Lk16v1-2 'Wasting his master's money.' These first two lines of this strange parable are like a punch in the gut. The sins of waste and complacency are, for me, two of the most prevalent. Folks speculated this weekend that I am an Enneagram Type 9 which, I don't know wholly how to engage or whether this is so, but it certainly doesn't seem far wrong that complacency might be my greatest spiritual temptation. Maybe we all suffer slightly different proclivities in our core weaknesses, but this sin is surely not far from most of us in this culture in some form, steeped as we are in an alienation from the consequences of waste, throw-away culture and the religion of comfort. This verse seems apt for this week and this season, I have been struggling with motivation and efficiency this week, and having taken on more work for the coming year, there is now an external demand that my time be spent intentionally. I am generally far more responsive to external motivation than internal motivation. Such as me, we love a deadline, I am best brought to a realisation of my wasteful ways - whether time, energy or resources - when someone from the outside speaks, as the master does here - "give a complete account." And, as a mercy, God does say this. If God exists, there is always an outside. I cannot say that Ps36v1-2 I am unseen. With God, the hard edges of reality cannot be ignored, all is laid open to light and saturated with meaning. Each hour and choice has significance, and certain daily choices and habits are shown up as the wasteful ways that they are. I pray for our culture, that a spiritual awakening to the connection between waste and it's consequences would shape an understanding and practice of ultimate reality, and I pray for myself in this season, that I might lean into the never-complacent spirit of God, finding a joy in excellent and creative stewardship of all that I touch.
Lk16v3-4 💸 Life and commerce are transacted with payment terms, all of life is a supply chain, everything is debt delayed. We operate on the basis of working capital loaned against collateralised accounts receivable. The world is on loan to us, and we are its middle managers. Dear God, the cheque is in the post. Oh rly?
📉 This is how I'm currently reading the parable of the dishonest manager - as a paean to the shrewd true truth of a world without usury. SB imagines a world without interest. Everyone wins. The workers get a discount, the managers get commended, and the master gets the glory. But we don't do this. The allure of interest, the getting-money-for-nothing-except-administrating-the-cost-of-financing, is pervasive, is rampant, is the status quo of our hegemonic economic system, run throughout by degrees of unjust stewards. And it has no self-limiting constraint. And the cost of this unstable ponzi scheme is born most acutely by the voiceless wonga'd payday loan classes.
👨💼 "I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg." Such am I, neither properly strong enough for combat in the commercial world nor properly weak enough to inspire real pity in the charitable world. Such are we all. Therein lies the motive force for the hedging and posturing which establishes the managerial class. And this managerial class of middle men recurs, as a pitable penpushing set in a dire state, manifesting as a trope to avoid, a clear diagram of systemic sin, within the universe Jesus paints. From the hired hands of Jn10v12, to the unforgiving debtor of Mt18v28, to Jesus' tirade against the administrative sins of weights tied Mt23v4 and weights tithed Mt23v23, to a crystalised portrait in Zaccheus, the administrative cheat whose physical stature is also noted.
📑 The world is on loan to us, and we are its middle managers. Everyone owes God something, and we the religious mediators manage those debts with interest. Wherever I'm holding resentment for another's sin committed-against-me-and-against-God, I'm an older brother holding a debt portfolio for the interest. Nobody wins. Nobody has the right to charge interest. If God came to audit the books of my marriage, would he find I was running it as a payday loan scheme, an incorrigible insurance scheme of grudges and grievances? Probably. Nobody wins.
Lk16v5-6 The servant fears for his life and well-being and something of his tacit intelligence (previously unused because smothered in comfort) rises to the surface due to his danger. This scene from Minority Report has stayed with me for a long time - the thought that we all have a deep-down instinct for our own preservation, that when we get into a threatening situation we find that we are capable of being both more creative and more destructive than we ever thought possible. Our bodies are capable of much more than we imagine, so are our minds, our emotions, our co-ordination, our skills. Jesus, using the master, praises the way intelligence is released in the servant, his newly discovered savviness and higher-functioning, brought about by his alertness to danger. Ultimately though, Jesus is advocating this kind of intelligence, perceptiveness and skill for the sake of v9 kingdom generosity rather than self-preservation. What if this were possible? What if our union to Christ were so fully realised that our deepest instinct were no longer survival but love? But that this love brought out a comparable - even a stronger - alertness, motivation and shrewd action in the world? What if it were possible that I could hum attentively and alertly to the physical, relational and spiritual well-being of others such that I was constantly provoked to excellent practical, emotional and spiritual intelligence, well co-ordinated and purposeful? Just as resurrection offers reverse entropy, it also offers reverse survival instinct: love.
