by CCW | 2 August 2026 10:00
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.
August begins with Lammas Day and the commemoration of the Maccabean Martyrs[1]. Lammas Day, associated with the harvest, is one of the four ‘cross-quarter’ days which have to do with a profound sensibility about our connection to creation understood in terms of things celestial and terrestrial, the heavenly and the earthly; a commonplace for human experience for several millenia. Think for a moment of the medieval cathedrals that depict the interplay between the labours of the months and the signs of the zodiac. Such images place human labour in the world as ordered to God and as a form of participation in the life of God in contrast to our technocratic world which presumes the mastery of human and non-human nature at the expense of both. August 1st, too, is more or less halfway between the summer solstice and the fall equinox, though you probably don’t want to be reminded of that! In northern Europe, as seen in one of the stained glass windows at Chartres Cathedral, August is associated with the labour of the threshing of the grain or wheat. Lammas derives from Old English, hlaf, loaf, and, maesse, mass, hence loaf-mass; it marks the first harvest and its fruit, as it were. The term, mass, in loaf-mass ties it to the Christian theme of our sacramental participation in the fruits of Christ’s redemptive work as suggested in today’s Epistle.
What about the Maccabean martyrs? One of the very rare pre-Christian commemorations in the life of the Church, it recalls the Maccabean revolt in the second century against the aggressive anti-Judaism of the Hellenistic world after Alexander the Great. Second and Fourth Maccabees tell about Eleazar and his seven sons martyred by Antiochus IV Epiphanes for refusing to repudiate their faith. Styling himself as Zeus, he erected a statue in his own honour in the Temple of Jerusalem. The Book of Daniel and 1st Maccabees calls this the “desolating sacrilege,” a term Jesus uses in Matthew (24.15) and Mark (13.14) in the lead up to his Passion but as an indictment of the misuse of the Temple by Israel herself.
Equally remarkable is the witness of Eleazar’s wife and mother of the seven sons who exhorted them to remain faithful by way of two principles: the idea of creation as ex nihilo, “Look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and know that God did not make them out of things that existed” (2 Macc. 7.28), and the doctrine of the Resurrection, “God will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws” (2 Macc. 7.23). Fourth Maccabees is a philosophical and ethical treatise about the primacy of reason, of phronesis or wisdom, over all other attachments and passions, explicitly citing the mother of the martyrs as an example of wisdom. It is about holding to a divine truth in the midst of the follies and evils of the world.
All this is a prelude to the challenging and seemingly impossible Gospel for today. It is entirely about phronesis, practical wisdom, and about our labours in the world as ordered to God. As such it illustrates the Epistle rather wonderfully.
Paul looks back to the Exodus struggles of Israel in the wilderness, the place where they learn the Law. He connects the images of the shekinah cloud of God’s protective grace and guiding presence, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the provisions of manna and water by Moses in the wilderness to the story of Christ. Christ is the rock upon which our lives in their totality are grounded. But many “were overthrown in the wilderness.” Why? Through an ignorance of spiritual things such as lust, idolatry, pride, temptations. Nonetheless he says, “these things were our examples.” We learn through the negative in the awareness of our unwisdom, our ignorance, literally, our unknowing. “Brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant”!
The problem is about our misuse of the things of the world in relation to God as the Creator and author of all good things. The Collect bids us seek from God “the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful,” full knowing that “we cannot do anything that is good without thee.” The counter to ignorance is wisdom, the very thing which the Gospel parable highlights.
The unrighteous steward is praised by his master, for “act[ing] with prudence.” Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is about using the things of the world properly with a regard to their origin and end in God. The Epistle suggests what that means in terms of Holy Communion: how the things of the world, bread and wine, themselves the products of human labour by working with the natural world, become the instruments of our communion with God; “the cup of blessing [is] the communion of the blood of Christ,” “the bread which we break [is] the communion of the body of Christ.”
This is to be prudent, wise about our lives in the world, by using the things of the world with respect to our being with Christ. We are not meant to be passive but active in terms of our thinking and our doing. Hans Georg Gaddamer, one of the great German philosophers of the 20th century, drawing on Aristotle argues that phronesis, wisdom, is the key concept in ethics and rhetoric; in short, in deeds and in words. It is what is most needful for us to recover, he suggests, in the contemporary world, a world defined, as George Grant put it more than fifty years ago, by “the technocratic dominance of human and non-human nature” (Technology and Empire, 1969). There is no wisdom in technology. “It is not possible to live humanly in technopolis,” as Prof. James Doull put it, but that doesn’t mean to reject it; the challenge is to discover how it “can be overcome and contained within human freedom” (The Theology of the Great Society, 1967). This is similar to Pope Leo XIV’s recent Encyclical at least in noting the problematic of the “technocratic paradigm,” which is really all about what you can do and get away with; power, in other words, that compromises the dignity of our humanity as imago dei.
The challenge is to discover the wisdom which connects our thoughts and our labours to nature, to ourselves, and to God. To know who we truly are in our freedom frees us from the idolatry of the practical whether through the technological or the forms of existential individualism. “Thinking is [our] freedom,” Hegel says, in the overcoming of all forms of externality by drawing them into self-consciousness in the actualization of our ends. “Mak[ing] friends,” as Jesus says, not of “the mammon of unrighteousness” but by means of it, knowing its limitations but knowing our end in God through them. Ultimately, wisdom means a proper and just relation to things, “[being] faithful in that which is least” through “[being] faithful,” itself a kind of wisdom, “in that which is much.”
We learn by means of the unrighteous steward but what we learn is wisdom; a way of thinking through the contradictions and uncertainties of our times. It means reclaiming something of the wisdom of Athens and Jerusalem which belongs to the Christian understanding and so to the challenge of our times. Learning exactly what is meant in the paradox of the Gospel:
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 9, 2026
(a reworking of a ‘Covid’ sermon, 2021, unpreached)
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