News - November 2023 RSS Feed

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.)

Today’s readings are about spiritual leadership. They are directed at the priests, no doubt, but I believe there are some good lessons in here for everyone. First, in our Gospel, you’ll notice that Jesus recognizes legitimate authority. He says, “The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example.” The “Chair of Moses” is the chair of power so to speak, it is the legitimate leader’s seat. In the Catholic Church, there are several levels, the first being the Pope’s chair in Rome for the whole Church, second being the bishop’s chair in the Cathedral for the local area Church, and the third being the Pastor’s chair in the individual church.

In today’s gospel the Pharisees ask Jesus a complicated question. It is complicated because they have made it complicated over the years. If you think about it, the first and only law was: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” But they couldn’t even get that single law right.