Luke 16.1-13
This parable of the unrighteous steward is notoriously difficult to make sense of, and so I’m going to start somewhere else and come back to it.
I want to think of a painter. The painter makes a few strokes with the brush on the canvas. Then she stands back and looks at it. She can then see what to do next, and she does it, and stands back again – and thinks, “that colour’s not quite right, that shape needs to go a bit that way” and so on. In this way the painter enters into a dialogue with the work that is coming to be. She paints a bit, and what she has painted speaks back to her and prompts the next move. This is how things usually work, in painting, in literature, in composing music, in human relationships, in being a student at a theological college. Not to mention monastic life. We test things out, we discover where what we are seeing leads us. It would be unusual for an artist to have all sorted out every detail their work of art before start. It would be unusual for a novelist to have the story all settled before he picks up his pen. It’s more likely to be that he will discover what is going to happen as he writes. We all have this experience in one way or another. In counselling we can spend a whole hour doing all the talking, and in the process of the talking we grow to understand more, through a dialogue with the questions that are troubling us.
How does this apply to being Christians?
A few years ago I had a sabbatical, and part of it I devoted to studying modern art – reading about it, looking at lots of art, and trying to get under the skin of what to the untrained eye can often be puzzling or alien. I was staying in a monastery on the edge of London, and one day a monk left a big bunch of keys on the chair in front of me in the church during a service. I looked down and to my surprise I felt that I was looking at a work of art. I had been looking at all this modern art – I was now beginning to see with different eyes, and these keys, their shape and their arrangement, on the material of the chair, engaged my imagination in a way they would never have done before. It was a light-bulb moment. It’s often said that if you want to begin to relate to art, you need to look at lots of it, and this seemed to prove the point. All my looking at art was changing the way I saw things.
In the early history of the church they used to say about baptism that it opens our eyes. The people who had been baptised were sometimescalled illuminati – illuminated ones. Through baptism the light was now getting in. We can say this about the whole Christian life. In our prayer, we look at God and God looks at us, in a dialogue, like that of the painter with the painting. In the liturgy we and God look at each other in material ways, in buildings and artifacts and texts and movement and music. In sitting under the Scriptures we see God, and in loving our neighbour we see God in them and hopefully vice versa. The more we look on God in these ways, if our heart is in a right enough place, we will begin to see things more as God sees. Prayer, worship and love of our neighbour can change the way we see life, just as looking at lots of art can change the way we see things.
Now to the parable of the rogue who said, take your hundred-dollar bill and write 50. This is pure St Benedict. Benedict lays down clear rules. But the Abbot needs to know how to adapt them to the needs and the weaknesses of particular brethren. Benedict doesn’t believe in forcing real life into a jelly-mould. He also says that when we are in a meeting we have to be careful not to be a jelly-mould ourselves. It’s a temptation to put our views forcefully. To have a strong opinion and to want to insist on it. No – in a meeting, of a monastic chapter or of a parish church council, we have to be like the painter. Patiently and gently let us dab on our thoughts, and then stand back and see how that develops, see how the meeting speaks back to you. Just as the artist can’t produce a true work of art without this process – so we have to beware of having everyting schematized and settled in our heads – there is always more that we haven’t yet seen. We are in no position to be dogmatic at meetings.
Does this mean we can’t have any convictions? Do we simply have to be a jelly, letting ourselves be led by others? No – it’s rather a question of a balance of forces. With an artist there are quite firm givens that come into play: experience, judgement, instinct, a sense of what is right, a sense of what is true. And the you have to add to that that the artist isn’t just an individual. Painting couldn’t happen without the painter being part of a society and part of a tradition. Even if the work of art is very way-out, it is the fruit of a tradition. We balance what we are confident about with a practice of exploration and attention, knowing that we are always learning to see as God sees. We will in many ways know what ground we stand on, but this is a call not to be hidebound about the certainties we find ourselves holding onto.
One thing you can say about the unjust steward is that, like St Benedict, he bent the rules with imagination. There was a high degree of risk, but it worked, and he came out tops in every direction. So with the Christian, be careful about your convictions, your fixed certainties. Our discovery of life’s certainties will come from knowing where and in what ways to be uncertain, but rather from looking and looking at the supreme work of art, which is God.