the talents
It is about the “one thing necessary” (Luke 10:42): the response of trust, of faith in Jesus free acceptance of us by the grace of his death and resurrection. It is in other words, about a faithful, Mary-like waiting upon Jesus himself as the embodiment of the mystery — and about the danger of substituting some prudent, fretful Martha-like business of our own for that waiting. It is not at all about the rewarding of good works or the punishment of evil ones.
(1) A judgment rendered on faith-in-action, not on the results of faith. God is not a bookkeeper looking for results — the only bookkeeper is the servant who decided he had to fear a non-existent audit and hid his one talent in the ground.
(2) A jubilation of the Lord’s joy at throwing money around — a divine party. But there will always be dummies who refuse to trust a good thing when it is handed to them on a platter.
(3) The sheer needlessness of fear, the unnecessariness of our ever having to dread God. Jesus parades through his parables pitiful turkeys to shock us into recognizing the stupidity of unfaith. We spend our lives invoking upon ourselves imagined necessities, creating God in the image of our own fears — and all the while, he is beating us over the head with the balloon of grace and the styrofoam baseball bat of a vindicating judgment. There are no lengths to which God won’t go to prove there are no restrictions on the joy he wants to share with us.