Day: July 28, 2024

“Now these things were our examples”

Examples of what exactly? Of things good and bad such as is illustrated in the Gospel where “the unrighteous steward” is praised by his master not for his unrighteousness but for his “prudence,” the one bad, the other good. There is always, of course, the prospect of learning hard things the hard way: “Teach your children about taxes, eat 30% of their ice cream,” as we saw on a road sign the other day!

Yet these readings challenge us about how we journey in the wilderness by recalling us to the things that we should know about our spiritual life in Christ particularly through our communion in the body of Christ. The Gospel actually ends with a warning and negative note about unrighteousness and a strong and positive note about faithfulness.

The point of both Epistle and Gospel is that we learn from both things good and bad. Such is prudence, the practical wisdom that is meant to guide us. Prudence here is seen as having to do with the God-given “spirit to think and do always such as be rightful,” as the Collect puts it, yet full knowing, and this is key, “that we cannot do any thing that is good without thee.” To live according to God’s will is our desire but one which requires our recognition of God’s grace. Here the classical virtue of prudence is seen not simply as a human excellence in itself but as properly belonging to our life in Christ.

Thus Jesus’ parable is a criticism of “the children of light” for their lack of prudence. What does that mean? It has very much to do with using the things of this world with a view towards our life in God and not as ends in themselves. When we forget that then we fall into idolatry, treating the things of the world as divine, a massive category mistake, a confusion of the creator and the created, and, paradoxically, a loss of true human agency.

“Apart from me,” Jesus famously says, “you can do nothing.” As Augustine observes, “all that we can do of ourselves is sin.” But to know our sins and failings is itself to know the goodness of God as prior and absolute. Paul in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians provides a profound spiritual commentary on the pilgrimage of our souls. He looks back to the ancient Exodus of the Hebrews and connects the images of the Exodus with the forms of our sacramental participation in Christ. “All our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea,” he says, recalling God’s providential guiding of the people of the Hebrews at the Passover, “a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of light by night,” and leading them across the Red Sea. We forget how powerfully paradigmatic and symbolic these Passover images are in the Judeo-Christian understanding.

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