In general, the beginning is a very good place to start, but there
are some stories with which it’s best to start at the end. I think this
parable, which is confusing and strange in a lot of ways, is one of those.
It ends
with the master commending his manager. He praises him. And, like in most of
Jesus’ parables, one helpful way to start applying them to our lives is to imagine
God as the master and us as the servant. Straight off, doing that, we come to
an awareness of what God has entrusted us with. Huge sums, valuable, precious
gifts, all of the amazing gifts in our lives: God’s goods, given for us to
administer, in the service of His Kingdom. And the end of the story is God
praising us. I don’t know if that’s an image of God we think of very often, but
it’s profoundly biblical. Just as God proclaimed of Jesus at his baptism, “this
is my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased,” so in each baptized follower
does God delight and proclaim his love and his good pleasure. I think these two
moments give us prompts for our prayer. We talk a lot about the need to examine
our conscience, to acknowledge our sins. And that is important. But what might
it look like to put just as much energy into examining our gifts, what God has
entrusted us with, and imagining vividly that moment of God praising us? It’s
such a human need, and maybe we’d be less needy about, if we regularly prayed
about God’s praise of us.
Now,
that would be incomplete as prayer if that was all we ever prayed out, and the
story is just as incomplete if that’s all we retell of it. It starts with the
news that the manager, the servant in whom we’re meant to see ourselves, has
royally screwed up. He’s squandered his master’s property. Not necessarily
through any ill will, quite possibly just through carelessness. And as much as
we resonate with the desire to be praised, we probably also resonate with this
feeling: the awareness that we have not used the gifts God has given us as they
ought to be used; we have not lived lives of stewarding all of our gifts for
the greater glory of God. And maybe we feel we’ve been there with the manager
in knowing the shame of having been found out, or maybe we are reminded of our
fear that something we’ve done or haven’t will be exposed, or maybe we know a
little bit of both, for different aspects of our sinfulness. Regardless,
looking at the beginning and end of our story, we see our fear and our hope,
our shame and our glory; the awareness we’ve sinned and squandered, the longing
for praise, the conviction that God is bringing us there.
That
dynamic, that tension of being caught between those two things, is capture
brilliantly in what I think is one of the most beautiful prayers of the Mass. Right
after the Our Father, the priest prays in our name to Jesus that he might “Look
not upon our sins, but on the faith of your Church.” It’s a prayer that recognizes the reality of
our sin, but asks Jesus not to look there; to look instead on the faith that
gathered us together. It’s a prayer prayed with confident, daring hope that God
will answer it. God will look not upon our sin, but upon our faith, and rejoice
and erupt in praise.
Note
that it doesn’t say, “look not upon our sin but upon our accomplishments;” our
resume, our transcript, our merit badges; no, upon our faith, our trust. I
think in this way, the liturgy interprets our scripture for us. For what does
the man do when he realizes he’s getting the boot? His first step is to take an honest inventory
of himself, to become aware that he can’t do all the things, that manual
laborers and beggars (people he probably looked down upon) have gifts that he
doesn’t have. He doesn’t doubt that God has given him gifts, but he comes to a
deeper awareness of his limitations, and of others’ giftedness.
And this
equips him for action. As a lame duck debt collector, he really has the
opportunity to do whatever he wants in this last day or so, or, should I say,
extort whatever he wants. But, he doesn’t. Rather than making a quick buck on
these hapless clients of his soon-to-be-ex-master, he plays the long game,
which is prudent, but it’s only prudent if you basically trust people. He plays
the trusting game, the game that assumes the best of others. His ploy only
works on the basis that he assumes that if he’s kind to people now, they’ll be
kind to him later. In short, he assumes the people around him are people,
basically good people, not pawns (like the poor being cheated by the merchants
Amos castigated), and not out-to-get-him. He has respect for other people’s
gifts, and faith in their good nature.
And the
Lord looks not upon his sins, but upon his faith, and praises him. We want our
faith to be so much bigger than that. But a grand faith is big at every level;
our faith in God’s love and mercy grows as we nourish it at the lower levels,
as we grow in our respect for and trust in humanity. Not as Pollyannas, who
deny sin, but as faithful people, who call out our own before suspecting
another’s, and live lives of trust that God is working, not just in us, but in
each and every person we meet. When we ask God to look upon our faith, that’s
not asking him to look on something amazing we’ve built, but to see that we’ve
seen his handiwork, our awe at what, and whom, he is building up around us. The
opposite of faith isn’t so much doubt, as suspicion and pride. Coming face-to-face
with his sin lets this steward build up his faith, and readies him for praise.
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