Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

JEREMIAH 8:18-9:1: The question concerning this text turns on the identity of the speaker: is it the prophet who is speaking, or is it God?

If it is the prophet, this is a continuation of Jeremiah's many laments. He hears the cry of the poor of the land. It is now the end of the summer. A drought has been upon them throughout this season that they depend upon for food and wine. The harvest has produced nothing good. The festival of booths is at hand, and the people have nothing to celebrate. Jeremiah is dismayed in behalf of the people. There seems to be no healing for their hurt. Even the balms of Gilead are unhelpful. Jeremiah wishes that his head was a spring of water. Then his tears would surely water the land, and the land would produce its increase, and the people would be saved.

On the other hand, it may be God who is speaking these words. God's joy is gone, grief is upon God, God's heart is sick. God hears the cry of his poor people, rising far and wide in the land. God is distressed that the people have provoked him with their images and foreign idols. But with the hurt of his poor people, God is hurt. God mourns, and dismay takes hold of him. How will the health of this people be restored? Oh, that I might weep night and day for the people, says the Lord, and from the fountain of tears the slain of my people might be restored.

Jeremiah could have said these words. He identifies fully with the hurt, pain, and sin of the people. But God could also have said these words. The God who heard his people cry in Egypt hears them cry again in the land that he had given them, and he wants to move to deliver them. The pain of the prophet and the pain of God coincide. God wants to relieve their hurt even more than Jeremiah does.

This is a picture of God we do not often hold in mind, except as we remember the exodus, and the exile, and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

PSALM 79:1-9: Nowhere else in the Old Testament are the effects of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Babylonians in 586 BC so graphically set out for us as they are here. "O God, the heathen have come into thy inheritance; they have defiled thy holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. They have given the bodies of thy servants to the birds of the air for food, the flesh of thy saints to the beasts of the earth. They have poured out their blood like water round about Jerusalem, and there was none to bury them. We have become a taunt to our neighbors, mocked and derided by those round about us (79:1-4)." Twenty-six hundred years after the event, we can still see the city smoking and in ruins, the bodies lying bloody and untended, the neighbors taunting, "Why did your God not help you?"

The prayer goes up from the people in exile in Babylon: "How long, O Lord." If you are angry, pour out your anger not on us but on the peoples that do not honor you, who do not call upon your name. They are the ones that have devoured your people Jacob and laid waste to his habitation. How long will you requite upon us the sins of our forefathers?

The people of the covenant constantly had to struggle with this problem of the power of God. Sometimes that power showed itself in anger, as it did in the destruction of Jerusalem. Sometimes it showed itself in compassion, as in words of the prophets and in the moments around the temple when the people were offered the forgiveness of God. This problem of vengeance and compassion came to resolution on the cross of Christ. There sin was punished once for all, the sins of denial and betrayal, of arrogance and violence. There also compassion was offered once for all. A prayer like that offered in the 79^th Psalm is only answered through the cries of Jesus on the cross: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!"

LUKE 16:1-13: This is an extremely difficult lection to interpret. What we seem to have here is an authentic story as told by Jesus, to which was added a number of "morals" meant to provide acceptable interpretations of it. Some of the interpretations were given by Jesus on other occasions in his ministry and were appended to this story in an attempt to make sense of it. Let's try to sort out the various parts of the story to see what meaning we can bring out of it.

The story, and it may actually have been one circulating at the time, goes like this. A certain rich man had a superintendent of his businesses who was accused of cheating him in various ways. The owner of the properties confronted the manager and demanded an accounting of his actions. The rich man told the manager that he would fire him if he found out that the charges of mismanagement were true.

The superintendent knew that the charges were true, and he tried to find the best way out of his predicament. He began to list his choices. "What will I do?" he mused. "I am not strong enough to dig ditches. I don't want to beg - that is too degrading. I have an idea," he said to himself, and then he went about putting it into effect.

