WELL DONE, GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT!
What is the best thing anyone has ever said to you? Maybe you have a particularly strong memory of some word of appreciation or praise from a person whom you really admired and loved, and whose good opinion you longed to have. Maybe it was a teacher at school who was very searching, yet also very fair, and who was known never to give praise that was undeserved. Maybe it was an older friend to whom you looked up when you were young, after you had done something demanding and difficult for the first time. Perhaps it was your employer after an especially difficult assignment you had been asked to do. Yet nothing that we may yet have experienced in this life can possibly measure up to the words Our Lord addresses to His good servants in today’s parable of the Talents: “Well done, good and faithful servant!” How we should long to hear those words addressed to us by our Saviour!
Sometimes Our Lord speaks about sheep, or seeds, or crops, or vines. The parable of the Talents is one of Our Lord’s stories based on the world of money. We may not easily understand how it is fair that some people seem to have more “talents” than others. So Our Lord tells us a story in terms of money that makes it easier for us to grasp. The strange thing is that because of this parable the word “talent” has changed its meaning in our language. A “talent” was originally (and still is in this Gospel parable) a huge sum of money. Nowadays, we use the word “talent” to mean a skill or ability that God has given us. We use the word, in actual fact, in exactly the way that Our Lord was using the sum of money as a metaphor: an idea from one kind of business or experience applied to a different, but parallel, one. That is, of course, exactly what Our Lord’s parables always are: Earthly stories with a heavenly meaning. For us, a “talent” is now exactly what Our Lord intended us to understand by the image of the different sums of money entrusted to the different servants. This parable reminds us that Our Lord does not expect everyone to produce exactly the same return on God’s gifts, because God never gives exactly the same gifts to any two persons. Moreover, “Talents” are not just to be interpreted as gifts.
No two persons are ever put in exactly the same position or given absolutely identical lives or responsibilities. Every human being who has ever lived is unique. This fact is in itself a remarkable tribute to God’s inexhaustible inventiveness. Even identical twins are still two individuals, however much they may share.; and it is as individuals that they will be judged—just like all the rest of the human race. To have won Our Lord’s approval for the fruit of our life’s work is surely the greatest joy we can look for-ward to on leaving this life—a joy to be surpassed only by that of the everlasting sight of His glory in the company of all the saints.
Hence, after these wonderful words: “Well done, good and faithful servant”, Our Lord will say to those who have done His will these yet more thrilling words: “Enter into the joy of your Lord!
~ Fr. Paul Dobson