Lk16v7-8 📈📉 Jerram Barrs adds to the mix that archeaology records olive oil could be charged at 100% interest, and wheat at 20%, which seems to add credibility to idea that it is illegitimate interest which is being subtracted from a total that had been added to by the dishonest manager.
🏆 "The master commended the .. manager" What for? A cashflow windfall by the faster payment of these discounted debts? The PR coup fashioning the master as magnanimous amongst his tenants? Simply for the shrewdness of being shrewd, as in-itself commendable?
🦊 Be shrewd. Be cunning. Look out for yourself, in the truest biggest way. Christian hedonism pursues it's own joy relentlessly. You should be so extremist. You should be so shrewdly self-interested. It is more-blessed to give, so seek to be more more-blessed, develop an addiction to the heady rush of giving. Then, everyone wins.
Lk16v9-10 Trying to grapple with this confusing set of statements. At first blush this seems like a confused mixed metaphor. Who are the "friends" that Jesus is exhorting us to make with worldly wealth? In the story it would seem that these friends are people in the world who we are (to transpose the story) to serve in generous ways, using the wealth of God. But here we are to make friends so that we are welcomed into eternity...which becomes an exhausting works-righteousness if read in the wrong way. Are the friends...God? Is this verse a references to our friendship with the Holy Trinity, which is the substance and guarantee of our life eternal? Could it be that what looks like a mixed metaphor is or includes a story working at a number of different levels instead? Concentric circles of meaning nestled within each other? If so, what does the story of the shrewd manager teach us about salvific friendship with God as well as about the nature of generosity as the stuff of eternity?
I have been wondering the last few days that this story is also a picture of a conversion, as well as a story about generosity and stewardship. Just as we often point to the worship of idols to try to demonstrate the quality and structure of worship, and to constrast it to the worship of the true God, so too I think this story is a picture of a conversion, teaching us something about the nature of conversion, and also giving us a contrast case by which we can compare total and true forms of conversion with partial and compromised forms.
The manager has a 'conversion' in v3-4, conversion in the technical sense: "the process of changing or causing something to change from one form to another". In a moment, he finds himself inhabiting a different landscape, a different paradigm, he is forced to think about his life as a whole, differently. the 'affordances' available to him (as we'd say in Phenomenology) are transformed. Not only this, but he, the manager, is changed into something different. He starts to act as the master, taking on to himself the authority of one 'for whom all things were made' (Col1v16). This is an ontological change, if you will, a becoming one with the master, assuming his possessions and authority. To be united with Christ is such a transfigured state - transforming oneself and one's relationship to the stuff of the world entirely. It is a transfiguration rather than an ideology. This is why, in this new ontological state, v10 small things will be transfigured as much as big things. This is because to be in Christ transforms everything.
It is because we are united to Christ that we can become friends with God. God loves us wherever we are and however we respond to Christ, but as we accept the transformation that union of Christ brings, we are raised to friendship with God, philia, a state in which parties recognise something attractive in one another, respect each other and enjoy each other, as well as offering charity agape, no matter what. In this story the manager does also make a friend of the master as well as the debtors - the manager sees, enjoys and respects the moves that emerge from the servant's converted state, and the way that the servant assumes the authority of the master. In union with Christ, converted to a new way of being, we are welcomed into friendship with the Father, welcomed into heavenly dwellings. (And this way of being will involve a generosity, this is the other prong of the story).
But note that I think there is also a comparison here. Why on earth would Jesus use a story about dishonesty to illustrate conversion? Is it to demonstrate differences between good and bad forms of conversion? This servant's conversion is based on fear, and as noted previously - fear will do it - fear will unmake your world and force you to reconsider things differently. Fear is a furnace forging new ways of being in the world. But fear is not a good basis for true and total conversion. Fear does not have the purity of love. Fear is corrupt and weak and less-than love. A conversion based on fear is liable to lead to an inconsistent way of being, a transfiguration that is unsure of itself, that has to pretend a bit because it is not safe in the world, it cannot rest in this new identity but must stay on the alert and be prepared to change again at signs of fresh danger. As such, a fault line runs through this kind of conversion, a nothingness in its being. A fearful conversion begets forms of dishonesty, forms of compartmentalisation, forms of pretense. This is structurally so. Compare this to conversion grounded in love. Love is pure all the way through, a transformed love sprung from the revelation that what one has converted to is good and substantial and real and eternal and faithful begets a converted state that has integrity, structurally speaking. Conversion on the basis of love begets a way of being that is honest, because it has nothing to fear and therefore no need to lie or pretend. Oh, dear hearts, let's be fully converted, let us accept the full transformation that is on offer when we recognise that we are in Christ. Let us inhabit this new world because we are sure we are loved, rather than because we are afraid.
