25th Sunday: Sacrifice and the Future

Today's parable is about the Dishonest Steward. Jesus, surprisingly, links dishonesty with prudence under the circumstances. No, dishonesty is not the path to heaven. What Jesus is admiring is the Dishonest Steward's capacity for thinking about the future. The Old Testament understanding of the human predicament is rooted in the analysis of human failure in the story of Adam and Eve and how that failure was visited on succeeding generations. When the first couple ate the fruit, they were not thinking about the future consequences of their action. When they fell, God told both of them what was in store for them as a consequence. Eve was told

“To the woman he said: I will intensify your toil in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Gen. 3:16

 Adam would have to till the ground and his crop would be thorns and thistles.

Cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you shall eat its yield all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you, and you shall eat the grass of the field. By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Gen. 3:17-19

Our present actions have future consequences. Sacrifice in the Solomon’s Temple was the ritual acting out of a future that could be attained by giving up something in the present.

Sacrifice is like work. The work of childbearing or farming imposes sacrifices of pain, labor and sweat in order to yield a family and harvest to sustain that family in the future. In the Temple, the family would sacrifice first fruits or a choice animal to secure a future with God.  Sacrifice means “that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present.” [i] If you recall, sacrifice is introduced in Genesis immediately following Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden to their lives of childbearing and labor. Cain and Abel worked, farming and herding. Both sacrificed to God. Do you remember how that worked out? The prophet Amos is very concerned about the link between ethics and Temple sacrifice. Both had future consequences for Israel. 
 
Amos and Sacrifice
The Prophet Amos lived 800 years before Christ. For Amos, the rituals of the Temple were not a substitute for an ethical life; you could not separate how you worked and raised your family from how you sacrificed. God was worshipped in righteousness and only the prayers of the righteous were heard by God. What he reviled in the northern kingdom of Israel was the subjugation of religion to the profit motive. Amos wrote about pursuing expediency in profit by cheating the ritual of sacrifice:

Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land! "When will the new moon be over," you ask, "that we may sell our grain, and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat? We will diminish the ephah ( a unit of measurement), add to the shekel ( currency), and fix our scales for cheating! We will buy the lowly for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!" The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Never will I forget a thing they have done!” Am. 8:4-7

Amos complained that the people of Israel couldn’t wait to get the Temple sacrifice out of the way in order to cheat and to make money. When they returned to their work, they rigged the scales, sold bad produce and abused those most in need. The poor always have less options than the well-off. For Amos, 2,800 years ago, the ethical and the religious sacrifice were intricately connected.
 
Expediency and delayed gratification
Expediency is, “the quality of being convenient and practical despite possibly being improper or immoral; convenience” Sacrifice is the human experience of delaying gratification in order to obtain something better in the future. Expediency is sacrificing the future for present advantage. A man and woman might give up their freedom from responsibilities of family in order to work and to build a family of well-adjusted children and grand-children for the future. In either action, they have to make a sacrifice of their youth to build a life that might come to fruition when they are later years. The whole logic of sacrifice in the Temple and in the experience of life is based on an understanding of life contrary to the human inclination to expediency.
 
Reality is structured by God as something that can be affected by our present sacrifices. Our willingness to sacrifice is what forms who we are in the future. If we only act out of expediency, we will be one kind of person. If you grab what we want, abuse our body, lie, cheat and steal, the future you will look very different from who your mom and dad hoped you might be. On the other hand, to restrain yourself and to make sacrifice of the present opens the future to much better possibilities. People living on the street are rarely the result of decades of good-decision making. We make sacrifices now in hopes of a better future. Sure, there are no guarantees about health and wealth, but a person that makes prudent use of their life will most likely be someone who has friends, family and a good conscience at the end of life and in the world to come.
 
Jesus and the Dishonest Steward
So, what is going on in Jesus’ story of the dishonest steward? Last week we had the parable of the prodigal son who spent his father’s money lavishly and lived to regret it. Today, we have the prodigal steward who stole from his master to buy favor with his master’s debtors and lived to enjoy it. The son used his father’s wealth and the steward used his master wealth. The son used his father’s wealth on wild living that had no future potential. The dishonest steward used his master’s wealth to secure a better future when he knew he was going to be fired. Get the connection! Both are using somebody else’s wealth. One used wealth without regard for the future, the other used it to take care of his future. That is the point; sacrifice is essential to a good life.
 
Adam and Eve would not delay gratification. Cain’s frustration lead to a darkened life because he could not make the changes necessary to have his sacrifice accepted by God. Sacrifice, something good for something better, is at the heart of the Gospel. With work and family, we have hopes that our sacrifices will secure a reasonable old age and family to share it with. The future Christ calls us to prepare for extends beyond old age and requires the sacrifice occasioned by faith. With Christ, we use present wealth with the idea of becoming who God made us to be in heaven. It is through faith, work, child-bearing and sacrifice that the future is secured both here and the world to come. The world to come is vouchsafed by God in a way that our future in this world cannot be. Our hopes for the future determine our choices in the present.