First he summoned two of his master's debtors. "How much do you owe the master?" he asked the first. "One hundred jars of olive oil." "How much do you owe?" he asked the other, and the second man answered, "One hundred containers of wheat."

The interpretation of the story depends on what these figures mean. Had these men borrowed these exact commodities from the owner? Most likely they had not. What they had borrowed from him was money. Each had made an agreement to borrow from the rich man a specific amount of money and to pay him a definite amount of interest on the money. Such transactions would be perfectly legal in our day, and perfectly normal.

But they were neither normal nor legal in Jesus' day. Taking interest on money lent to another was considered usury, and usury was forbidden under Jewish law. Deuteronomy 23:19-20 stated the case plainly: "You may not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, . . . or on anything that is lent." The rabbis, however, putting their best casuistry to work, had come up with a method by which the law could be overcome and interest could be paid. The principal of the loan plus the interest could be calculated and then applied to a repayment that was figured not in terms of money but in terms of some commodity. The following chart will show what I mean:

Principal of loan + Interest on loan=Commodity Equivalent

Contract A 500 denarii 500 denarii = 100 jars of oil

Contract B 2000 denarii 500 denarii = 100 containers of wheat

These loans were expensive to the ones who had incurred them. The interest paid on wheat often came to 25%, and the interest on olive oil was as high as 100%. This accounted for the striking disparity in the percentage of debt forgiven. "One hundred jars of olive oil" was the equivalent of nine hundred gallons of olive oil, and the total cost of nine hundred gallons of olive oil was about 1,000 denarii. "One hundred containers of wheat" came to anywhere from 650 to 1200 bushels of wheat, roughly 2,500 denarii, and the second borrower was to repay the lender an amount equal to that. By receiving repayment of "100 jars of oil" from one debtor and "100 containers of wheat" from the other, the man who made the loan would receive both principal and interest, and he would avoid the questions that might be asked about his taking the illegal interest.

The steward acted on the fact that the loans were illegal. Making his quick calculations, the steward said to the man who owed 100 jars of olive oil,"Rewrite your bill so that you owe on only fifty jars." To the other he said, "Rewrite your bill so that you owe for only eighty containers of wheat." The discounts are curiously different --50% on one, 20% on another -- but since the value of olive-oil and of wheat are different, the reductions on the bills were about the same. J. A. T. Robinson (Roots of a Radical 117) figured the interest to come to about 500 denarii on each bill. This is worth five hundred days' labor to the average worker in Palestine, an ample sum indeed. The rich man and his debtors were dealing in large commercial enterprises when they made their original arrangements with each other.

Why the steward chose these particular discounts is quite apparent. This discount of 500 denarii on each bill represented, as my chart shows, the amount of interest to be paid. By taking this action, the steward accomplished a number of important things. He brought the bills to be paid back within the rules of Jewish law: no interest was actually charged on either loan, and this made the steward look good in the eyes of the public. In addition, he had cleared his master of these illegal contracts which were drawn up in his name, and this made the master look good. The steward had also made friends of the two debtors, so, as he had said to himself, he would be welcomed into their homes when he was without a job. No wonder the master congratulated him for what he had done. In a crisis the manager had acted quickly, cleverly, and resolutely. He had had the principal of the loans repaid in such a way that his master did not lose his money, and he had enhanced his own previously tarnished public reputation. Jesus drew his own conclusion to the story: "The children of this generation," said Jesus, "are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light." In other words, said Jesus, in the face of his crisis, this man took appropriate action. Looking at his followers, he then asked, "In the light of the crisis you are about to face as I move toward Jerusalem and death, are you doing the same?"

It is clear by what follows in the gospel that later followers of Jesus had great trouble squaring the overly clever actions of this steward with the moral standards of the Gospel of Christ. So by the time Luke narrated the story in his gospel, they had added to this story a number of interpretations that they thought helped them deal with the problem. Reading them, as C. H. Dodd said (Parables of the Kingdom 30), "We can almost see here notes for a number of separate sermons on the parable as text."

