29 - Chapter 29
CHAPTER XXIX THE UNJUST STEWARD
EVEN if the disciples of Jesus, and especially the leaders, accepted this conception of themselves as stewards of the Master, there was one special temptation to which they were subject. That temptation is dealt with in the parable commonly, but somewhat unfortunately, known as the Unjust Steward. This is, by common consent, the most difficult of all the parables, the number of explanations given even before the days of Trench being described as appalling. We may dismiss at once a moral that has found much favour with commentators, viz. that the followers of Jesus must show in spiritual matters the same long-sightedness which enabled the steward to escape from his difficulties, and that wealth, even wealth dishonestly acquired, should be generously distributed with a view to a good reception of the donor in the next world. Jesus did not teach men to make an immoral use of
1 Summarized, by permission of the publishers, from an article by the author in The Expository ’Times for September, 1926. their own money, much less of other people’s money.
Luke appends four or five different lessons to the parable, which looks as if, by the time he wrote, people were just as much puzzled by it as we are to-day, and so various sayings of Jesus had become attached to it as its explanation.
(Two of these have parallels in Luk 19:17 and Mat 6:24.) Luke’s third and fourth lessons are: (3) A man trustworthy in a trifle will be trustworthy in a big affair; the converse is also true, and if you cannot be trusted with ’ ’ filthy lucre,” who will commit to your keeping genuine wealth? (4) You may be a slave of God or of mammon, but not of both; you must choose. The true exegesis of the parable seems to be in the line of these morals. If people follow the ironical advice to be generous with their illgotten gains, the homes they will thereby secure for themselves in the other world will have only the eternity of tents, which are the very symbol of the temporary and evanescent. The steward is held up not as a model but as a warning, as an illustration of one to whom a trust has been committed, and who evades his difficulties by lowering his master’s claims. In the early centuries the principle involved in this parable proved to be of supreme importance. 1 From the time the religion of Jesus entered the Gentile world, the Christians put
1 See Harnack’s “ Expansion of Christianity “ and C. J. Cadoux’ “ The Early Church and the World.” in the very fore-front of their teaching that God is spirit and that God is One. Then, as now, idolatry did not confine itself to a compartment of life that might be labelled religious; it insinuated itself into social life and into the occupations by which men earned their bread, and some felt that the only way to keep their garments clean was to hold aloof altogether from those outside the Church. Not only guild feasts and dinners held in temples, but marriages and the coming-of-age ceremony were closely associated with idolatrous rites: might a Christian accept an invitation to such? In the circus performances which were the football matches of those days, idolatry played an essential part; could a Christian be an actor or even a spectator? A magistrate or an army officer had to conduct sacrifices, while even the private soldier became involved in the sacrificial ceremonies; did that close to the Christian political and military service? Having to read with his pupils heathen literature and to explain to them heathen mythology and idolatrous customs, the schoolmaster was placed in an ambiguous position. There were, again, many trades such as that of incense-seller, builder or engraver which might at any time involve their workmen, wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of idols, heathen temples, or sacrifices. No less strong was Christian antipathy to a living idol in the shape of the reigning emperor.
Round this point centred one of the earliest and most persistent struggles between the Church and the State. From the first it was realized in the most vital way that a spiritual worship and a life of lofty moral purity were of the essence of the Faith.
If the Master had written a hundred, then whatever pain or shame or loss might be involved, though the refusal might mean torture or death, the steward must not lower his Master’s claims to eighty or fifty. Ultimately there came a time when Church leaders not only showed a Christian consideration for those who found the demands of the religion too rigorous, but actually sought to smooth the path to acceptance of the Gospel by an unworthy lowering of its claims. For such disloyal stewardship there was a heavy price to pay. As Harnack has shown, the adoption from the third century onwards of semi-divine saints and angels, of local cults and holy places, of noisy annual festivals, and of relics and bones of saints as objects of reverence and instruments of healing, was really a reversion to paganism which has permanently degraded Christianity in the theory and practice of large sections of its followers. The classic example of lowering the standard to lighten the load alike of the leaders and of the rank and file was the introduction of the system of indulgences, which instituted what has been aptly called a tariff for sin. In our own day every one who tries to take a dispassionate view of the situation must be seriously perturbed by the extent to which even in the Christian West life seems to demand one long series of compromises with the Christian standard. A passage of Dr. Herbert Gray’s As Tommy Sees Us reads like a commentary on The Dishonest Steward. His soldier friends, he tells us, just said quite bluntly: “ In business you can’t be a Christian.” “ In the modern competitive scramble a man who took Christ’s teaching seriously and honestly could not exist.”
