by CCW | 17 August 2025 10:00
Examples of what exactly? Simply to think and do what is rightful as opposed to what is wrongful. Or, as Paul clearly puts it, “to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted,” before mentioning the problem of idolatry. All of this, including the Gospel, turns on the relation between thinking and doing, a question about the virtues and the vices in our souls.
Sanctification or holiness is the project especially of the Trinity season. The focus is on the virtues as the essential activities of our souls as infused by the grace of Christ. Thus the virtues become graces, aspects of the charity or love of Christ moving in us. That requires our thinking and our doing, especially our acting upon what has been made known by way of revelation. Both the Epistle and the Gospel emphasize the point made so clearly in the Collect that we “cannot do anything that is good without thee,” without God, and that only “by thee may we be enabled to live according to thy will.”
This is part and parcel of the core teaching of the Christian Faith. It complements and belongs to a rich and profound ethical tradition of teaching about the relation of the virtues of the soul as transformed into the forms of love. The virtues are the activities of our souls that belong to human excellence and perfection of character. The key point is the transformation of the cardinal or classical virtues into the forms of charity or love. What Paul and Luke present to us is the concept of the virtues as placed upon a new foundation, the foundation of charity or love; in short, Christ, in whom the end or perfection of our humanity alone is found. It cannot be attained by ourselves on the basis of our own power and intent.
This is the point of Paul’s reference to “these things” that are “our examples,” namely, the recapitulation of the Exodus story into the story of Christ. The reading begins and ends with the sacraments of baptism and communion, the very forms of our incorporation and life in Christ. Paul references the moments in the exodus in the wilderness of Sinai as signifying our spiritual life in Christ; at once anticipating it and participating in it. The cloud which protected and covered the people of Israel in the wilderness and the crossing of the Red Sea point to our redemption in Christ sacramentally understood: “our fathers … were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud, and in the sea,” thus, baptism, and “did all eat of the same spiritual food, and did all drink of the same spiritual drink,” thus, communion, both of which are explicitly tied to “the spiritual rock that followed them; and that rock was Christ.” This connects to one of the dominant metaphors for God in the Hebrew Scriptures, God as the Rock upon which everything depends, the Rock which in Moses’ song in Deuteronomy both begets and gives birth to all things, especially our humanity. Such imagery complements the profound revelation of God’s transcendent ‘Name’ to Moses in the burning bush as “I Am Who I Am” which is ultimately explicated by Jesus in terms of the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Paul is building upon that sensibility in the conclusion of the passage about the way in which we are incorporated into the life of God through the communion of the blood and body of Christ sacramentally understood in terms of our being all partakers of that one bread. On the other hand, Paul notes that the story of the Exodus is also about human sin and evil. For despite God’s provisions for the people of Israel in the Exodus, “with many of them God was not well pleased.” An understatement to be sure as rehearsed in the Venite about “the day of Temptation in the wilderness;/ when your fathers tempted me, proved me,/and saw my works,” in short, our murmuring and complaining about God’s provisions for us understood in terms of making God subject to us, a form of idolatry.
The Gospel builds on these ethical ideas in the story of the unrighteous steward. He is praised not for his unrighteousness with respect to his misuse of his master’s goods but for his prudence. Prudence, as Thomas Traherne says is the king of the virtues. There is a kind of primacy to prudence in the sense of the ordering of all the virtues to their end and Traherne’s point as building upon Thomas Aquinas is that the virtues all have to work in harmony in terms of their specific role and relation to each other. Prudence is practical wisdom about what and how things are to be done thus highlighting the end to which our actions are ordered. This is quite different from our contemporary sense of prudence as a kind of over-abundant cautiousness and hesitation for the sake of self-preservation. What Jesus is doing in this parable is pointing to how self-interest properly belongs to our end in God. Hence the parable in exhorting us to make friends “by means of the mammon of unrighteousness” needs to be seen in terms of using the things of this world which are limited and incomplete as means to our higher end in God. One should note the conclusion in which being faithful in that which is least leads to being faithful in much in contrast to unrighteousness. “He that is unrighteous in that which is least is unrighteous also in much.” There is a strong sense of disproportion.
What is shown in these readings is the powerful idea that the classical or cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice are transformed by being placed upon the foundation of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity; the greatest of which is charity. This corrects or perfects the cardinal virtues which by infusing them with the grace of charity transforms them into graces or forms of love. This way of thinking follows Augustine and Thomas Aquinas who are building upon the teaching of Paul and passages in the Wisdom literature about the virtues as belonging to the activities of the soul in terms of our human end and participation in the life of Christ.
This is wonderfully illustrated in Giovanni Pisano’s baptismal font in the Church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia, Italy. Carved on the pedestal are images of the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity upholding the baptismal bowl on which are depicted the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Father Crouse notes: “It’s a very humanistic statement, in that the new life at baptism is seen as a renewal of the natural human virtues; but at the same time, it’s a powerful affirmation that the restoration of authentic humanity depends upon and is sustained by, the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 9, 2025
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