"Make friends with dishonest wealth (16:9)" was one interpretation quickly attached to the story. This interpretation indicates that the one commendable thing that this steward had done was to give aid to those caught in the web of debt. Luke believed that all money has some taint about it and that the only redeeming feature of its possession is to use it for righteous purposes. Anyone who uses even dishonest wealth in this way has done a good work and will find room for himself in the mansions of heaven. As John Wesley said: "Gain all you can; save all you can; give all you can."

"He that is dishonest in a little will be dishonest in much, and vice versa," is the interpretation given in 16:10-12. The unjust steward could not get into heaven because he had failed to be faithful over the little things and so could not be entrusted with the goods of the world hereafter. But if he had been faithful in the little things, he could have been trusted with the life eternal.

Lastly we read, 16:13: "No man can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and mammon." Shouldn't this man, horrible example though he is, serve God rather than wealth, his own or his master's? You have to make a choice, said Luke. You cannot serve both God and the accumulation of your own money.

FIRST TIMOTHY 2:1-7: The key to this passage is the creedal statement that comes near the end of it: "There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
who gave himself as a ransom for all." This creed holds together matters that the second generation church who wrote the Pastoral Epistles held dear.

1) God is one. Jewish people had said this phrase daily for centuries when they quoted the Shema that came from the Book of Deuteronomy: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD;
and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." The people in this church happily recited that sentiment.

2) "There is also one mediator between God and humanity." The Greek word is not aner, an individual man, but anthropos, the word for humanity as a whole. Jesus is called "the mediator between God and humankind," the one who brings the will of God to human beings and who brings the petitions of God's people to God.

3) The mediator is called "the man Christ Jesus." There seems no sense of divinity in this word. For this church he is still "the man." Again, however, the word for "the man Christ Jesus" is "anthropos" and not "aner." This portrays Jesus as "the representative man," the summation of humankind, the man who in himself is everything that God wants humans to be.

4) He also "who gave himself as a ransom for all." This accords perfectly with the statement in 2:4 about God the Savior "who desires all humanity, all men and women, to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." In Greek practice "ransom" refers to the act of freeing a slave. For the slave to be freed, he would go to a temple, pay to the priests a designated amount of money, and then he would have his name inscribed on the wall of the temple designating him a free man. "Ransom" also had to do with the Hebrew practice of a member of the family paying off a debt to buy a piece of family property, as Jeremiah did for his cousin, or to purchase the freedom of a family member who had been enslaved over a debt. Boaz did this for Ruth. "Jesus Christ did this for all of us," says this letter. It seems to point to an understanding on the part of those who recited this creed that Jesus on his cross had given himself for everyone, no distinctions, no questions asked.

Behind this creed is a desire for "a quiet and peaceable life." Christians may not have had much of an opportunity for this kind of life. They were involved in many issues with the Roman government, with the pagan priesthood, and with the Jewish authorities, to say nothing of the suspicions that may have been placed upon them by co-workers and neighbors who could not understand the ways of this peculiar group of people. After the anguish of the previous decades, "a quiet and peaceable life" seemed a worthy goal, indeed.

But it was not going to be a life apart from the issues and tumults of the times. Qumran had withdrawn into its own cozy little corner of the world, down by the Dead Sea. Mystery cults from Egypt and the east met in secret societies with clandestine passwords and occult rituals. This was not the life that Christians saw for themselves. They intended to pray for all people, and especially for kings and all who are in high positions. Their faith was not to be practiced in some obscure alley way. Their faith brought them into the public square, where their prayers would be for a peaceable and quiet life, godly and respectable in every way. But if that was not to be their lot, they would continue to practice their faith before the world and to bring upon themselves whatever it was that the world would give them. The Jesus Christ who gave his life as a ransom for many had received scandalous treatment. If necessary, the church gathered in his name was ready to receive the same.