The citizenship of heaven and the prudence of the faithful steward
By Prof. Dr. Daniel C. Afonso · Updated
Our conversation in heaven is also what we expect our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to do. (Philippians 3:20)
The liturgy of the thirty-first week of Ordinary Time presents us with two ways of inhabiting the world. Paul, to the Philippians, sketches the portrait of the faithful whose citizenship is in heaven and who awaits the Savior from there. Luke, in the Gospel, presents the disconcerting figure of the unfaithful manager who squanders his master’s goods and then saves himself through cunning. Between the letter and the parable runs one question alone, the question about where the treasure of the human heart rests. The responsorial psalm, singing the joy of those who ascend to the Lord’s house, offers the key, because the celestial citizenship of which Paul speaks has a concrete name and address, and that name is Jerusalem, the city beautifully built in harmonious unity. The three readings, read together, teach that the prudence of the faithful does not consist in fleeing time, but in administering it in view of eternity.
I. Heavenly citizenship and the apostle’s crown
Paul writes with tears, and the tear is the first exegetical data of this reading. The apostle does not denounce abstract enemies, but inimici crucis Christi, enemies of Christ’s cross, men whose Deus venter est, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their own shame. The opposition that structures the whole passage is not between Jew and Gentile, but between earthly and heavenly, between those who terrena sapiunt, who only savor things of the earth, and those whose conversatio in cælis est. The word conversatio translates the Greek políteuma, and does not merely designate a devout feeling, but the legal status of a citizen, belonging to a city whose laws govern us even when we live far from it. The faithful are resident aliens who have never ceased to be citizens. From this citizenship springs hope for the transfigured body, because the Savior reformabit corpus humilitatis nostræ, configuratum corpori claritatis suæ, will reform our body of humility, configuring it to the body of his glory. The flesh is not abandoned, but reformed. And Paul, in the verse that opens chapter four, calls the faithful gaudium meum, et corona mea, my joy and my crown, because the persevering community is the only trophy the apostle will present on the day of his coming. Firmness in the Lord, sic state in Domino, is the proper way of inhabiting the interval between promise and fulfillment.
II. The unfaithful manager’s cunning
The parable of the unfaithful manager is one of the harshest in the Gospel, because in it a master praises one who has defrauded him. It is not appropriate to soften the scandal. The man is diffamatus, accused of dissipasset bona ipsius, of having squandered his master’s goods, and the sentence falls immediately, redde rationem villicationis tuæ, render an account of your management. The inner drama explodes in a rare moment of nakedness, Fodere non valeo, mendicare erubesco, I have no strength to dig, I am ashamed to beg. Between the manual labor that the body refuses and the alms that pride cannot bear, the administrator finds a third way, a calculated fraud that buys him friends for the day of his fall. He reduces others’ debts; a hundred barrels of oil become fifty, a hundred measures of wheat become eighty, and thus he ensures recipiant me in domos suas, that they receive him in their homes. What the Lord commends is not dishonesty, but prudentia, the lucidity of one who reads the time that remains and acts without delay. The final verdict is a diagnosis, not a moral praise; filii hujus sæculi prudentiores filiis lucis in generatione sua sunt, the children of this age are more prudent, in their generation, than the children of light. Christ does not censure His people for innocence, but for slowness. The worldly person invests with urgency what he possesses in a future he knows to be fragile. The faithful, who possess an eternal future, delays.
III. The prudence that buys eternity
The two readings converge on the verb “administer.” Paul declares that we are citizens of a country we do not yet see, and Luke shows a man who administers goods that do not belong to him. This is precisely the condition of the faithful, an administrator of others’ goods in a time that is passing away. Everything we possess—the body that will be renewed, the gifts, time itself—was received in trust, and account will be demanded of all. The parable becomes a parable of conversion, because the condemnable cunning of the administrator, translated into the register of grace, becomes the virtue that tradition calls supernatural prudence, the art of ordering means to the ultimate end. The psalm gives this administration its horizon, Lætatus sum in his quæ dicta sunt mihi, In domum Domini ibimus, I rejoiced when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord. Paul’s celestial citizenship, Luke’s administrator’s urgency, and the psalm’s joyful ascent form a single movement. We are not called to despise the goods of time, but to convert them into a ticket to the city that does not pass. Paul’s firmness and Luke’s cunning do not oppose, but complement each other, because he who is firm in the Lord knows how to negotiate the present in view of eternity.
IV. Mary, the most faithful administrator of grace
Where the parable displays astute infidelity, faith contemplates luminous fidelity, and this fidelity has a woman’s face. Mary is the administrator who never squandered the Lord’s goods, the villica fidelis to whom the greatest of all deposits was entrusted, the very Word made flesh in her womb. If the administrator of Luke keeps in his heart the calculation of fraud, the evangelist writes that conservabat omnia verba hæc, conferens in corde suo, he kept all these things, meditating them in his heart, and this keeping is perfect administration, nothing is lost, and everything yields a return. The celestial citizenship that Paul merely awaits, she already possesses it fully, because the Assumption is the first creature whose corpus humilitatis was in fact configuratum corpori claritatis, restored to the image of the glorious body of the Son. In her, the hope of the flesh transfigured ceased to be a promise and became an anticipated fulfillment. That is why we call her a crown, resuming the word that Paul gave to the Philippians, not the crown of an apostle, but of the whole Church, the woman crowned with twelve stars that the Johannine tradition contemplates in Apocalypse. To learn from Mary is to learn the prudence of the children of light that the children of this world do not know, the prudence of one who administers the brief earthly time with eyes fixed on the house of the Lord, so that, when the hour of reckoning comes, we may be received not in the houses of men, but in eternal abodes.
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