Eighth Sunday after
Pentecost, 31st July 1870
The Parable of the Unjust Steward which is the
subject of today's Gospel is more difficult to understand than most of our
Lord's Parables - but there are some points in its teaching which it is
impossible to mistake.
First in its
literal sense it presents us with a view of human society, as it is, which is
true in all ages, now as much as when our Lord spoke. Nothing is more common
now in the world than that sort of dishonesty which is instanced in the Unjust
Steward. He was in trust with his master's property; he treated it as if it
were his own; he wasted it either by carelessness or by spending it on himself.
He forgot his duty to his employer, as men do now, and as men now borrow money
without rational expectations of repaying it, and thus involve themselves and
are unable to meet the claims made on them. Such was the case of the Steward:
he was called upon to make his account good, and he could not do so. Under
these circumstances he was led on to commit a second sin in order to conceal
the first. He took his master's creditors into his counsel, and formed with
them a plan of fraudulent returns with the purpose of making his books right.
This, I say, is the first picture presented to us in this Parable, and it
impresses on us by an instance St. Paul's warning, "The love of money is
the root of all evil."
But a larger
sense of the Parable, and one on which I shall rather insist is this: the view
which it gives us of our duties to God and our conduct under those duties. It
is plain that the Master spoken of by our Lord is Almighty God Himself; and by
the Steward is meant each of His creatures, His rational creatures, who have
goods, or, as is sometimes said, talents committed to them, by Him. He does not
give these goods to us, but He lends them to us in order that we return them to
Him, when our time is ended, with fruit or interest. Men in trade by means of
money make money; and as at the end of a certain time capital is thus
increased, so by using God's gifts well during the years of this mortal life,
we are able to render in to Him a good account and return His gifts with
interest. This is the meaning of the Parable of the Talents.
And so as regards
the Parable of the Steward, on which I am now remarking, fields and
market-gardens and woods yield a produce, and are the means of wealth; such are
hay, wheat and other kinds of corn, and various fruits and vegetables in this
country; such are olive yards, vineyards, sugar canes, and other produce of the
land abroad. As then money creates money, as the land bears bread, wine and
oil, so our souls should yield the due return to God for the many gifts which
He has bestowed upon us.
I am speaking of
those gifts which belong to our nature, our birth, or our circumstances; gifts
of this world. He has given us the means of worshipping Him and doing Him
service. He has given us reason, and a certain measure of abilities, more or
less. He has given us health, more or less. He has placed us in a certain
station of life, high or low. He has given us a certain power of influencing
others. He has given us a certain circle of persons, larger or smaller, who
depend on us, whom our words and our actions affect for good or for evil, and
ought to affect for good. He has given us our share of opportunities of doing
good to others. All these are God's gifts to us, and they are given us, not to
be wasted, but to be used, to be turned to account. The Steward in the Parable
wasted them; and was made responsible for his waste. And so in our own case, we
may waste them, as most men waste them; nay worse, we may not only squander
them away, we do not know how; but we may actually misapply them, we may use
them actually to the injury of Him who has given them to us; but whether we do
nothing with them for God, or actually go on to use them to His dishonour and
against the interests of truth and religion, (and the latter is more likely
than the former, for not to do good with them is in fact to do evil,) anyhow we
shall have one day to answer for our use of them.
Thus the Parable
before us applies to all of us, as having certain goods committed to us by our
Divine Master with a day of reckoning for them in prospect. But this is not
all. Charges were brought against the Steward, and his employer called on him
to answer them, or rather examined them, and found them well-founded. And so it
is sometimes with us, that our conscience, which is the voice of God in the
soul, upbraids us, brings before us our neglect of duty, the careless, the
irreligious, the evil life which we are leading, our disregard of God's
commands, glory, and worship; and anticipates that judgement which is to come.
