Friday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
When people have a clear goal, one they really want to achieve, they will discipline themselves to do what it takes to reach their goal We’ve had an example of this these last few months and weeks, culminating this week in the midterm elections.
Not only the candidates themselves, but everyone working in or for their campaign, gives up a lot to focus on one goal, winning on election day. Family life takes a back seat to giving speeches, shaking hands, holding listening sessions with voters. Sleep is sacrificed to accommodate demanding travel schedules. Meals are haphazard or skipped altogether as candidates and campaigners rush from one engagement to another.
There’s a good reason we call these campaigns “races,” because they demand the same kind of discipline and single-minded focus that a physical race does—like, say, the New York Marathon, also held this past week.
People do this because the goal is important to them, whether it’s the opportunity to serve or pursue specific policies, the prestige, the power, or maybe some combination of all those motives. They go all out.
Both Paul and Luke speak to us today about going all out for a goal. In Jesus’ parable in Luke the goal of the dishonest steward is sheer survival. In the society of the first century, people survived because they were part of a group—a family, a household, a tribe, a city-state. It was not a society that prized individualism. People left out of group life risked literal starvation.
The steward was not an employee, in the modern sense of the word. He was a member of the rich man’s household, one who held a position of high responsibility and prestige. As a member of the household he had a place to live, food to eat, work to do, and an identity in the broader society.
No wonder he panicked when the rich man fired him! He knew he had to take drastic action. So what he did, in effect, was to forego all of his expected income by telling the rich man’s debtors to rewrite their notes for only the amount owed to the rich man, less the amount the steward had added on as his commission. He hope that would buy him favor in their eyes, so that one of then would take him into his household.
The rich man, seeing this, commends his cleverness and pluck in taking this all-or-nothing gamble. If only, he laments (or maybe it’s Jesus lamenting), people who were starting to glimpse goals that go beyond the ordinary business of this world (“children of light”) could be equally clever and plucky when it comes to following the Way of Jesus!
Paul spells out what this Way entails: a single-minded focus on the things that last, not the things that will ultimately decay and die. Food is good, but after a few hours you have to eat again. Bodily pleasure is good, but fleeting.
So what does last? Fidelity. Love. Serving others and witnessing to them of the Way of Jesus. Yes, a life dedicated to these things will include suffering, but it is precisely through accepting the suffering and remaining committed to the Way that we get to our goal: to be with Jesus where he is and to share with him that risen life that never decays or dies.
It’s a discipline, but one that leads to a greater prize than winning an election or, in Paul’s image, the laurel wreath crown given to the winner of a first century foot race. Greater than landing a position in the household of a rich man (who will sooner or later die). It’s a life of joy and peace that will never die.
-Margot Merz