Running Man

The messenger goes out because he is sent by one in authority, and he runs because the message is urgent. He does not stroll in pomp like one of the king's dignitaries, and he doesn't mete out his message to other runners in order to shirk off the duty from his own hands and feet.

The angels that are messengers do not need to run, because they are like lightning in obedience to God who they perpetually adore. But we as messengers are runners for a greater reason than that we are obeying authority: we run because of love - love personified.

The messenger of old who delayed would have faced severe penalties, the more severe in proportion to the urgency and gravity of the message being sent. This holds true, but the good news we bear, while not cancelling the gravity, outweighs the gravity in our being and bearing, as victims of mercy; the messenger of the Gospel is running because he himself has been set afire and has been set free. He cannot not run. The goodness and mercy of God is infinitely greater than all sin.

An urgency that has not the spirit of this joy - the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life - should be aligned with the work of those who tie up heavy burdens and lay them on the shoulders of others, making them twice the children of hell that they themselves are.

If running with the message is the context in which we realize our own salvation, then what is foundational is not a padding out, but a sweating out. The first connotation of running in this instance is not the motion of running per se, but what is shed in order to be able to run. Running is easier when you don't take an extra cloak; running is hard to near impossible when, for example, you drag an entire seamstress shop behind you so that you need two serving boys to take up the slack.

Each one of us is supposed to take up the position of the Crafty Steward. Perhaps the main thing to take from the parable of the Crafty Steward - or the Dishonest Steward - is Christ's bold underlining of the provisional nature of the steward's circumstances: this is our own circumstance.

He is thinking on his feet, and calling up the king's subjects in order to make a radical reduction in what they owe. Note that the steward's alleviation of his coming poverty is not by way of accumulating wealth, but is tied with alleviating other people's debts, even though he has, practically speaking, already lost his position, and has no more actual legal hand, or authoritative say, in the wealth of the king's subjects. You can't get any shrewder than that.

He is thinking about himself, and yet his worldly self-consideration has the animation of one fully recognizing the poverty of his situation in trying to alleviate it looking forward. He doesn't seek to repurpose other people's goods towards either himself or the king. Rather he repurposes his position, knowing he is as good as dead, in order to be received into people's homes once he gets fired.

The king praises the dishonest steward. The steward was bad to begin with, but now he has gone and with audacity used his position to gain favour, which creates a further loss to the wealth of the king, for he has called the subjects up to reduce their debts to the king - but the king praises him! What do you think Christ is doing there? Just adding a little detail to the story? Good grief!

If the shrewd dealings of a rascal such as the dishonest steward earns the praise of the very king who has called him up, then what of those who are not mere subjects having their debts reduced, nor stewards going to the dock, but subjects and stewards completely forgiven and washed clean in the dock of mercy and made the King's adopted children?

Christ here is showing us BOLDLY that the way we deal with our present circumstances - which is to say, the way we put ourselves into a position of divestment - not only reflects how we receive the eternal things of God, but is the way he has willed for us to receive and proliferate the kingdom of God. And Jesus consummated this way, outside of the parable, by his own practice on this earth, so the repurposing of our positions has an immense security in the One who has made himself the first and perfect model of that urgent divestment.

"To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." --John Henry Cardinal Newman

"For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light." --Luke 16:8

There is a kind of vast stupidity in trying to fortify your own foundations. Who are you to do such a thing? Can you who are human add one minute to your lifespan? God who is himself the foundation has gone down to the wood of the cross, which no one could have foreseen. In the eyes of those who were most edified, who were most secured, who were most knowledgeable and learned in tradition, the children of Abraham, this was the complete opposite of foundational.

And if that is the foundation of the Church, then what in the world could you possibly know for certain about where the Church needs to go? That is not a subject upon which you are to "edify" your salvation, let alone the salvation of others. And this is the problem of the absolutist-fundamentalist. The absolutist presumes to be faithful in the greater things first, foregoing the smaller things. Indeed, he actually thinks he can be faithful in the greater things by relativizing the smaller things. The absolutist is merely a relativist that relativizes the matter that Christ is forming.

If you look at the directionality of the phrasing in Christ's parable, everything points in the way of faithfulness in small things first leading to faithfulness in greater things - not the other way around. For there is no other way around.

But the result of the absolutist, in effect, is that he ends up turning the smaller things into monoliths as the means of manifesting his "faithfulness" in great things. In order to serve his delusion of being faithful in great things, he makes the small things insurmountable, blocking the way to the sanctuary. He ends up in the position of a micro-manager, which is the very image of the phony good steward, calling up the king's subjects and telling them in great minutia and gravitas how they are to go about managing their funds in order to reduce their debts to the king, as though the king was interested in nickle and diming.

He lays it upon others and allows none of the harrow to lay into his own self. He has no capacity for repurposing his position - for he has absolutized it. Not only does he distort his own mission; in doing so he distorts the nature of the King. And wonder of wonders, the absolutist even ends up distorting the seriousness of sin! He does so because he doesn't really believe in God's outgoing mercy, which would like to percolate and spring up in all kinds of small avenues; he thinks such things relativize the greater things of God. The channels for the springs are clogged.

And now they come to the point of stoning the Vicar of Christ, Pope Francis. Some of the more moderates of them try still to hedge around wholesale stoning by talking about respecting "the office of Peter" etc. and all kinds of weird talk that they never talked about before when Benedict was Pope, about how it's not just one Pope, etc. Any way they can to abstract the here-and-now present concrete personhood of that office as willed by Jesus Christ in one particular man who has particular things that Christ wants us to learn and know, and moreover to be in union with in order to learn and know - not just intellectually, but in the practical will, begun with a heart of flesh. Are you docile to the King's message because you love his messenger? Or are you contentious with the message because you have abstracted the King's messenger?