Knowing Our Limits

Abstract

It is quite striking that in the gospel parables Jesus more than once uses the world of economics as a framework for his stories — the parable of the talents, the dishonest steward, even, we might say, the little vignette of the lost coin. Like farming, like family relationships, like the tensions of public political life, economic relations have something to say to us about how we see our humanity in the context of God’s action. Money is a metaphor alongside other things; our money transactions, like our family connections and our farming and fishing labors, bring out features of our human condition that, rightly understood, tell us something of how we might see our relation to God and God’s to us. A story about how people do and don’t take risks with what they have been given or about an eccentric landowner who insists on paying all his employees the same wage, however long or hard they have been working, becomes a window into the strangeness of God — like the stories about broken families, careless farmers sowing seed all over the place or unwelcome and disgusting foreigners offering life-saving compassion when the usual neighbors are nowhere to be seen.