Spiritual Inspiration, Temporal Perspiration
Today’s Gospel reading according to Luke makes one glad to be a Catholic. For in understanding the Word of God, Catholicism insists on using both the nearly 2000 year old sacred teaching tradition of the Church AND the words of Scripture. The sacred teaching tradition of the Church allows us to support advanced historical research, knowledge of languages and the effects of enculturation in Sacred Scripture to help us understand what it being said. Without that tradition, our Gospel reading would seem to present Jesus as supporting greed and dishonesty in the way people should treat each other.
It is important to remember that in Palestine at the time of Jesus, there were many absentee landlords. There was a Roman occupation, and many non-Jews who were Roman citizens owned land not just in Palestine but also in other places throughout the Roman Empire. So they delegated the day-to-day operations of landholding and land production to others, including slaves who had distinguished themselves in one way or another.
In the Roman Empire, there was no real tradition of what we would call rule of law. While there were hierarchies of authority, the enforcement of laws was a function of who could extract the most out of others, who could threaten and extort others, who could cheat others. This was the best way of avoiding or lessening one’s own obligation to people higher up the authority structure.
It is this corruption, this greed that Jesus addresses today. And far from endorsing it, he uses his human nature, employing wit and sarcasm to demonstrate the fundamental immorality of the Roman system, and for that matter the Jewish power structure that supported it. He wants to make sure his audience understands that in a system run by greed and corruption, blaming only a corrupt slave for the consequences of a system of greed and corruption from top to bottom is to attack a symptom rather than suggest a cure.
Nor is Jesus singling out the Roman system. His audience would have known a long tradition in Mosaic teaching and religious practice, exemplified by our first reading from the prophet Amos that prohibits greed, cheating and corruption in the way Jews were to teach each other. Such actions violated the covenant between God and man. Old Testament Jewish prophets and teachers repeatedly warned such actions would not be without implications for the decline and decay of the Jewish nation.
But before we are too critical of Roman and Jewish greed and corruption, our own society would do well collectively to take a good look in the mirror. Scandals like those at Enron, Arthur Andersen, and Merrill Lynch demonstrate the culture of corporate excess, greed, conflict of interest, and fraud that has taken hold in the United States. Thousands of workers have lost their jobs and pensions from such scandals and a climate of greed permeates our economic and political system. Federal budgets pay for tax cuts for millionaires with budget cuts in education, medical care, and child and health care.
In terms of real income, the middle class in the last thirty years is standing still, and it would be worse were it not for the fact that a second family earner has entered the workplace, placing considerable stress on families. Meanwhile, additional income is gobbled up by remarkable price increases in health care, education, child care, housing, and transportation. Family savings rates have dropped from 10 percent to near zero. Americans are working overtime to hang on to a middle class lifestyle, a lifestyle made more precarious because two incomes are needed to keep it going.
There is an old saying that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Part of this statement is undeniably true. Many nations do not respect worker rights and environmental safeguards in economic production and therefore globalization drives down wages, sometimes beyond the ability of even the most progressive political system to stop. But disparities of income have also occurred in this country because some politicians have actually promoted it a social good, shifting tax burdens to the lower ends of the income scale, and from corporations to individuals.
In the last thirty years, America has gone from being the Western industrialized society with the smallest gap between the super wealthy and the poor to the society with the largest. This was done in considerable measure by conscious political choice. From the end of World War II to 1979, eighty percent of productivity gains by workers had trickled down to America’s workers. Now only 25 percent does. Meanwhile the wealthiest 500,000 Americans have tripled their income, and corporate executives make more in a day than their employees do in a year.
I could go on and on. But what is the solution? Jesus reminds us in our Gospel that his children will never be able to compete with the world in terms of being greedy and corrupt. We live in this world but live for the next. While we live in this world, Jesus provides the answer of how and why we work for social justice. Jesus’ advice to his followers in short and sweet: we cannot live by man’s sinful rules, and God’s just ones. We have to choose.
The same sacred teaching tradition of the Catholic Church that helps us understand God’s word in Scripture more fully, also uses Jesus’ Gospel message of love of God and others to define a steady and reliable body of what is called social justice teaching. The Church asks that all Catholics utilize this teaching as a moral foundation when we seek to live our faith and relate to our political and economic system through work, advocacy and voting. Social justice teaching, if you will, provides the spiritual inspiration, for our temporal perspiration.
Our Church teaches that our identity as God’s creatures, indeed our human dignity includes our work. The work that produces physical goods are, no less than spiritual goods of grace, are held in common. However societies are organized, the common good, including the common distribution of physical goods, must be the guiding organizing principle.
Because of the effects of sin and human weakness, uneven distribution of physical goods is never going to be completely eradicated. But, as Jesus reminds us, to whom much is given, much is expected in return. Possessions in and of themselves are not a sin, but how we choose to use them at an individual, community, national or international level can be. Generosity of spirit, using possessions to cement social justice rather than tear it asunder is required of all of us. Our first job, even before our temporal one, is to serve God and love others.
Strictly speaking, private ownership is only apparent and temporal, because everything is a part of God’s creation. We are all born in God’s image and likeness. We are stewards of what is given to us, and at the end of our lives, there is no U-haul behind the hearse. The only mediator between God and us, as St. Paul tells us in our second reading, is Jesus Christ, whose life of service and all-embracing love is the model for the way we treat each other. Neither profit nor state is superior to the fundamental dignity of the human persons at every stage of human life; not just at conception, not just at birth and childhood, not just at the end of our lives, but for all the years in between when we grow up, work, build our families, and serve our God and others.
As such, capital and government should serve the Body of Christ and not the other way around. Catholic teaching supports the right to work, the right to a just wage, the right to property, the right to rest, the right to medical care and a modicum of income security in old age. Economic and political institutions must honor all these rights. Disputes should be settled non-violently, but the right of workers to organize to enforce these rights is also respected by the Church.
At the same time, our support of social justice is not about trying to work God out of a job. We pray that our leaders employ such teaching. What we have achieved in alleviating poverty and creating a middle class in this country was because many of our past political leaders believed it and acted on it.
Human beings, possessing free will, can and often do choose to ignore the Church’s teaching on social justice. Ultimately, there will be a judgment, and end time, a transformation of the earthly life into a heavenly one or a hellish one. All of the Church’s teachings can be ignored; it employs no military coercion anymore. But social justice teaching is every bit as authoritative as its teachings on abortion, euthanasia, war and peace, and other issues. We cannot be buffet Catholics on social justice teaching any more than we can on any other aspect of Church teaching.
Jesus challenges each member of the Body of Christ to honor the value of labor and the rights of workers. Catholics are called to accept this challenge, and work for social justice through our service and our responsibilities as citizens. It is an essential, necessary part of a Christian life, a road sign pointing to a successful journey to salvation, and another reason why it is so wonderful to be a Catholic.