They know not what they do

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (Luke 16: 1-8) is a strange one involving the parable of a dishonest man who is sacked for being wasteful with his master’s possessions. He ends up being praised for the dishonest albeit clever way in which, before he leaves his job, he buys friends by reducing their debts to the master. It must be one of the oddest parables Jesus ever told. As the scholastics used to say, every comparison limps except in the point of comparison, and so we must look here closely not at the dishonesty or wastefulness but at the reason given for the master’s praise of his servant:

The master praised the dishonest steward for his astuteness. For the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light.

Possibly, it should not surprise us that the children of this world are astute. The darkness which St John tells us did not understand the light is, nevertheless, characterised often by its cunning.  But, is it not a surprise that the children of light fail to be astute, to be insightful? What is going on here?

After all, the children of light are supposed to be blessed with particular gifts such as wisdom, knowledge, and understanding – all charisms that are concerned in one way or another with intellectual insights. How is it that they can, therefore, lack astuteness? And, ultimately, what does this tell us about them?

In one way, perhaps this lack of astuteness flatters the children of light. If they lack practice in planning and plotting to get what they want, that is possibly because they are not in the habit of planning and plotting to get what they want. It is not that they lack the brains to do so, but rather that they are consciously committed – or at least they try to be – to a more benign agenda. Evil falls back only on its own powers, or else preys on the weakness of others. Good turns to God for aid. In a sense, the children of light are not astute because they do not – or, perhaps we should say, they ought not - aspire to the falsehoods of power and influence. Our help is in the name of the Lord who inspires us to the dependence of children in His regard. The children of light are not astute in the same way that children are not astute. They live by trust, not by treason. When they are at their best, their language is surrender, not selfishness – or it ought to be.

Yet, taken in another way, this lack of astuteness might be far from being a credit to the children of light. As we noted on Monday, our souls are a battleground for two competing loves, and even when our conscious minds are committed to the path of the children of light who love God, we still battle against the flesh, the world and the devil who only love themselves. In other words, even when we have received that kiss of peace that comes to us in the Father’s love, we still struggle against the child in us who remains the child of this world.

Now, this child in us is astute, for this child – our worse selves – not only has the astuteness of the children of this world but can dress up that cleverness in the robes of righteousness. And, if we do not know ourselves, if we are naïve enough to believe in our own justice - or not so much to believe in it as to fail to remember that our justice continues to be besieged even by the lingering effects of original sin – then, we are on the path of the Pharisees who were, as the saying goes, as pure as angels and as proud as devils. Do we need the astuteness of the children of this world, therefore? Only insofar as it may help us spot its traces in our own motives, our own poorly regulated unconscious and dissonant needs whose feet trample everywhere beneath the surface of our consciences.

We are, as we noted before, and remain a battleground.

 Video proboque meliora

Deteriora sequor.

I see and approve the better things / But the worse things I follow. Even the pagan poet Ovid knew of this war in us. How is it that the children of light can so easily lose sight of it? As St Paul tells the Romans:

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Are we then destined to be overcome both by our lack of astuteness as children of light and by our sinful weakness? Maybe we would be, were it not for the ingeniousness of love. For love, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the very essence and existence of our God, will find a way to help us seek the face of the Lord and yearn for it, even in the midst of our own self-betrayals. We are back again at those lines from St Augustine:

Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.

The folly of God is greater than the wisdom or astuteness of this world, says St Paul to the Corinthians. If we wish to remain children of light, we can only do so by living in the love of God in whose wisdom all the astuteness of this world comes to nothing. In this light, even the traces of worldly astuteness that remain in us can serve to help keep our feet on the ground and our hearts in heaven where they ought to be. For power belongs, in the end, not to astuteness but to love.