27th Sunday 2022
Habbakuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4; 2Tim 1: 6-8, 13-14; Luke 17:5-10
Drat the Jerusalem Bible. Once again, it has messed up a translation. Jesus doesn’t tell us to say that we are “merely servants”, but that we are achreioi “useless” or “unprofitable” servants.
What does He mean by that? He appears to be saying that we have no grounds for giving ourselves airs, no reason to swank, to show off, to congratulate ourselves. So often, we fall short of what we could and should achieve, and some of our supposed triumphs may sometimes turn out to be disasters.
Think of the residential schools in Canada, for which the Pope has just apologised to the indigenous peoples of that country—the First Nation Canadians, as they are known; the Native Americans in the United States; those whom we, most insensitively, used to call Red Indians. Those who ran these schools, at the behest of the government, may well have prided themselves on wiping out the native culture, on “bringing {these people} to Christ”. The Holy Father has described what they did as “cultural genocide”, and has deplored the cruelty which so often accompanied attempts at conversion.
In many parts of the world, at various times in history, the spread of the Gospel was accompanied by, or even accomplished by, the sword. We rightly deplore the conduct of jihadists today: we should not forget that Christians have behaved equally badly, not least in the Crusades.
Even today, some of the wilder evangelicals use what amounts to brainwashing in their attempts to convert people to their own somewhat unchristian version of Christianity. During my university days, the Catholic chaplain commented that he spent half his time attempting to put back together the shattered remnants of faith and self-respect in people who had fallen into the clutches of these characters. Within the Catholic Church, there is a group whose founder was actually canonised by Pope St. John Paul II, which has done immense harm to families, including my own, by the underhand and dishonest recruitment methods recommended by that same founder.
All such people come very clearly under the heading “useless servants”, but so do we. Our best efforts, if they produce good fruit, do so by the grace of God. How many of them prove to have been misdirected, even harmful?
This could cause us to become disheartened, to wonder if anything is worth doing. This should not be the case. We need to bear in mind those words to Timothy: “God’s gift was a spirit, not of timidity, but of power, and love, and self-control”. Again, the Jerusalem Bible is somewhat naughty in its translation, repeating the word “spirit” and giving it a capital letter the second time, distinguishing “a spirit” from “THE Holy Spirit”. This isn’t justified by the Greek text. Power, love, and self control do indeed come from the Holy Spirit, but it is not the job of translators to tamper with the text in order to underline the meaning.
What this passage does is to emphasise that the Holy Spirit has come upon us, and has given us gifts. These gifts, however, are not ours to do with as we wish or choose. They are always God’s gifts, and in all that we do we must depend on Him. One of these gifts is self-control, which might also be translated “moderation”, and this is an important gift. If we are using dubious methods in our imagined service of the Gospel, we are ignoring that gift: we shall be, not merely useless servants, but destructive servants. The other requirement is faith, a trust in God’s grace, not our own efforts. As Habbakuk points out, God may appear to us to work slowly. We must accept that He IS working, and that He will achieve results in His own time, if we cooperate with Him—but not if we rely on our own gung-ho approach to people or to the world.
