“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.
Here Paul sees those images as prototypes of baptism and communion. They “were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud, and in the sea; and did all eat of the same spiritual food and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them.” Wow. One of the great Exodus images of God is God as the Rock. Here Paul says “that rock was Christ.” It is a wonderful metaphor that speaks to the essential divinity of Christ by arguing that this is the moving principle in the pageant of redemption from the past into the present. It shows us also how the images of the Hebrew Scriptures are interwoven and shape the Scriptural images of the Christian New Testament.
But no sooner are we reminded of these good things, then we are recalled to our sins and failings which are also exemplified in the stories of the Exodus in terms of our rebellion and complaining against God’s providential care. “But with many of them, God was not well pleased” (quite an understatement, I assure you!); “for they were overthrown in the wilderness.” Yet, as our text emphasizes, “these things were our examples.” I take this to mean both the good and the bad, what to do and what not to do and in what ways.
These Exodus images exemplify the nature of our pilgrimage and the challenges which we face within ourselves in our complacencies and overconfidence; in short, our pride. There are necessarily and always temptations but they belong to the testing of our life in Christ, to our agency in working with God. Thus God who is faithful “will with the temptation also make a way to escape.” But only if we are actively learning the will of God and making that will our own in our lives. It is at this point that Paul bids us “flee from idolatry,” the idolatry of ourselves in the illusions of our independence and separation from God. That is our folly and ignorance, our lack of prudence.
The message is driven home by way of two rhetorical questions that belong to our incorporation into the life of Christ. “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?” The language explicitly references the passion as the meaning of communion, “for we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.”
This requires the activity of prudence, a kind of practical spiritual wisdom in us, that is about nothing less than using the things of the world in relation to our everlasting life with God. The things of the world are not divine but are made by God to be the means of our life with him. But it requires our learning to be prudent and to know what is rightful and good and what is not. This is what the Gospel parable shows us: to be prudent but not to be unrighteous. The deeper lesson may be that God and God alone, as Augustine noted, brings good out of evil, even out of our evil. The Book of Genesis ends with the story of Joseph, sold into slavery out of the envy of his brothers but who rises to prominence and power. The story of his reconciliation with his brothers is most moving. It sets things up for the Exodus itself. As Joseph says to his brothers, weeping, “Fear not, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Gen.50. 19-20).
Such is the greater goodness of God. Paul reminds us of the Exodus pageant of grace which continues to shape our pilgrimage if we indeed will learn what God seeks for us in our lives. God seeks our life and our good. It can only be found in him.
“Now these things were our examples”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 9, 2024