Readings for 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31; Psalm 128:1-2, 3, 4-5; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30.
A recent New York Times article brings some welcome news. Progressive Democrats are finally discovering that Jesus has something to say about politics. And what he says has more to do with feeding hungry people and welcoming immigrants than with the religious right’s familiar obsessions.
The article describes a new crop of politicians who, like Senator Raphael Warnock, call themselves “Matthew 25 Christians.” They take their cue from Jesus’ identification with the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned and unwelcome. They connect those words with health care, immigration and our responsibility to care for one another. Good for them. It’s about time someone challenged the Republican Party’s claim to own Christianity. (See what Presbyterian seminarian and senator elect from Texas, James Talarico, says about this in the video above.)
However, the article also shows how easily Jesus’ teaching can lose its bite. It describes the final section of Matthew 25 as “softer and more soaring” than what precedes it. And it presents today’s gospel selection, the Parable of the Talents, as a lesson about making good use of our money and abilities. The writer even jokes that it teaches compound interest.
Apparently, Jesus wants us to make a killing in the market and then remember the poor. That interpretation should please J.D. Vance and his billionaire benefactor, Peter Thiel. But I doubt it would please Jesus. And Pope Leo XIV has been saying things that make that comfortable arrangement harder to defend.
To see why, let’s look again at today’s familiar parable. It’s about economics—about investment, profit-taking and a boss who expects other people to make him richer. It’s also about a servant who refuses to cooperate and suffers the predictable consequences.
Usually, we’re told that the boss represents God. The successful servants represent people who develop their God-given gifts. And the servant who buries his money represents the rest of us when we fail to live up to our potential. We should work harder, take some risks and stop wasting our talents.
But there’s another way to hear the story. Listen to it from the position of the people doing the work rather than the man collecting the profits. Then notice what the third servant says about his employer: he harvests where he hasn’t planted and gathers where he hasn’t scattered. In plain English, the boss lives off other people’s labor. He’s a hard-ass who expects his underlings to make him money while he’s away.
The first two servants go along. They double what he gives them, and he rewards them handsomely. They’re successful because they accept the arrangement and do what it takes to keep it going. The third servant refuses. He buries the money, gives it back and tells his boss to his face what kind of man he is.
Naturally, the boss throws him out. He also takes the servant’s money and gives it to the man who already has the most. Those who have get more. Those with little lose even that. We hardly need a Bible commentary to recognize that arrangement. We live with it every day.
Now, I realize this isn’t the interpretation most of us heard in Sunday school. But why should we automatically identify this particular rich man with God? Jesus told stories about unjust judges and dishonest managers too. We don’t have to turn every powerful character in his parables into God. Especially when the character admits that he expects to collect where others have done the planting.
Read this way, the third servant is the story’s troublemaker. He refuses to help the rich get richer. Worse still, he says aloud how the system works. Like Jesus and John the Baptist, he discovers that telling the truth about powerful people can cost you dearly.
And that brings us back to the Times article and its Matthew 25 Christians. The chapter’s concluding scene has Jesus judging people by what they’ve done for those at the bottom. But shouldn’t that lead us to ask how so many people got there? Who took their land? Who kept their wages low? Who made their health care unaffordable? Who benefited while they lost their homes?
Otherwise, we end up praising the successful servants for enriching the master and then congratulating ourselves for feeding some of the people his system leaves hungry. Surely Jesus is asking more of us than that.
Pope Leo seems to think so. In Dilexi Te, the document begun by Francis and completed and issued by Leo, the pope insists that Christians confront the causes of poverty. He repeats the condemnation of the “dictatorship of an economy that kills.” He refuses to leave human well-being at the mercy of markets and financial speculation. The poor need justice now. They cannot eat promises that prosperity will eventually trickle down.
That teaching creates problems for a Christianity tied to billionaire power. Consider Vance’s relationship with Peter Thiel. Vance worked for Thiel’s investment firm. Thiel later put $15 million into a super PAC supporting Vance’s Senate campaign. He also helped shape Vance’s religious thinking. That’s quite a combination: the boss, the political benefactor and an influence on the convert’s Christianity.
Thiel, for his part, once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Think about that. Ordinary people might use democracy to raise wages, tax fortunes or stop corporations from doing whatever they please. Apparently, that creates a problem for freedom—at least freedom as understood by a man with billions to protect.
Leo approaches things differently. In his encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, he asks what happens to the people whose work makes the new technology possible and whose livelihoods it may destroy. He calls for worker protections, participation and rules governing the changes. Investors don’t get to decide everything simply because they own the machinery.
That sounds like a reasonable application of Matthew 25. Before celebrating another technological fortune, ask who did the work and who will pay the price. Before praising the harvest, find out what happened to the people who planted it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has found another way around the chapter’s demands. Asked about Leo’s appeal to Matthew 25 on behalf of immigrants, Johnson said the obligation to welcome strangers applies to individuals rather than civil authorities. Apparently, Jesus can tell us how to treat the immigrant next door, but he has nothing to say about what we authorize our government to do to that same person that he specifically identifies with. We shouldn’t mistreat Jesus, but governments can.
How convenient. We can offer a family groceries with one hand and support policies that tear it apart with the other. We can call the first act Christian charity and the second responsible government. Somehow, Jesus is supposed to approve of both.
But Matthew’s judgment scene begins by gathering “all the nations” before the Son of Man. That doesn’t give us a detailed immigration bill. It does make it hard to imagine that governments have been excused from treating people humanely. Where does Jesus say that kindness stops being obligatory when we enter public office?
And where does the Times get the idea that this is the chapter’s softer part? Jesus identifies himself with people we would rather ignore and makes our treatment of them the measure of our lives. Religious credentials don’t get us off the hook. Neither do patriotic speeches or claims that we were simply enforcing the law.
The new Matthew 25 Democrats should take that seriously too. I’m glad they’re talking about Jesus. But the test will come when feeding the hungry requires confronting the people who profit from keeping wages low. It will come when providing health care means challenging those making fortunes from sickness. It will come when their wealthy donors discover that these Christians mean what they say.
That’s when they’ll need the courage of the third servant. He doesn’t give a speech about compassion while continuing to enrich his boss. He refuses to cooperate. He tells the truth and accepts the cost.
The master calls that failure and throws him into the darkness. The wider gospel gives us reason to question the master’s verdict. Jesus himself was rejected by the powerful. And he promised God’s kingdom to people the powerful had pushed aside.
So yes, let’s welcome the return of Matthew 25 to our political conversation. But let’s hear the whole challenge. Feed hungry people, welcome strangers and care for the sick. Then ask why so many of our neighbors need rescuing in the first place—and why the people who benefit from their suffering keep getting richer.
Jesus wasn’t blessing the billionaires. It’s time his would-be followers stopped doing it for him.