Now sometimes this self-accusation leads us to true repentance and change of
life - certainly, praise be to God, this is sometimes the case; but more
frequently, instead of turning us into the right path, it has the effect of
making us go more wrong than we were before. When the Steward found he could
not make good what his Lord had a right to demand of him, he had three courses
before him besides that which he adopted; he might have made his debts good by
extra work; again he might have got friends to have supplied the deficiency;
or, he might have thrown himself on his Lord's mercy. He might have digged, or
he might have begged; but he rejected both means. "I cannot dig," he
said, "to beg I am ashamed." So he went off into a further act of
dishonesty to the disadvantage of his master. And in like manner, we, when we
have been unfaithful to our good God and feel compunction for that unfaithfulness,
have two modes of recovery: we might dig, that is, we might do works of
penance; we might vigorously change our life; we might fight with our bad
habits; we might redeem the time; that is, we might dig. But we cannot make up
our minds to this laborious course; it is too great a sacrifice; it is above
us; we cannot dig. And secondly we might beg; that is, we might pray God to
forgive us and to change us; we might go to confess our sin and beg for
absolution; we might beg the prayers of others, the prayers of the Saints; but
to many men, especially to those who are not Catholics, this is more difficult
even than labour: "to beg we are ashamed." Begging seems something
inconsistent with what they call the dignity of human nature; they think it
unmanly, cowardly, slavish; it wounds their pride to confess themselves
miserable sinners, to come to a priest, to say the Rosary, to give themselves
to certain devotions, day after day; they think such a course as much beneath
them as a valiant effort to overcome themselves is above them. They cannot dig,
to beg they are ashamed; and therefore they attempt to destroy the sense of
their sins, which has fallen upon them by some means worse than those sins themselves
- I mean, such as denying perhaps that there is any such thing as sin, saying
that it is a bugbear invented by priests, nay perhaps going so far as to say
that there is no judgement to come, no God above who will see and will judge
what they say or do.
Such is the
repentance of men of the world, when conscience reproaches them. It is not a
true turning from sin, but a turning to worse sin - they go on to deny the Holy
Commandment because they have transgressed it; they explain away the sinfulness
of sin because they have sinned. St. Paul speaks of this evil repentance, if it
may be called by that name, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, when he
says to them the words of 2 Cor. vii. 10. Such is the state of mankind as we
see it realized on a large scale on the face of human society in the world at large.
When they do evil, act against their conscience and clear duty, there is this
opposition between what they know and what they do; light becomes darkness, and
instead of the light within them destroying their tendencies to sin, their sins
dim or stifle that light, and they become worse than they were, because they
were bad already.
This lesson I
draw from today's Gospel. Now let us turn to today's Epistle, which carries on
the lesson farther, and that both for our warning, and for our encouragement
and comfort. It is taken from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and begins
thus: "Brethren: We are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to
the flesh; for if you live according to the flesh, you shall die." Now
here first we must see what is the meaning of the flesh. At first sight it may
seem to mean human nature, but that is not its exact meaning. To explain it, I
will turn to the 40th chapter of Isaias. In it is the great promise of the
coming of Christ, the preaching of His forerunner, St. John Baptist, and the
gifts of the Gospel. The Prophet begins, "Be comforted, be comforted, my
people," and he speaks of the voice crying in the wilderness... Then he
says, (which is the passage to which I especially refer), "All flesh is
grass, and its goodness is like the flower of the field... " Now is not
the grass, and are not the flowers of the field in themselves good? Does not
our Lord say that they are more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory?
Certainly. But what is their defect? They fade - our Lord says that today they
are and tomorrow are cast into the oven. That is the case with the human soul.
Of course it cannot die as the flowers of the field; but its first estate dies.
Whatever there is of good in it, whatever of virtue, dies out of the soul as
life goes on, as the flowers die, as the human body dies; and as the flowers
are at length (as our Lord says) cast into the oven, as fuel, fair as they once
were, so much more does the moral excellence of man die, as time goes on; and
the longer he lives, the harder, the colder, the uglier in God's sight, the
deader, I may say, he becomes.
Now we shall see
what St. Paul's meaning is. When he speaks of the flesh, he means human nature
in its state of decay, in that state into which he is sure to fall, as times
goes on; and he says, "If ye live according to the flesh, ye shall
die." If, like the Unjust Steward, we live in the mere way of nature, we
shall soon lose all the little good that nature has on starting; and become
worse and worse, as time goes on, just as the Steward went from one sin to
another, till we reach a state of spiritual death. For all flesh is grass; and
this is the beginning and end of the matter; this is the end of all our hopes,
all our aspirations, as far as nature is concerned - utter, desperate ruin.
