One of the great things about Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the wonderful
stories associated with him, some of which may even be true. I'm
assured this one is. You may be surprised to hear that there's an
Anglican Cathedral in Cairo in Egypt – I'm not sure how that came to
be, but there it is. And the story goes that a young priest in South
Africa received an invitation to go to this Cathedral and preach.
He was honoured and excited to be asked, of course, but also a little
nervous, so he asked Archbishop Tutu for some advice. In particular,
he asked the archbishop what text he should preach on. "Egypt, eh?"
said the archbishop in his inimitable way. "Well, my son, if I were
you I stayed well clear of the Exodus!"
That's funny, but it also makes a serious point. The Book of Exodus
is a hard sell in Egypt. Whenever we divide people into us and them,
on whatever basis we choose, we run the risk of assuming that the
Scriptures are ours not theirs, and, even worse, that God is ours but
not theirs. The Exodus story is about the forging of a new people,
about a national or ethnic identity, and it necessarily is written
from the point of view of those people. The "other people" – the
Egyptians – are the enemy. They're beyond the pail. They cop the
plagues. Their army gets drowned. We're God's people, they're not.
Who cares about them?
But if we fast-forward from the time of the Exodus to the time of the
prophets, we find a rather different picture. At least, when we look
at the prophet, Amos. He's got up a full head of steam, but the
target of his vitriol is not the Egyptians, or any other "foreign"
group of people. This is all in-house stuff. Here the division is
not on national or ethnic grounds; here the divisions are
socio-economic, as we would call them today. The commercial classes
are giving capitalism a bad name. They are the epitome of unbridled
greed. They are cheating the poor, with false measures and with
inflated prices.
And there are two important points to note here, both arising from the
fact of who they are. They are Jews, descendants of the very people
whom God rescued from Egypt. The very people whom God endowed with a
land of their own. Yet, first of all, they are dishonouring God by
fretting about the restrictions on their economic activities on
Sabbath Days and Festival Days. Far from treating the Sabbath as a
day of rest and thanksgiving, they find it a tiresome waste of time
and want it over with as soon as possible.
Secondly, their victims are fellow Jews, fellow people of God. Far
from being a light to the Gentiles, an example to the other nations of
the world, Israel has become like everyone else, greedy, self-seeking,
and forgetful of God. But there is no immediate threat of divine
intervention, no plagues, no wholesale drownings. These people, rich
oppressors and cheats though they are, are still God's own people.
Still the people of the Covenant. There will be a final accounting:
God will never forget what they have done. But there is a sense in
which the prophet's words are to be taken as a warning: think what
you're doing; remember that you will be called to account. Stop your
evil ways, and repent.
In other words, there is no suggestion in this passage that the rich
oppressors are, to God, simply dispensable, as the Egyptians rather
seemed to be in the Exodus story. God loves all his people, rich and
poor, powerful and powerless, sinner and sinned against.
And that message is there for us in St Paul's First Letter to Timothy.
In this morning's passage St Paul is giving instructions about
worship; and in particular about our prayers when we gather like this
for worship. He wants our prayers to be all-embracing. He wants us
to pray for our rulers or leaders, for "kings and all those in
authority". And not just prayers of intercession, we should notice,
but also of thanksgiving. We should give thanks to God for those in
authority over us. We need them, with all their weaknesses, because
human society needs leaders to keep the peace.
There is no room here for any us and them divisions. Why? Because,
says St Paul, God "wants all people to be saved and come to a
knowledge of the truth". That is why Jesus Christ "gave himself as a
ransom for all". Divisions along national or ethnic lines, divisions
along socio-economic lines, divisions along political lines, all fall
to the ground in the face of the divine desire that all of us come
together and return to God as one people.
But what about division along the lines of faith and ethics? What
about the division between the Church and the world? It's time to
turn our attention to this puzzling parable in today's gospel reading.
The outline of the story is clear enough, and we are given a few clues
to fill in some of the details. In particular, we are told about two
of the debts owed to the master. They are both large, and each is
expressed in terms of an agricultural product. – olive oil and wheat.
So a fairly safe bet is that this master is a moneylender, who lends
money to peasant farmers at the start of the season, and expects
payment when the harvest has been sold. He isn't directly involved in
this business himself; he has employed a manager to run it for him.
The next clue is that this manager has not performed well. He is
accused of wasting his master's possessions. That word "wasting" is
the same word used of the Prodigal Son, who wasted his inheritance in
wild living. It doesn't involve actual dishonesty – the manager does
not seem to have been into embezzlement. Rather it suggests a lack of
care and prudence, and business acumen. Putting it all together it
may be that he is being accused of making unwise loans, without
checking to make sure that the borrowers had a reasonable prospect of
being able to repay the debts.
So maybe the master has now found that he has a lot of bad debts on
his books. He tells the manager that he is fired, and demands a final
set of accounts. All this seems feasible enough. So does the
reaction of the manager. He is now facing a bleak future, with no
source of income available to him. (This tends to confirm that he
hasn't been salting away his master's money in an offshore bank
account!) What can he do? He is facing a labouring job, a drop in
status bringing shame on himself and his family, or, worse still, a
life of begging.
So he hatches this plan that is at the heart of this story. He calls
in his master's debtors and discounts their debts by a considerable
amount – 50 percent in one case, 20 percent in another. He figures
that they will be so grateful to him that he can touch them for a few
favours later. Again, this makes some sort of sense.
But when his master finds out about this the story takes a real twist
towards the bizarre. His master commends him for his shrewdness. We
expect the master to go ballistic – to beat or at least abuse him for
ripping him off. But he doesn't: he commends him, and this is the
first aspect of the parable that bothers us. Well, I suspect that
this is the clue to us that the master is not an innocent victim in
all this. Perhaps the master is himself a rogue – a loan shark
screwing the peasant borrowers for all he can get out of them
Notice that there is no hint of reconciliation, much less of the
reinstatement of the manager. He is still fired. So maybe the master
recognises the devious scheme of the manager as one rogue impressed by
another. That, too, makes some sort of sense to me; but then comes
Jesus' teaching in which he appears to encourage his disciples to
learn from these rogues. What exactly are we to learn from them?
I think, perhaps, it's got something to do with providing for the
future. The manager was trying, in his shrewd, worldly way, to secure
his future. He used his master's assets to that end. Jesus seems to
be urging us to secure our future, not by stealing, of course, but by
using our worldly wealth for the good of others. When it is gone, he
says, we will be "welcomed into heavenly dwellings". Almost certainly
he has in mind the lovely Jewish idea that those to whom we have shown
kindness in this world speak for us on Judgment Day.
The message seems to be, don't be too proud or self-righteous to learn
from the worldly wise, but transform their wisdom into the godly
variety. And always remember that there is a final accounting, for
rich and poor, creditor or debtor, master or slave.
As a story, it may not be as pithy or as witty as those of Archbishop
Tutu. But at least it could be preached in Cairo Cathedral.
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