Whaling & Grinding of Teeth By Brian Flanagan

“Whaling & Grinding of Teeth” by Brian Flanagan

Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Little known fact – After Captain Ahab retired from sailing the high seas, he became a dentist. His autobiography is entitled “Whaling & Grinding of Teeth.” Okay, sorry – couldn’t resist the pun. I’m sure everyone reading this is wailing and grinding their teeth right now.

Jesus closes out his parable this week with that lovely expression. It’s never good news for the folks who are wailing and grinding their teeth at the end of one of Jesus’ parables. It indicates that they’ve messed up big time. Let’s back-track to see what this servant did to wind up getting fitted for dentures.

A master gives “talents” to his servants and goes on a journey. Talent in this sense doesn’t mean a gift for playing the guitar or working on cars, but a talent was a fixed quantity of silver, worth about one thousand dollars.   When the master in the parable returns, he finds that the servant who received five talents and the servant who received two talents had invested them and made their master more money. The third servant, who had received one talent, buried it in the ground. The first two servants acted, knowing what their master expected of them, while the third did not act out of fear. He’s the fellow who ends up being “thrown into the darkness outside” where he goes through a whole case of boxes of tissues from Costco.

Throughout our lives, God will ask us to do all sorts of things. Maybe not in an audible voice, but we’ll encounter plenty of situations where deep down, we know what God would want us to do. When we follow through with what we know he would want or expect from us, he sees that he can trust us. That’s a twist isn’t it? As Christians we love to talk about how we can trust in God, but we don’t usually think about God trusting us.

The master in the parable (and God to us) says, “since you were faithful (or in other words, trustworthy) in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities.” As we give little “yes’s” to God, he will entrust even greater things to us. Perhaps the best model of this is Mary. She lived her life so perfectly and free from sin, that he entrusted to her the greatest responsibility of all time: becoming the Mother of God.

The temptation with a parable like this is for each of us to identify with only one of the characters. We might think of ourselves as the servant who was given new and greater responsibilities or the servant who goes home and gets ready to send out his resume and look for a new job. Instead, we need to look at where in our lives we are being like the first two servants, and where we’re being like the third. There’s a bit of each of the servants in all of us. If you’re reading a blog like this, you’re probably doing something right in your spiritual life, but surely there are ways that all of us are falling short of what God is asking and expecting of us.

So let’s each take a moment to look at our lives and at how we’re living out our faith.   Where are we acting on what we’re called to? Where are we hesitating in doing God’s will out of fear? Where are we being spiritually lazy? Let’s be the best servants we can be so we can hear God say to us, “Come, share your master’s joy.”