Church of the Nativity

Today we celebrate Christ the King, and it is the end of the Church year so we will be moving on from Matthew to Mark, so I want to tie a bow on this, really just tying everything together that we have been talking about.

So we are getting to the end of the parables in Matthew’s Gospel, and this one has always been one of my favorites, but I’ve found a new appreciation for it in looking for that twist. Before we get there, we often think of talents as skills or abilities, God given usually, but in the time of Jesus, a Talent was a value of money. A silver Talent would have been worth 20 years worth of wages, so in today’s terms, worth about a million dollars. So the Master gives 5 million dollars, 2 million, and 1 million and goes away.

At the end of the Church year we focus on “the Last Things.” These readings are actually funeral readings. Well not so much the first one but definitely the second two, I’ve used both at funerals recently, in fact the reading from Paul’s 1st letter to the Thessalonians was read at my funeral (today/yesterday). (In my green funeral book they are numbered E12 and G3.)