Social Affairs

Thinking Anew: What money cannot buy

A strange parable implies that we are to do what’s good, albeit in an imperfect world

A food bank in Bristol. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Gordon Linney
Sat Sep 17 2022 - 10:30

Followers and admirers of Jesus Christ understand his words to be statements of principle by which to live. “Love one another as I have loved you” is an example. However, in tomorrow’s gospel reading from St Luke we hit a bump on the road to discipleship in the mystifying parable of the unjust steward. To some the steward is an out-and-out rogue, to others he is only giving discount for prompt payment or being kind to poor people who are indebted to his boss and who have been overcharged over many years.

The thing that causes problems is the lesson that Jesus seems to suggest are to be drawn from this parable which seems at odds with the rest of his teaching: “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly… And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” It sounds like “if you can’t beat them join them” but it is not quite so simple.

Jesus shared the everyday lives of ordinary people especially the poor so it is quite possible that what he is saying here is that we might have to make compromises to make life tolerable for the weakest in society. It doesn’t mean that Jesus approves of the greed of the rich and powerful, represented in the parable by the Master, or their neglect of the poor. Indeed, he stands in the great prophetic tradition of Amos who we hear from tomorrow: “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land…We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat. The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely, I will never forget any of their deeds.” The language may be dated but the injustice continues to this day and on a grander scale.

When Tony Blair, Britain’s then-prime minister was asked about his faith, his aide Alastair Campbell intervened and said, “We don’t do God”. Michael Sandal, who is professor of government at Harvard, disagrees. He questions the reigning assumptions of modern public life – that moral and religious notions are private matters that should be kept out of public life.

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In What Money Can’t Buy he writes: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketisation of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places … What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of everyday life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences and how we come to care for the common good.”

In a radio interview some weeks ago Tony Blair’s successor Gordon Brown, son of a clergyman, issued a report supported by all the UK faith groups warning of the consequences for the poor in a deteriorating economic situation in the UK. He described it as a moral crisis and argued that we all have obligations “beyond the front door, and the garden gate.” He quoted from the parable of the good Samaritan telling the government that they must not walk by on the other side, that there would be damaging costs of failure in terms of people’s mental and physical health, children going to school hungry and ill clad and increased homelessness. We should pay attention nearer home.

The strange parable we read tomorrow implies that we are to do what’s good albeit in an imperfect world because, as the 19th-century American politician and soldier Carl Schurz, said, “Ideals are like the stars – we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea we chart our course by them.”

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