AMOS makes uncomfortable reading. He pronounces “woe” on indifference to suffering, neglect of religion, dishonesty, and exploitation. Do we feel as if we are selfish, exploitative? Perhaps only a few of us have grossly exploited our position, like a dishonest police officer with a vulnerable victim, or an immoral teacher with a naïve pupil. I have never bought the needy a pair of shoes. But I have sometimes bought shoes, when I could have spent the money on something more worth while.
If we have not the self-discipline to be generous with this world’s goods, or if our faith is insufficient to make us observe the tenets of our religion ungrudgingly, or if we resort to spiritual contortions to shunt the sufferings of others out of sight and mind, at least we can have the decency to accept that we need to hear God’s “woe” upon us. We can acknowledge failing, even if it does not bring about the fullest repentance of a grace-filled heart.
Stern Old Testament “woe” may send us off in search of New Testament comfort, instead. But the reassurance in 1 Timothy comes with a calling. It is a prayer for peace: not the ultimate spiritual vision — that “peace which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4.6) — but rather “peace and quiet”, an absence of violence (at one end of the disturbance spectrum) and hassle (at the other).
Living (mostly) peaceably in our habitations (Ecclesiasticus 44.6) has been a privilege of British life for decades now. But we do not value it as we should. In Bible days, life was precarious, war was normal, and there was no welfare state. In those circumstances, which most of us can barely imagine (while the few who remember them are getting fewer year by year), how could we not pray for kings and rulers?
What may strike us as obsequious or quietist must at the time have been a cry from the heart, a yearning response to the Spirit’s “groans too deep for words”, of which Paul writes elsewhere (Romans 8.26). To know where you will spend the night, to have confidence that there will be food enough for those whom you love to eat their fill, to trust that what you call your own will not be taken from you unjustly, to close your eyes at night without fearing the morrow — these are not unreasonable aspirations, and it is proper for Christians to pray for them, for themselves as well as others.
In the days when the BCP was our only prayer book, prayers for the Sovereign were a daily duty. They do not speak challenging truth to power, or express any higher calling for His Majesty’s subjects than to “serve, honour, and humbly obey”. The virtue that they do still embody is a common desire for peace and wise exercise of authority.
Amos and 1 Timothy share a vision that combines straightforward morality with devotion. Not so the Gospel, with its strange parable, its paradoxical commendation of dishonesty. In the ancient world, paradoxes were a way of teaching philosophy, or the art of reasoning. My favourite is the Cretan-liar paradox: “All Cretans are liars,” the Cretan says. But, if he is telling the truth, he is lying; and, if he is lying, he must be telling the truth.
In the parables, a “master” (of slaves; in most older versions the translation “servants” is preferred) usually stands for God. This might mean that God approves of dishonest means, provided that the end is a good one. But we cannot call even the steward’s motivation “good”. It is nothing nobler than self-preservation and pride. One scholar found it so embarrassing for the master to praise the steward that he argued that the word “praise” must really mean “condemn”! If there are no easy answers to the moral meaning of that praise, we can at least be sure that such puzzles help us not to over-simplify Jesus’s message.
There are two things that I take away from this parable, and which shine with perfect clarity amid the dark enigma of the paradox. One is that the only person who has been wronged by the steward’s behaviour is the master. The other is that the master chooses to remit the debt, in an act of undeserved generosity and forgiveness. This confirms that he stands for God, because that is the very definition of divine grace.
