The Parable of the Talents
A faith reduced to heritage, to an inherited treasure,
doesn't automatically generate interest and dividends sufficient for living
now, for surviving the onslaught of reality today...
In the painful confusion presently
surrounding us, only a few things are clear and certain. One of these is that
we cannot live on the proceeds of the past any longer. For example, we cannot
base our tranquillity on political balances consolidated decades ago; they are
collapsing in the most unforeseeable way... It is no longer possible to assume
that wealth automatically produces wealth - as was the case in the past fifty
years in Western countries - without re-investing it now, and at a risk. Even
lifetime certainties like home or relationships can be swept away in a moment,
or end up caged in by a threat of death that suffocates the future...
So, as you find yourself looking at
those dramatic events... you realise that the challenge reaches you at a
deeper, radical level. For your wealth, too, cannot be enough, even that wealth
that once served to lay a foundation on solid ground - an encounter, a history
behind you, an education - in a word: the Christian heritage, what many of us would
define, quite rightly, as the crucial factor of life, that which has given form
to our existence. We can't live on the proceeds even of that. A faith reduced
to heritage, to an inherited treasure, doesn't automatically generate interest
and dividends sufficient for living now, for surviving the onslaught of reality
today. It's rather like the parable of the talents... in which the owner is
angry with his servant who buries his talent in the ground to keep it safe,
instead of making it produce a profit. The talents are... what has happened to
us, the heritage granted to us by faith. If you don't risk it now, in time it
is of no use. If there is not a presence that enables you to augment it and
make it fruitful now, it is useless. It can even be harmful...
"The Christian faith stands or
falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead",
as Benedict XVI reminds us... If you take this away, we are dead, because faith
is reduced to "a series of interesting ideas" or "a kind of
religious world view", but it is "dead". All that's left is
"our own judgement in selecting from his heritage what strikes us as
helpful", and we find ourselves "left to ourselves", alone,
unable to face up to the certainties that collapse, in a moment.
This is why Christ rose. He removes
the stone from the grave, and he digs up the earth where we would like to hide
what we have received, where at times we would have the temptation to bury the
heritage of faith. He does it so as to give it back to us now, to make it bear
fruit now, and to take away our loneliness from the world, for ever.
An Editorial From Traces Magazine