By Brian Ntwali
The parables are enduring stories. They are replete with moral potency that has both shaped the Church and has seeped into even the modern secular world. Yet, while innumerable books have been written on this subject, few have ventured to unfold the economic dimensions of these parables and their far-reaching implications.
On October 17, 2022, the Saint Benedict Institute, Markets & Morality, and the Corpus Christi Foundation were pleased to host Rev. Robert Sirico, who lectured on his latest book, The Economics of the Parables. This book seeks to elucidate those very economic dimensions.
Father Robert Sirico is the co-founder and president emeritus of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. Fr. Sirico is also the pastor emeritus at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Parish in nearby Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of several books, including Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy, and his writings and commentaries have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the London Financial Times, and National Review.
From the outset, Fr. Sirico stressed this point: the parables were not written to impart ideologies and economic systems. Asserting that would amount to reading foreign meanings into the parables and ahistorically applying economic policies that were still nonexistent. Rather, he sought to uncover the parables’ underlying economic assumptions. Fr. Sirico reminded us that economics is at its core concerned with human actions. As Jesus wove the parables together, he inevitably presupposed certain principles from which we can draw economic realities. If God does, in fact, cry “Mine!” over every square inch of our human existence, as Abraham Kuyper famously penned, does this not extend to the economic dimensions of human life?
To explore some of these economic dimensions, Fr. Sirico selected and unpacked three parables. The first was the Parable of the Prodigal Son (or the “Merciful Father” as he believes it would more aptly be named). Fr. Sirico drew our attention to this seldom-heard connection: just like the prodigal son, the eldest son was preoccupied with material things. It is not material goods that were the cause of evil, but rather the disordered love of those goods. The father invites the guilty sons to jettison the idols of temporal goods and enter back into communion with the father.
Fr. Sirico then spoke about the parable that is dearest to his heart: the Parable of the Pearl of Great Price. He remarked how beautiful it was that the discovery of something became an all-encompassing treasure. The merchant discovered the high value of the pearl and accordingly incurred “costs” to attain it. This substructure of commercial exchanges carries over into a transcendental reality and allows us to appreciate the value and the costs of the true Pearl of Great Price: the Kingdom of Heaven.
The third and final parable that Fr. Sirico considered was one that has become an expression in common parlance but is nonetheless rich with moral instruction: the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Fr. Sirico lamented how this parable—along with the rest of the New Testament—has been portrayed as a text that champions a larger welfare state. The claim that Christianity was “a primitive communism” is a persistent motif voiced by the likes of Friedrich Engels. To dismiss this claim, Fr. Sirico reminded us of Winston Churchill’s poignant reply: “The socialism of the Christian era was ‘all mine is yours,’ but the socialism of today is ‘all yours is mine.’” Aside from attacking this blatant distortion of the parable, Fr. Sirico warned the audience that farming out our duty towards the “least of these” is the antithesis of being a Good Samaritan and an image bearer. Indeed, this parable invites us to be intimately near to all and to recognize our God-given ability to remedy hurt.
As he concluded his talk, Fr. Sirico reminded the listeners of how critical it is to eschew making interpretative errors while reading the parables. To this end, he draws from a breadth of theologians and scholars, ranging from conservative Catholic commentators to liberal Christian scholars verging on atheism, and even a Jewish scholar of the New Testament. He does this because he recognizes that we are prone to fall into the two extremes. On the one hand, there is the romantic tendency to plaster the Scriptures and to refuse to bring them into a modern light. On the other, there is the risk of falling into heresy which begins, as G.K. Chesterton described it, as “a truth taught out of proportion.”
Fr Sirico entreated us to remember that economic realities, while they were strongly presupposed, are not the telos or end of the parables. To borrow the words from Fr. Sirico’s book, the parables are “much like the story of the Incarnation itself: the commingling of divine transcendence with the human contingency. Or to put it in a word, Emmanuel (God-with-us).”
Brian Ntwali is a junior and an economics major at Hope College.