Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity
“His master praised the unrighteous steward”
Parables are a powerful heuristic devices, ways of teaching about ethical and spiritual matters. They appeal to our imaginations and convict our hearts so that we may learn to see ourselves in them but they are by no means simple. They require our serious attention.
In the course of any given year, there are in the classical Prayer Book and liturgical calendars anywhere from twenty-three to twenty-six Sundays after Trinity. Epiphany and Trinity Season both vary in length owing to the variable date of Easter. There are within the Trinity Season a number of intriguing and compelling parables that focus on the ethical life. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, read at Evening Prayer this week, is also the Gospel for Trinity 13. It is the classic illustration of the essential ethical teaching of the Christian faith as grounded in the love of God and the love of neighbour, something which Augustine highlights in his de doctrina Christiana. It shows the intimate connection between thinking and doing by way of questions that draw us into truth and direct our actions. Other parables, too, highlight how to think and act.
I have in mind two parables which teach us about how to think and act by way of examples from the negative: what notto do and be, as it were, from which we can learn how to think and act better as grounded in the love of Christ. On Trinity 22, there is the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant and, today, the Parable of the Unrighteous Steward. The one illustrates the necessity of forgiving others even as we have been forgiven by way of the servant who is forgiven a great debt but then refuses to forgive the paltry debt of another; a form of hypocrisy which highlights a betrayal of the good which God seeks for our humanity through the forgiveness of our sins. But perhaps even more disconcerting and yet intriguing is today’s Parable of the Unrighteous Steward. He is praised by his master, not for his unrighteousness, but for his prudence.
