How Can Everybody Get A "win"?

Friday of the Thirty-first Week Integral

Our Introit today begins with a plea of someone afraid of being abandoned. “Forsake me not, O Lord, my God; be not far from me! Make haste and come to my help, O Lord, my strong salvation.” Psalm 38 is attributed to King David, perhaps because it is the third of the penitential psalms, songs of remorse for sin. The Church gives us this song in the last month of the liturgical year, perhaps because November is a time of chill in the Northern Hemisphere, a period to reflect on our stewardship of God’s gifts and any shortcomings we have acknowledged before Our Lord. Looking back at the beginning of the week, we meditate on our inevitable passing from this earthly life and pray for God’s forgiveness and direction as we anticipate our next year.

As if to confirm our duty of self-reflection, St. Luke’s Gospel focuses on Christ’s parable of the wasteful steward. Recall that the parables of Jesus read like the stories of a wise old man starting off a tale with the words, “This reminds me of a story. . .” They might not be about someone the listener knows, but whatever the source there is always a moral to be drawn.

It took medieval monks to develop the system of double-entry bookkeeping we still use today to keep books and discover fraud. In the ancient near East, not everyone was literate, nor skilled in simple math. So when we see that this steward was keeping two account books, we are not surprised. Somebody ratted him out to the property owner of the local wholesale establishment, and the owner called him in and gave him a pink slip. The now-fired steward looked at his situation and examined his non-calloused hands and middle-class lifestyle. No money there. He decided to negotiate with customers who owed money to the property owner for goods purchased on credit. The steward looked at the difference between the official record for the owner and the actual amount he had charged the purchaser. That was his own merdida, the commission that he would now be unable to bank. He signed off on the promissory note held for the buyer, changing it to the amount he had recorded for the owner. “A hundred measures of wheat? Let’s make it fifty.”

Well, sure the buyer will like that. He goes all the way down the debtor list knocking off his commissions, figuring that he’s making some friends along the way. The master commended him, not for his original malfeasance, but for giving everybody a “win” in the deal. And Jesus isn’t telling us to cheat, either. He is telling His disciples that they need to be as clever spreading the Gospel as the merchants peddling their wares in the marketplace.

Now we can look back at today’s first reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul is trying to tie together a number of topics that should be useful for a young church that he has not yet visited. Writing from the background of letters sent to Paul by perhaps a number of people either in that community or familiar with it, Paul tells them he is convinced that “you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to admonish one another.” His letter has been “bold” and assertive because he believes the Romans to be well beyond the basics. Paul is “performing the priestly service of the Gospel of God, so that the offering up of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” He is not trying to build up the Romans’ opinion of himself. He wants them to be purified by the Holy Spirit so they can be a kind of community sanctified and sacrificed to God. Paul himself is just a minister of the Gospel, as in one sense or another, all of us aspire to be. That’s why he only speaks of nothing “except what Christ has accomplished through me to lead the Gentiles to obedience by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God.” His message, over the years, he has personally delivered from the first church at Jerusalem through Syria and Anatolia into Macedonia and beyond into the Roman province of Illyricum, which we know as the whole Balkans. Moreover, he sees that mission extending. Wherever the Gospel has not been proclaimed, he wants to be there to erect churches on firm foundations.

Our response to this missionary spirit must be positive. Today’s world is in trouble. So many people have the idea they can be saved by politics, that a perfect secular world can be built and injustices removed from it. But the penalties and realities that come from the first society in the Garden of Eden are still with us. Only Jesus Christ, through His Holy Spirit, can remodel society one person, one family at a time. That’s why each of us must be willing to be aware of our surroundings, to have situational awareness. We must always be alert to the Spirit’s summons to our minds and hearts. There are people out there, and maybe even in our own church communities, who are hurting, lonely, directionless. Let’s all pray that each of them is made visible to us so we may accompany them in the right direction for healing and strengthening. The Holy Spirit is here and waiting for us to agree.