Main news for 20 October 2021

The Savior compares the position of God's servants among the people of God with the position of a slave-steward. Today it seems strange to us to entrust care for a house and servants to a slave. But in antiquity such a practice was fairly widespread: everything depended only on the measure of the master's trust in one slave or another.

Such a situation was especially widespread where, as in Israel and later in Judea, slavery was domestic, so that slaves lived in the house practically as junior members of the family. If the master of the house placed one of these slaves in the position of steward during his absence, such a slave of course by no means ceased to be a slave, but the circle of his duties and, correspondingly, rights in the house expanded significantly, approaching the duties and rights of the master.

But one could speak of the duties and rights of such a steward only in relation to the other household slaves and servants, who owed him formal obedience; in relation to the master he remained a slave, bound to him by those partly formal and partly personal relations that usually connected master and slave in the situation of patriarchal slavery. Only on the stability of these relations, on the master's favor, did the slave's position in the house depend, whether he would remain steward or not, and how the master would deal with him on his return. A slave in himself, of course, had and could have no rights, and woe to the slave who forgot this. These are the very relations Jesus gives as an example, as the earthly analogue of relations in the Kingdom.

In a certain sense, in the Kingdom everyone is without rights except the King who brought this Kingdom into the world: no one has deserved it, and no one can enter it by right. And when the Kingdom is projected into our world, still untransformed, it often turns out that the servant of God receives authority over people, since the laws of the untransformed world presuppose such authority: God acts in our world so that His action proceeds, as it were, from within, without exploding the world or destroying it.

Here everything depends on whether such a servant feels himself in the position of a slave to whom the true Master has entrusted temporary management of His house, or imagines himself a full-right manager whose rights are conditioned not by a concrete situation of service, but belong to him originally by virtue of some special status or special position in the Kingdom. The point is not that the true Master will be offended and want to punish the usurper, but that any attempts at self-assertion in one's own independence separate the one who tries to do this from the Kingdom. And therefore from the One who brought the Kingdom into the world.