’ They did not feel it was all so very bad, but they were quite clear it was not Christian, and therefore for them Christianity was an impossible religion.” In other words they themselves, however reluctantly, were quite prepared to abate twenty or fiftypercent, of the demands of Christian morality, but they were honest enough to call what they were doing by its proper name. In Stones of Stumbling^ Mr. Tillyard, who had himself been in business, gave it as his conviction that ’ no Christian has ever been engaged for long in a competitive business without doing many things he would have liked not to do. He may desire to love his neighbour as himself, but he dwells in the midst of people who are out to do the best they can for themselves, and he must do as they do or go under.” In politics, the average voter is as well aware as the statesman that the statecraft even of those politicians who are enthusiasts for righteousness, consists largely in accommodating the moral progress of the State to the pace of the average citizen. As Dr. Hodgkin says in ’The Christian Revolution: “ Its legislation is for men as they are, or seem to the politician to be, rather than for men as they may become, or seem to the Christ-eyes to be.” Any who are inclined to think that the temptation of the Dishonest Steward is one with which the Christian in the West has no longer seriously to reckon, should weigh the words of Dr. C. J. Cadoux: “ The spirit of the world has eaten deeply into the vitals of the Christian commonwealth, so much so that the charge can be made, not justifiably indeed, but at least without obvious absurdity, that the average moral life within the Church is little higher, if at all, than the average moral life without, that the Church is as much the home of lazy reactionism and selfishness as it is of idealism and progress.” The Church has her own peculiar problems; one of them is that of tainted money. Yet in this sphere also, ideal purity is not even possible except within strict limits. Church balances kept in a bank may be employed to finance a distillery or a firm of swindlers. The leaders of the Church, too, are stewards of God in other than financial matters. They are defenders of the faith, not onlv of the faith once delivered to the saints, but of the new truth that God makes known to each generation. There are always those who resent the idea that revelation is progressive; and the stewards of the mysteries of God know very well that they can simplify their own task by placating the conservatives, who are often the elderly and influential men, while keeping their own counsel about any new light they may have themselves received. Has it not at times been regarded even as a virtue in an ecclesiastic to be a “ safe “ rather than an honest man? On this subject as on all others, Pharisaic self-satisfaction and condemnation of others are out of place; to our own Master we stand or fall. Yet it is idle to minimize the reality of the danger or the seriousness of the temptation.
Self-respect requires that we do not rest content with any comfort secured by acquiescing in a second-best. The application of the parable to life demands earnest thought and fearless facing of the situation. In our age the difficulty has been increased by the extent to which moral responsibility has been socialized. Arrangements are made for us by our joint-stock company, our trade union, our municipality, our Church; our individual responsibility almost seems so small as to be negligible. Yet however helpless each of us may seem to be, our stewardship not only remains but can be in some measure discharged. It is always in our power to strive to retain a conscience keenly alive to the difference between what is and what ought to be, and to throw ourselves into the work of trying to Christianize the social sentiment that dictates so much of our policy. There are times we can learn to recognize them, and perhaps they come oftener than we think when it is unmanly to take refuge behind the corporate conscience and the customs of our society. It is ours, too, to guard against the insidious danger, the temptation especially of middle life, of making props of the words ’ impracticable ’ and “ impossible,” of believing that an unworthy compromise with wrong is the utmost that even the Church of God can ever hope to achieve.