Lk16v11-12 Stealing SPJ's verse by way of establishing what "being faithful" is, in this context, with money.
(v9) Make friends, they will receive you in eternity. Make friends, game the system, smuggle your wealth through the veil of death. Invest in people relentlessly.
(v9) Use unrighteous wealth. All money is dirty money, it is all Caesar's, it is all corrupt inflated bribes traded for ransoms, abstracted distractions distorting innate value through exponentially coercive power. Redeem it. Launder it. Through people. There's no currency or system of valuation that can't be flipped, subverted and sanctified
(v9) Not if but when it fails. There's no hedging, no gambling, no speculating, no fingers crossed. Winter _is_ coming. The worst case scenario is the case. The bottom will fall out.
“They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless?” - @rushkoff
When it fails.. who you gonna call? Be that who. Be the kind of person that you would call in that disaster. Demonstrate you are that kind of person. Rehearse being that person. Even now. While we are but playing with monopoly money. When the shit hits the fan, after "the great event..", the men are sorted from the boys, "the unrighteous wealth" is burnt up, and you can only trade in "the true riches" and when you are no longer trading future options in "that which is another's" you will be responsible "that which is your own" the actual, the real, the ready to hand, the eternal commodities, that which you banked in your army wealth mules. Truly, I am learning this from R. Go all in.
Lk16v13-14 This again has the surface feel of Jesus just free-associating about money, throwing out some general good spiritual tips on how to comport yourself towards wealth. And these are very soundbite-able, perhaps to no harm - I think many of Jesus' statements can be read in an aphoristic fashion, containing depths within them as little proverbs that have the power to upheave and overhaul a whole way of life. But I also think that this statement placed here at the end of this parable makes a kind of sense if read through this lens of thinking about a conversion, as I have been. A conversion is a complete transformation. You cannot be partly 'in' Christ. We fail to recognise our total metaphysical and spiritual re-orientation when we try to 'convert' based on fear, and we also fail to recognise the totality of the thing when we try to retain previous desires on an equal footing to the desire for God. True conversion sees all desires submitted to the desire for God, and thus their authority becomes submitted to the authority of God. The servant's conversion in this passage is marked by a re-orientation to the work that needed doing in his life, but not a re-alignment of his fundamental desires (safety and comfort) or a re-calibration of his submission to external authority (to the master). "Purity of heart is to will one thing" says Kierkegaard - this is the Eph4v4-6 One Thing that characterises Being In Christ. May we follow the Spirit such that we might be All In.
Lk16v15-16 ❔ What was? What is? What happened? What now?
<strainedmetaphor>
👩💻🍴 Is the Kingdom of God a hardfork in the Law's protocol, an executable code injection to the Law's system shell? No. The Law was and is. The script is untouched (v17) the semantics are identical, the logic remains, but the output data is different.
So, the Kingdom of God is. It has happened and is happening. And now, that which was "exalted" is an "abomination" [and vice versa 1Co1v23] ~ The same software is running on new hardware: "your hearts" and these new hearts of flesh Ez36v26 are receptive to new input data.
💞 Thusly, does v16 speak of "force" for it is a heart transplant that is in view here, for it is no minor upgrade, no mere tweak to the wiring or additional RAM. The old has gone, fam.
</strainedmetaphor>
🌅 I was speak to C about the what-was-&-what-is of the Christ event. It happened in 33AD, everything changed. It happened aged 20-something in a London season, everything changed. It happened this morning at a quarter to seven. New every morning. We are being perpetually resurrected. Perpetually renewed. And it is no small force being engaged to transform you.
