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 like other things; our money transactions, like our family connections and our farming and fishing labours, bring out features of our human condition that, rightly understood, tell us something of how we might see our relation to God.
The point doesn’t need to be laboured. Monetary exchange is simply one of the things people do. It can be carried out well or badly, honestly or dishonestly, generously or meanly. It is one of those areas of life in which our decisions show who we are, and so it is a proper kind of raw material for stories designed to suggest how encounter with God shows us who we are. All obvious enough, you may think. But we should reflect further on this ”“ because we have become used in our culture to an attitude to economics which more or less turns the parables on their head. In this new framework, economic motivations, relationships, conventions and so on are the fundamental thing and the rest is window-dressing. Instead of economics being one source of metaphor among others for the realities of self-definition and self-discovery, other ways of speaking and understanding are substitutes for economic assessment. The language of customer and provider has wormed its way into practically all areas of our social life, even education and health care. The implication is that the most basic relation between one human being and another or one group and another is that of the carefully calibrated exchange of material resources; the most basic kind of assessment we can make about the actions of another, from the trader to the nurse to the politician, is the evaluation of how much they can increase my liberty to negotiate favourable deals and maximise my resources.
Read it all (Hat tip: Ruth Gledhill).