“Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God”
Perhaps you recognise this text, or perhaps not! Most of you enter Christ Church through the ramp entrance at the back though all of you, at some time or another, have entered through the main door into the narthex of the Church. And just perhaps (and not without a wee bit of irony), you may have looked up and noted the inscription above the second doors leading into Church itself. “ Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God.” You may not have noticed them, of course, because you may have been looking down rather than up!
But here we have yet another example of the dangers of being too literal. The text is taken from the most philosophical of all of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament, Ecclesiastes (5.1). What it means, I think, is fairly clear, especially because of the continuation of the passage: “be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools.” What it means is to enter into this holy place and this holy service intentionally and thoughtfully; in short, being attentive to the purpose of place and event. Okay, you might think. That’s interesting but what does it have to do with today’s readings, particularly this rather challenging Gospel story about the unrighteous steward? Or is this just a way of avoiding these readings?!
Well, no. The text complements, I think, these readings. Paul would not “that ye should be ignorant” and goes on to speak about what we should know and do, themes captured in the Collect. It is very much akin to what we have in the Gospel where the unrighteous steward having been called to account by his master and who is being fired, undertakes certain actions which are certainly unjust with respect to his master’s property, essentially defrauding him after having dissipated or wasted his master’s goods; and yet, he is praised by his master. Why? Not because of his unrighteousness but “because he acted with prudence.”
This is the key insight of the parable. Jesus uses the example of the unrighteous steward to point out a lack of wisdom or prudence in us; “for the children of this age are in their generation more prudent than the children of light.” Prudence is what matters. Prudence is practical wisdom, “deliberating rightly about what is good and advantageous for himself,” Aristotle says, though not in particular or merely physical respects such as “health and strength,” but in relation to “what is conducive to the good life generally”.
Jesus is telling us that we need to be more attentive and prudent with respect to the ultimate end or purpose of our lives, which is our life as ordered to God which means using the things of the world in relation to our end with God. Thus the Epistle reading ends on an explicitly sacramental note: “the cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” This sacramental understanding is about how the things of the world are transformed into the vehicles of grace. We are meant to be prudent with respect to our life in Christ.
Prudence is one of the four classical or cardinal virtues of antiquity which in a long and rich spiritual tradition have been transformed by love in the Christian understanding to become the activities of our souls by which we participate in the life of God. Drawn from the poets of ancient Greece and developed by Plato especially, the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage (or fortitude), prudence, and justice are not negated but perfected into forms of love by the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Quite a number of medieval churches and cathedrals depict the virtues on the portals, the entrance ways into the holy places, often in the form of a conflict between the virtues and the vices. The opposite of prudence is folly or ignorance.
Prudence is sometimes depicted in medieval art as a woman with snakes and a mirror. The snake imagery is taken directly from Christ’s injunction to us to “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt. 10.16). The mirror image has to do with our self-awareness. The cardinal virtues provide a way of understanding the totality of our humanity, a kind of philosophical or theological anthropology, if you will. Temperance – self-control or self-mastery – refers to the body; courage or fortitude speak to the heart (cor); prudence to our minds. But left at that we would just have a collection of parts and no sense of the unity of the whole of ourselves, hence the greatest of the four is justice which is about the right relation of the virtues to the whole of our being. Courage without prudence can be dangerous – reckless and foolish, as it were. Prudence without courage, on the other hand, can result in being cowardly and fearful.
But these cardinal virtues are incomplete in terms of our end with God. The theological virtues are the virtues of grace which perfect nature but do not destroy nature. This too connects to a sacramental view of things in which the natural things of bread and wine in relation to the body and blood of Christ are not negated or destroyed but made the divine instruments of our incorporation into the life of Christ. But this is about prudence, our active attention to the purpose of this holy place and this holy liturgy.
We learn to be prudent but prudence itself is an activity of our souls. Here we learn not from the unrighteousness of the steward but from his example of prudence in terms of his self-interest. Jesus uses the parable to awaken us to our true selves as found together in the body of Christ – not just our immediate self-interest but our real good as being members of the body of Christ. “For we being members are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.” We are meant to come to the sacrament thoughtfully and attentively, not in ignorance and indifference but with humility as drawn by the love of God about which Paul would not have us ignorant.
We learn even from the unrighteous steward, from the negative, as it were, about what is the positive and the good. Thus this Gospel complements a later Gospel story about the unforgiving servant (BCP, 254). There we see a servant who, having been forgiven a great debt, then refuses to forgive the much smaller debts of the lesser servants who are under him. This is brought to the attention of his Lord who was very angry “and delivered him to the tormentors until he should pay all that he owed” (Mt. 18.34). It is an example of what happens when we refuse to act out of the very mercy which we ourselves have received. We negate the goodness that has been given us and so cast ourselves out from the presence of God; we deny what we have known.
The shift from Trinity 9 to Trinity 22 is about the greater awareness of the transforming power of God’s love in forgiveness. Yet once again, it recalls us to what we should not be in ignorance and to our being reminded of the activity of God’s grace alive in us precisely when we are spiritually prudent, attentive to the things of God in our midst. In every way, “keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 9, 2022