Lk16v17-18 These 'additional teachings' feel like they're thrown together in an ad hoc and somewhat hilarious way. Did Luke just run out of steam? Where these the notes at the end of his hastily scribbled minutes that he remembered were important but couldn't really remember the whole conversation so shoved in a few quick addendums? Read out loud the seeming non-sequiter slide in these two verses from the cosmic to the domestic, the lyrical use of absolutes, opposites and analogies mixed with chiasmic repetition and list-like codification, strikes with all the beauty and absurdity of a JP poem. There's a kind of shimmering elusive madness, which is kind of frustrating but also evocative of the something that is not nothing at the heart of the universe. There is the infinite meaning burning at the horizon of comprehension that cannot be contained by language. So the little flourishes and juxtaposings and confoundings-of-and-with words and metaphors, gestures at unsayable deep truths about marriage, morals and metaphysics. Let's let the words sink in like a poem, let these words read us.
Lk16v19-20 There is something mundane, even nothingy about this portrait which Jesus begins to paint. There are rich people, there are poor people. Here is a description of the perennial 1%, the Marie Antoinettes that recur in the world and the Marie Antoinette which recurs in my own heart. The trope of callous wealth’s indifference to abject destitution. What a pity.
🌉 I'm tentatively working on a theology of SB, I have been trying to find bridges in the Bible, even proto/pseudo/analogous bridges in the Bible. I can’t find that there is one. Any suggestions welcome. The Nav’s Bridge To Life, is in fact apocryphal. John has us crossing from death to life Jn5v24, and obvs Moses needs no bridge over the Red Sea Ex14v21, and Jesus needs no bridge over Galilee Mt14v25.. The bridginess of a bridge, what is it?
👴🏻 I posit, that Jesus suggests a Heideggerian bridge by its very absence, where such a bridge would exquisitely have gathered to itself, in its own way, earth and sky, divinities and mortals.
But. Without a bridge, there is the chasm.
The obvious chasm is in view here:
📉📈 Wealth \\// Poverty - with wealth's purple robes and poverty's open wounds rendering as precipitous the Gini coefficient. The poverty is utter, Lazarus is all ulcerated ruin, a crumpled form of the infinitely pitiable, passive, so much so that it cannot lift itself to ward off the dogs. A human being on the brink on unbeing. Someone should do something.
👥 This weath-poverty chasm displays my own infinitely narrow self-understanding teetering unbridged to unknowable Others, generationally and economically. Is there anyone out there, in the world that is not-me? What will shatter my myopia? How can I see and really see the legion Lazari obscured otherwise by this hedge-funded and border-moated being I have made myself on every side?
The other chasm in view:
⚰ Life \\// Death - your life now and the death you will die, and which you are living constantly in sight of. What is it to look ahead to the unbridgeable chasm looming (v22)? What will it be to look back across the looming chasm, to those left behind after our own death (v28), what will we wish to have conveyed to them while we were yet on their bank of the ravine? What is it to look backward, towards those who have already died, who speak from beyond their grave, if we would listen (v29-30) ⏱ This, our narrow slice of eternal present sheers away on all sides, occasionalistically. Is any momentary moment bridged consequentially to another? If we are not adrift in uncaused unceasing oblivion, then everything is weighty, and all time matters, and this is urgent.
✝ Jesus is the bridge. The bridge unnamed in the bible.
👇 The time to cross the bridge is now.
Lk16v21-22 I have been stuck on these verses for days. Primarily they bring to the surface my own privilege, my inconsistent, hypocritical and closed-hearted ways of engaging those nearby who are less privileged, particularly the street homeless. It doesn't help to belly-ache, and we do look to small, sustainable ways of being the Kingdom even to just one or two in our orbit who struggle with material poverty. But still, it is hard not to flail and to want to hide at Jesus' words. As so often, it is scripture itself that breaks me out of wordlessness. I pray Ps72 for myself, a prayer for the wealthy, a prayer for the powerful - that you would 'endow me with your justice'...that I may 'be like rain falling on a mown field'. Teach me by your love how to consistently, sustainably, sacrificially and personally 'take pity on the weak and the needy...for precious is their blood in [my] sight.' This is your heart God. Help me to mean this prayer.
Lk16v23-24 ⛑ We believe in life before death. 🧖♂🌋 And, as such, we are in Heaven and in Hell now. Eternity is a continuum. We are immortal beings, perpetual beings, always able to access our eschaton imaginatively, and thus meaningfully and thus viscerally. We, daily, are living our last day. And on every such day the anguish of wealth's torment is a true truth.
💰🔥 Wealth-as-hell is an instructive lesson in the nature of both hell and the nature of money.
🔥 Not all fire is hell (see fire as pain's refining power: 1Pt1v7 Is48v10 Pr17v3..)