And now I come to
the light which dawns upon this darkness, the light which rises over against
it, illuminating this solemn history; a light by which a lesson which is so
painful, so depressing, becomes a consolation and an encouragement. Blessed be
God, that though such is the state of nature, God has not left us in a mere
state of nature, but has come to our relief, and brought us into a state higher
than our own nature, and thereby destroyed this tangle, this web, this bond, in
which mankind lies. He has sent to us His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to
give us the gifts of grace, which is a divine power above nature, or what is
called supernatural, by which we are able to do what nature of itself cannot
do. Isaias says, "All flesh is grass"; but St. Peter in his first
Epistle (1 Pet. 1, 24) takes up the word, draws out the happy contrast between
nature and grace, and reminds us that by means of the power of grace, what was
flesh is flesh no longer, but is spirit; that is, the grace of the Holy Ghost
changes our hearts, according to our Lord's words in St. John, "that which
is born of the flesh is flesh, but that which is born of the Spirit is
spirit."
This great and
blessed announcement is made again and again in the New Testament by our Lord
and His Apostles; but let me confine myself to what is told us in the Epistle
for this day. St. Paul says, "Brethren: we are debtors, not to the flesh,
to live according to the flesh." That is, we owe nothing to the flesh.
What has the flesh done for us? It is nothing else than the corruption of our
nature; the flesh is pride, wrath, hatred, malice, impurity, intemperance,
craft, guile; or as St. Paul expressly says himself to the Galatians: "The
works of the flesh are manifest, which are ..." (Gal. 5, 19). What then do
we owe to the flesh? We owe sin, misery, a bad conscience, displeasure,
spiritual death, future punishment. It has done nothing good for us, and cannot
- "for if (he continues) you live according to the flesh, you shall die";
and after saying this, he goes on in wonderful words to enlarge on the contrast
of our state, if we have, and if we profit by, the gift of the Spirit.
It is by this
gift of the Spirit, that is, by the unmerited supernatural grace of God, that we
are set free from that law of sin and death, the law of the flesh, which is the
state in which we are born. That tangle of the mind by which our best faculties
are kept from rising to Almighty God and seeking their true end and doing their
duty, and growing in all good, is a bondage, a slavery, and the grace of God
sets us free of it, so that we may (as it were) rise on our feet, and become in
St. Peter's words good stewards of the manifold gifts of God. Again this grace
not only sets us free, so that instead of being slaves we are able to serve
God, but it does something more for us. It would be a great thing, if we were
allowed to be faithful servants of God, as the Unjust Steward ought to have
been, but grace makes us that and something more; we become not merely servants
but even Sons of God. What a second wonderful privilege is this! Though we were
slaves of sin and the evil one, He not only sets us free from that slavery, and
takes us into His house and His service; but, more than that, He adopts us to
be His children. This is a second wonderful gift of grace. But there is a
third: sons are heirs of their Father, and in like manner He gives us an
inheritance; and an inheritance as far above any thing which our nature, even
though it were ever so perfect, could merit, viz., the sight of Him hereafter,
and eternal life. As paradise is beyond any thing which our sin could inherit,
as sin never can merit God's mercy, but simply merits punishment, so human
nature, though ever so pure and perfect, could never merit heaven.
These are the
great mercies of God which have reversed the state in which we were born, and
enabled us to give a good account of our stewardship. He has fortified nature
by means of grace; He has overcome the flesh in us by His supernatural aid, and
that by three wonderful gifts: first, He has made us faithful servants, whereas
without His aid we can be but Unjust Stewards; secondly He makes us not only
faithful servants, but dear sons; and thirdly He not only blesses us in this
life, but He promises us life everlasting, according to St. Paul's account in
today's Epistle, which I will read again...
What a view this
opens on us both of consolation and of solemn thought! Nothing can harm us, the
Sons of God, while we remain in our Father's house. Nothing can deprive us of
our hope of heaven. But on the other hand how little we understand our
privileges; how little we understand the words of the sacred writers about
them. May God enlighten our eyes to see what the privileges are - "that
you may know what the hope is of His calling, and what are the riches of the
glory of His inheritance in the saints" (Eph. 1, 18).
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