Audio File of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 9, August 9th, 2020 [1]
“Now these things were our examples”
These examples are found in the wilderness. It is where we are overthrown, defeated and in despair, on the one hand, and enlightened and redeemed, on the other hand. “I would not that ye should be ignorant,” Paul tells us. At issue is the question of discernment, itself a form of prudence. The question is about learning in the wilderness. How do we learn?
Some find today’s Gospel rather difficult and disturbing, confusing and bizarre, and, well, not particularly positive and uplifting, and understandably so. I rather like it partly for all of those reasons but even more because it challenges us about spiritual learning and discernment. There are things to be learned from wickedness and evil, even from the example of the one whom Jesus calls the “unrighteous steward.”
In a way, these readings are about the realities of the wilderness or the world in which we find ourselves and, more importantly, how we understand ourselves and our world; in short, how we think and learn. Paul, in a wonderfully mystical and rhetorical flight of theological insight, sees Christ as the abiding principle even in the Exodus wanderings in the wilderness of the People of Israel. God, in a lovely image, “stands over” and “goes before” the People of Israel “in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night” (Numbers 14.14); the cloud of God’s shekinah, the glory of his presence, is the sign of his providential care. It belongs to the story of the Passover and the Exodus of Israel, to the lessons in the wilderness which culminate in the Law given to Moses.
Yet the imagery is given a Christian form; it becomes all part of the greater Exodus of Christ, at least in a Christian understanding. The Exodus events prefigure Christian Baptism and the Christian Eucharist, the forms of our incorporation into the life of God through the sacrifice of Christ: “baptized unto Moses in the cloud, and in the sea;” eating “the same spiritual food,” drinking of “that spiritual rock that followed them; and that rock was Christ.” It is a remarkable tour deforce of imaginative spiritual reasoning that inaugurates a long tradition of interpretation which sees the Hebrew Scriptures as anticipating and participating in the story of Christ. What is veiled in the one is revealed in the other. Quod Moyses velat, Christus revelat, as the saying goes. Moses strikes the rock at Horeb and out comes water that refreshes the People of Israel; Christ on the cross is pierced by the centurion’s spear and out flows water and blood which becomes a Patristic commonplace as symbolic of the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion.
The Exodus themes are also voiced in the Gradual Psalm: “He spread out a cloud to be a covering … [he] filled them with the bread of heaven …. He opened the rock of stone, and the waters flowed out.” The Psalmist asks, Why? The answer looks back before Moses to the Abrahamic covenant and promise. “He remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant. And he brought forth his people with joy” (Ps. 105, pt. 2, 39-43) The answer in the Psalm is positive and overlooks the hard lessons of the Exodus about which Paul reminds us in a classic understatement. “But with many of them God was not well pleased; for they were overthrown in the wilderness.” Yet it is precisely those negative things which are now “our examples.” We are to learn, it seems, from sin and error; something positive is grasped and learned through things negative.
What things in particular? “Lust[ing] after evil things; being “idolaters;” pride in being overconfident in ourselves to the neglect of God’s grace and power. In the wilderness of our world, Paul suggests, there are temptations but, and here is the wonder, God “will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” God makes use of the good and the evil. More strongly, Paul bids us “flee from idolatry.” What does that mean? It means substituting ourselves or some image of our own making in place of God; for us, the culture of narcissism. In so doing we deny God and ourselves. We negate God as communion and our communion with God in Christ; we deny the true unity of our humanity. “We being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.”
The Epistle helps us to make some sense of the Gospel. We learn from the “unrighteous steward,” not to be unrighteous, but to be prudent, That much should be clear. Prudence is a kind of practical wisdom, phronesis. Paul says he is speaking, “as to wise men,” literally, to the prudent, in calling attention to the nature of our life in Christ sacramentally. It is about making good and wise use of the things of the world in relation to our life with God. Such are the sacraments as the ordained instruments of God whereby we are made partakers of God.
In the parable, the “unrighteous steward” is praised by the certain rich man, “because he had acted with prudence.” On the one hand, his prudent action involved defrauding the property of the rich man; on the other hand, he acts in his own self-interest with respect to having lost his position as steward. Unrighteous in one way but prudent in another way. The point is not that we should find ways to cheat and defraud one another for our own immediate self-interest but that we are to be prudent in the use of the things of the world. Jesus seems to suggest that the children of light are deficient in this respect. “For the children of this age are in their generation more prudent than the children of light.”
Prudence is one of the four cardinal or classical virtues, an essential element of an ethical understanding that belongs to a long and rich tradition of moral philosophy. Just as temperance speaks to the mastery of our bodily appetites, and courage to our hearts, so prudence speaks to our minds. But the greatest of the four virtues is justice; the very thing which the “unrighteous steward” by definition lacks. Yet his prudence is praised. More troubling is Christ’s conclusion. “And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; and when it fails you, they will receive you into everlasting habitations.” What? You get rewarded for doing wrong? Not exactly but the prudence of the “unrighteous steward” serves as a counterpoint to his unrighteousness; it reveals an important aspect of our lives of faith in the world. It has to do with a proper use of things in the world with respect to our true end with God.
We are called to be faithful in all things; not to be unrighteous. That means making prudent use of the things of the world, fully knowing that they are not ends in themselves. The sacraments are not ends in themselves but the necessary means to our end in Christ. The parable of the “unrighteous steward” is one of the lessons from the negative; learning what to do from what not to do. Yet it suggests that something good in however limited a fashion moves in the wicked! There is a positive in the negative.
The spiritual lesson is distilled in the Collect where we ask God to grant us “the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful,” acknowledging that we “cannot do any thing that is good without thee.” Our prayer is about our end in God now by “be[ing] enabled to live according to thy will.” That necessarily means our prudent use of the things of the world and nowhere is that shown more concisely than in the sacraments. Wheat from a thousand fields and grapes from a thousand vineyards, I am speaking rhetorically but only barely, become through human prudence and labour, bread and wine; yet by divine Providence and Prudence at work in and through human sin and wickedness, they, in turn, become the body and blood of Christ, the sacramental means of our being in Christ. What is required of us is our prudent use of the things which belong to our life in Christ; our righteousness is in him alone.
After all, we are in this story twice-over: as the “unrighteous steward” and as the imprudent “children of light”! For can we say that we have been righteous and prudent stewards of the things entrusted to us whether as the Church institutionally or ourselves individually or, for that matter, as a society, culturally, politically, and in relation to creation? The Gospel bids us look at ourselves critically and discerningly about the things that belong to our relation to God and to the justice of God in creation and in our lives with one another. It convicts us so as to restore us.
We may learn from the shortcomings, failings, and the sins of others, and of ourselves. We learn from those who, not unlike us, “were overthrown in the wilderness.” We learn even from the example of the “unrighteous steward” who was thrown out of his job. Such is the radical nature of the positive in the negative.
“Now these things were our examples”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 9, 2020