The ABC of Sunday Matters

Amos 8:4–7; 1 Timothy 2:1–8; Luke 16:1–13

The Bible always surprises me with its ability to surprise. You think you know the text and its meaning; you look at it again, perhaps in another situation and from another angle, in the light of someone’s remark, and it takes on a new meaning. Take the parable of the dodgy steward in today’s Gospel reading for example. Jesus follows the parable with a couple of questions: if you (that includes us) cannot be trusted with money who will trust you with genuine riches; if you cannot be trusted with what is not yours, who will give you what is your very own? The expected answer of course is: ‘no one Lord’. But when I read this parable within the larger context of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus (and God) seems to say the exact opposite: ‘I will’ and ‘in fact I do it time and time again’. After all, the disciples whom Jesus personally chose and trusted proved as unreliable and deceitful as the steward in the parable. When challenged by the authorities at the time of Jesus’ passion, they bolted for safety and Peter denied ever knowing him. Yet, after the resurrection, Jesus sought them out, forgave them, reinstated them and put them in charge of preaching the Good News. Not the kind of thing organisations, including churches, are likely to do now. These days it tends to be ‘one strike and you’re out’. But God is that trusting, that forgiving.

Take a couple of other parables. To my mind as a farmer’s son, the famous parable of the sower seems to portray God as a pretty reckless farmer. What a waste of good seed, tossing it on rocks and pathways and among thorns. But an important point of the parable is that God will go to what we would think are reckless and wasteful lengths in the hope of getting one strike or finding one little patch of good soil. Think how Jesus, the incarnate Word, sought the company of prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners, the kind that those around him would have certainly identified as the thorns, hardened rocks, and good–for–nothing soil of the parable.

Another example is the parable of the vintner who employs the unemployed near the end of the day and pays them a full day’s wage. Any of us who ran a business like this would be broke in no time. But God’s business is something else and God will gladly do whatever it takes to help those in need.

We find a nice expression of God’s generosity and good will towards human beings in our second reading from Paul’s Letter to Timothy. In what we may regard as a surprise move, the letter urges prayers to be offered for everyone, especially for kings and those in positions of authority. Paul offers two reasons for this. The first is that God wants all to be saved and so our prayers for rulers, however inadequate they may be, are in accord with the will of God who desires one family of humanity. The second arises from Paul’s reflections about the trust that God placed in him, despite his earlier hostility to the faith. If God is so willing to forgive and trust Paul, then a fortiori, everyone as well.

Our first reading from Amos adds a crucial component to this portrait of an all forgiving and trusting God: I can only be forgiven and be healed if I first accept God’s diagnosis of my sinful situation. God does this in a just (God’s judgement is true) and compassionate way (so that we may be healed). According to the introduction to the book, Amos preached in the 8^th century BCE before the Assyrian conquest, when the northern kingdom (Israel) was prosperous and its capital, Samaria, much larger than its rival Jerusalem (capital of the kingdom of Judah). If, as God’s messenger, Amos did not challenge the people about their abuses, he would have been disloyal to God and in fact preaching a false notion of God. How could one believe in a just and merciful God who lets you get away with blue murder? But God is too concerned for our welfare to let this happen and so the Bible challenges Israel and the disciples of Jesus to acknowledge when they have done wrong, and through the texts they have bequeathed to us we are challenged to do the same.

When we go to our doctor we almost always accept the diagnosis in good faith and take the required medicine, however unpalatable it may appear. Doctors exercise enormous authority in our society because we believe they are acting for our good and we desperately need their help to regain our health. Jesus portrays himself as a doctor in Matthew 9:12 when he says ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick’ and that he has come to make the sick well. We believe that his diagnosis of our situation is a trustworthy one and that he will offer us the right remedy. Despite this we all too often think that we have no need of his diagnosis or his remedy.