Main news for 9 August 2025

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

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 such slaves in the position of steward during his absence, this slave, of course, by no means ceased to be a slave, but the circle of his duties, and accordingly his rights in the house, expanded significantly, coming close to 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, however, he remained a slave, bound to him by those partly formal and partly personal relations that usually connected master and slave in a situation of patriarchal slavery. And 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 no rights and could have none, and woe to the slave who forgot this. These are the very relations Jesus gives as an example, as an earthly analogue of the relations of the Kingdom.

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

And 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-rights manager whose rights are not conditioned by a concrete situation of service, but belong to him from the beginning by virtue of some special status or special position in the Kingdom. The issue here 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.