💰 Not all money is wealth (see money as a commons, a measure of faithfulness, a gratuitous token Ac4v32 Lk12v48 Mt10v8..)
💰🔥 But all wealth is hell. All wealth is unrighteous wealth. On this, to avoid semantic circularity, it would be valuable to be precise. I define "Wealth" pejoratively, intentionally; being yet conscious that this carves difficulty into the resting state of many innocuous idioms, and that it sets up its own conundrums of definition.
💰😮 I define "Wealth" pejoratively. "Wealth" happens instantly in the identity of the holder when stewardship becomes ownership. Wealth is never passive, you are always responsible for your self-identity.
⛪🤑 I would characterise the church as being stern on "greed" and disparaging of the "love of money" but permissive of "Wealth" and it is satisfied with this distinction. By this dichotomy, so-called-righteous-wealth and inherited-wealth and appreciated-assets-in-the-lottery-of-London's-land-prices are all sanitised in a fog of language under a banner of that-which-is-not-greed-per-se. This "Wealth" qua wealth-which-is-merely-not-active-greed has no equipment to make a distinction between revenue and profit or between capital and turnover, a word of such crippling opacity is a huge hinderance to holiness. Mere "Wealth" is a linguistic coup by the enemy. Beware. Wealth is deceitful, she is no inert matter. Wealth has branded herself as a propitious accident, as if wealth-just-happens-sometimes, and wealth-is-a-blessing, maybe even wealth-is-an-opportunity-to-use-money-for-the-Kingdom-...-if-you-get-round-to-it.
💰😳 Beware. That which is termed "Wealth" honorifically, or even attempted to be nebulously neutral, is in fact a pitiable predicament, a grave responsibility to have to use an inconvenient amount of money wisely lest is rapidly destroy you and all your relationships. Beware, all possessions, if they are not understood to be a harrowing responsibility will be, by omission, insinuated as an unrestricted-funds all-you-can-eat blessing.
💰🤒 I define "wealth" pejoratively, as an affliction. Within the cosmic gift economy, there is no innocent wealth. If your ingoings don't match your outgoings you have embezzled that which you were tasked with stewarding. You are getting high on your own supply.
💰 And the wealthy know this. Throughout Corporate Social Responsibility's long history, from Victorian philanthropic visitors to the GapYah grand tourers broadcasting slum porn to insta. The wealthy give-something-back because they know it was stolen. The wealthy are definitely not still Jenny-from-the-Block. The wealthy protest too much. I protest too much. The wealthy's gagged subconscious and seared conscience and crippled inner child know they are in hell. *Who will save them?*
💰 The wealthy are by definition those who have not learnt the secret to "facing plenty and abundance." (Ph4v12) Who will save them?
Lk16v25-26 Like the puffed up sense of being honourable in another's sight Mt6v2, the rewards of material comfort are immediate, addictive and ultimately empty. Russell Brand articulates this on sex, drugs, fame and stuff A prayer for today, that I may be baseline, disabused of the notion that comfort or honour or any other idol will do. May my hungry heart, in recognising it's constant longing, so quickly covered over by other things, find itself in the Father's house, and no other place, stumbling, running, and giving up every other thing.
Lk16v27-28
Go tell it to my frat house.
"Hell is hot. Eternity is a long time."
No, lieutenant, your men are already dead.
Dear reader, you are the Ghost of Christmas Present.
You are Moses, you are the Prophets.
Who is your brother? What is your now?
Lk16v29-30
it's all election and all reception
with every room for self-deception
against the good, my insurrection
surrender then to resurrection
Lk16v31
If you are closed to the past, you are closed to the present.
If you are inured to the law and the prophets past, that same inurement inoculates you from any surprise in the present.
If you resist the supernature inherent in the pure rigour of the law, if that was insufficient to prompt or provoke you heart to right stewardship of wealth, you will not be moved by any re-rendering of the law today to your dulled sensitivities.
If you are untouched by the supernature of the dazzling adventure of the prophets, if the obviously God-addled arch of prophetic history has not piqued your curiousity, if with disbelief and disinterest you consider those faithful who have gone before, then there is nothing which can alter your prophetic imagination in the now.
If you doubt history, you turn the tap off of knowledge and you immobilise perception, you cut yourself off from the real.
We exist in a temporal continuity as contingent knowers. Signs that were, are.
Believing is a miracle which God does. Opened eyes-of-heart, softened hearts-of-stone, and the will to want it. God does that. For your past and present. And for theirs. Therefore pray.
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