Reflection by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :- Sunday 25th C
There is a famous story in which Alexander the Great confronted a captured pirate and asked him why he should not have him executed. The pirate, recognising that the game was quite literally up, retorted that Alexander was only a pirate too, only a much more successful one. I suspect that our selection of Readings for today could gain much by holding this retort in mind. Jesus, after all, was known for remarking that ‘No one was good except God alone’, which puts the rest of us in our places.
Amos (8:4-7) comes from the mid 8th century BCE, at a time when the power of the Assyrians was on the rise. He is contemporary with 1st Isaiah and Hosea, prophets who explored the fall of Samaria/Israel, the northern kingdom as it fell to the power of Assyria. These writers, commentators on the current situation, believed that this appalling fate which befell their people had come about due to the corruption of the powerful and their complete disregard for the welfare of the poor and weak: ‘When will the New Moon be over...so that we can buy up the poor for money, and the needy for a pair of shoes.’ It’s a story with a very long history, isn’t it, where the powerful entrap others into slavery and treat them as mere commodities to be bartered for their own convenience? Ancient Jewish authors knew that their God was a God of justice and mercy and their expectation of their kings was that they should uphold the rights of the common people, and not exploit them. It was an understanding very frequently denied them, and the job of a great prophet was always to rail against such injustice and expect divinely given retribution, usually in the form of repression by a foreign power which spelled disaster for the ruling class. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that religion is not about politics!
Rightly therefore does the writer of 1 Timothy (2:1-8) insist that prayers be offered for all in power, for living as he did under the Greco-Roman Empire, he would have been aware of the immensity of the authority of the very few, some 1% of the population, over the huge underclass, and known how disproportionately they affected justice. This was a world in which wealth linked to superior class could ‘buy’ you justice in the courts, irrespective of the virtue of your case, and where the power of a patron could ensure your case was won, regardless of its probity. Even having the best lawyers did not guarantee the truth, as Cicero knew when called upon by his patrons the Metelli to defend the indefensible. Granted there were cases when some ‘small’ person secured justice from local magistrates, but as we know today, power and money spoke much louder. The author of Timothy tries desperately to get the recipients of his letters to look towards a different future, in Christ, to which allegedly they are already committed from highest to lowest and change their ways. With this in mind he turns their thoughts to Christ, the “Only mediator who sacrificed himself as ransom for them all.’ We may think this a bit of a cop-out, but surely he’s right, when looked at in the round humanity is in a desperate plight and clearly unable to get itself out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.
With this in mind Jesus, quirky as ever, Luke (16:1-13) continues with his series of utterly subversive parables of the Kingdom, here told we note to the disciples, who I suspect may have been thinking in ‘us and them terms’ and considering themselves among the squeaky clean, with others, non-followers of Jesus on the outside. When we recall that Luke’s patron was the wealthy Theophilus, possibly the governor of a Roman province and one who expected to recoup the outlay of his election expenses to the senate by fleecing his province, we can perhaps begin to get a bit of a handle on the situation, especially if we return to Alexander and the pirate.
We appear to have an absentee land owner, and there were a great many among the elite. Such owners would select a slave with ability as steward to oversee the running of their estate, or might have tenants who had to pay rents and dues in kind. Pliny the Younger had four or five such estates, and whilst away in Rome as a lawyer and fulfilling various tasks for his Emperor as Governor of Bithynia, Prefect of the aqueducts and sewers of Rome, and in charge of the Temple of Saturn, he would obviously have had such estate managers. But, Jesus remarked, what would happen if such a steward was accused of corruption? Some of course were good stewards, and could be ultimately rewarded by freedom and given land or their own or a business enterprise by their then patron. But some were known to be lazy or cruel to the other slaves, possibly taking cuts of the profits and cooking the books. Caught out, the reprobate has to work out how to save his own neck, as he could easily be sold on or reduced to beggary. He chooses to alter the record of debts the tenants owe the landowner. Libraries have been written attempting to make the steward out to be a virtuous man, but I think that is not the point Jesus is making. In fact ,he plays on the fact that both the steward and the owner are thoroughly corrupt people, as his listeners would have understood. By altering the debt of the olive oil and wheat producers, the steward obligates the tenants to take care of him and his family. When the owner comes to appreciate that he has been robbed, he who himself was known for exploiting his workers, accepts the status quo even commending the steward for such an astute move, the sort of thing he himself might have done. There is something laudable about knowing yourself and appreciating this in others, and Jesus as we know is bent on hammering home the message that only his salvific work on the cross can take us to the Father. We are all sinners in some shape or form, and the extent of it is irrelevant. Responsible for ruining a planet, none of us have a leg to stand on. Verses 10-13 are I suspect part of an entirely different discourse which later got attached to this parable and does not make sense alongside its thrust that we are all alike in need of grace. It’s time we all grew up and stopped comparing others unfavourably with ourselves – believing that we, naturally, are perfectly clean is immature and unworthy in relation to the God we serve.
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