Twice this week I went into places of business where sales
personnel gave me generous and unexpected discounts. In both instances they virtually put their
fingers to their lips motioning to me not to disclose what they were
doing. In both instances, the employees
had nothing to gain by being particularly kind to me.
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| Reynard the Fox, Archetypal Trickster |
And what is my reaction?
Why, I am indebted to them of course.
So far as I know, both are honorable employees, not rapscallions out to
cheat their bosses. And yet I have to
wonder whether they were simply being generous to me or if on some level they
expected something in return. It is not
my nature to be suspicious of people, so I would not even be asking this
question were it not for the parable in today’s gospel kicking it up for me. But I am not the least in doubt as to my
reaction when someone does something nice to me, especially if doing so
involves a little risk, however slight.
If one of these guys should come to me and ask me a favor, there is no
certainty that I would do what they asked.
But I would at the very least hear the request sympathetically, simply
because they have been kind to me.
That is sort of the way the world normally works, isn’t
it? Schmooze people and they will
respond in kind. Do a favor, receive a
favor. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch
yours. It is what we might call the
“law” of reciprocity. What goes around
comes around. And don’t forget: what goes around might be harsh, cruel,
snide, nasty. Dish some of that out and
you are likely to get some back yourself.
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| Jacob tricks Isaac and outfoxes Esau |
Luke is fairly plain, though not so plain as to leave us
without questions. Jesus used the figure
of the dishonest manager to illustrate how it is that disciples need to be
shrewd. That’s the first thing. He comments that the children of this world
are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the “children of
light.” Boy, is that ever true! Don’t press me for too many examples (I could
give you a list that would run on for hours), but generally I can tell you that
those who are out to make a buck in this world, whose primary motivation is to
amass power, to extend control, to protect their own interests, or even simply
to survive, are much better at their game than the so-called “children of
light” who want to play by the rules, to be fair, to be generous, to exercise
compassion. There is an incredible
naïveté about much that the “children of light” try to do. I would like to believe that we could make
lasting social change by appealing to the higher instincts of human
nature. Ha! Live as long as I have and you will experience
yourself being slowly sucked into a Calvinist view of the total depravity of
human nature. (I exaggerate, of course,
but there is some truth to that.) In the
centers of power, profiteers are always plotting, with notable success, as to
how they could benefit from the next war. The “children of light”? They are
out marching in front of the White House or gathering on the steps of the
capitol. Is anybody really
noticing? The “children of this age,”
as Jesus called them, are busy rigging elections, gerrymandering congressional
districts to their advantage, suppressing the vote, developing and using scare tactics that work,
spinning narratives with buzz words calculated to hook emotions, lobbying for
laws that make legal whatever they find advantageous. Don’t get me wrong. The children of this age are not just the
rich and powerful. They include quite a
number of the poor and dispossessed, who are not all paragons of virtue
themselves. Manipulating the system,
tricking the boss, circumventing the rules—or remaking them: talents for doing these things don’t crop up
in only one class of people. They are
fairly universal.
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| "Take your bill and reduce it..." |
So a point that Jesus is making here is that the children of light could stand to wise up. But if we look more broadly at Luke’s message, Jesus is saying something that goes beyond that. He consistently calls his disciples to recognize that they are approaching a moment of crisis. Things are going to go bad for them, much as they went south for the dishonest manager. And then what will they do? Figure out who and what is most important to you. Are you able to ride out the crisis, or indeed make the most of it? We can see in retrospect that the disciples were indeed going to be faced with serious problems once the weight of the system had come down on Jesus and put him to death. The shepherd was going to be struck and the sheep were going to be scattered. It is not so easy to see, perhaps, what our own crisis is. But we assuredly have one, or are in one.
And what is
that crisis? One way of stating it is
that it consists of, and hinges on, the question of for whom or for what are we
going to live. We can either be
“children of this age” who do our best to manipulate systems to our own
personal advantage, or we can throw in our lot with the kingdom, the βασιλεια, of God, and live for
the Truth as it is shines in Jesus. And
what is that Truth? It is being
authentic, not choosing for yourself the script written by family or society or
peers. It is boldly speaking the
Truth—telling it “like it is,”—when all about you are claiming that what you
stand for makes no sense. It is
submitting yourself to ongoing dialogue with the God who is your deepest Self,
as opposed to running off in directions dictated by your own ego. Being a “child of light” in that sense means
recognizing that you are connected to, and taking your place, within a
community that will help to keep you honest and rely on you to help others do
the same. To serve God as your one
Master and serve God only is the challenge to own that there is no part of your
life—not your money, not your job, not your family, not your relationships, not
your most private sex life—is some place or time where God is not, for there is
no such place and no such time. To
commit all your energies, your body, your soul, your mind to the cause of
freedom, to the quest for true peace, to the ideal of wholeness, to the
centrality of community: this is the
challenge. And if you are hearing the
call to do so, you are, my friend, in crisis.
It is a crisis that requires you to be as deft and as nimble as our
dishonest steward. In fact, it is a
crisis precisely in that you are
being called to be a steward. You are the one now who is about to be, if you
are not already, entrusted with the treasures of the kingdom, the moments
pregnant with meaning, the possibilities to make a dent in the way the world
operates, the promise to care as much about the life and wellness of others as
you care about your own, maybe even more so.
We
sometimes believe that this life of God that Jesus calls us to share as
stewards of the Master is an either/or proposition. Would that it were! It would be nice, to say the least, to be
able to be baptized into union with Christ and never again have to worry about
the object of one’s loyalties. It would
be wonderful to sign on with the βασιλεια,
the kingdom, of God and never
look back. Don’t even imagine that you
can do it, not even in your dreams. You
are a mixture, as am I, of trickster and truth, of scoundrel and saint, of ashes and glory, of serpent and dove. Only the alchemy of
Christ can take the base nature that we are bonded with and with the elixir of
grace transform us bit by stubborn bit into creatures that share his own
unalloyed love.
But you can
start, or continue what you have already started. Today or this week, it is unlikely that you
will, as theologian Fred Craddock has vividly put it, “christen a ship, write a
book, end a war, appoint a cabinet, dine with a queen, convert a nation, or be
burned at the stake. More likely the
week will present no more than a chance to give a cup of water, write a note,
visit a nursing home, vote for a county commissioner, teach a Sunday school
class, share a meal, tell a child a story, go to choir practice, and feed the
neighbor’s cat. ‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in
much.’[1]
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013
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