Book of Common Prayer

The letter and the spirit

3 So: we’re starting to “recommend ourselves” again, are we? Or perhaps we need—as some do—official references to give to you? Or perhaps even to get from you? ² You are our official reference! It’s written on our hearts! Everybody can know it and read it! ³ It’s quite plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, with us as the messengers—a letter not written with ink but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of beating hearts.

⁴ That’s the kind of confidence we have towards God, through the Messiah. ⁵ It isn’t as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account. Our qualification comes from God: ⁶ God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit. The letter kills, you see, but the spirit gives life.

Death and glory

⁷ But just think about it: when death was being distributed, carved in letters of stone, it was a glorious thing, so glorious in fact that the children of Israel couldn’t look at Moses’s face because of the glory of his face—a glory that was to be abolished. ⁸ But in that case, when the spirit is being distributed, won’t that be glorious too? ⁹ If distributing condemnation is glorious, you see, how much more glorious is it to distribute vindication! ¹⁰ In fact, what used to be glorious has come in this respect to have no glory at all, because of the new glory which goes so far beyond it. ¹¹ For if the thing which was to be abolished came with glory, how much more glory will there be for the thing that lasts.

The veil and the glory

¹² So, because that’s the kind of hope we have, we speak with great freedom. ¹³ We aren’t like Moses: he put a veil over his face, to stop the children of Israel from gazing at the end of what was being abolished. ¹⁴ The difference is that their minds were hardened. You see, the same veil lies over the reading of the old covenant right up to this very day. It isn’t taken away, because it’s in the Messiah that it is abolished.

¹⁵ Yes, even to this day, whenever Moses is read, the veil lies upon their hearts; ¹⁶ but “whenever he turns back to the Lord, the veil is removed.” ¹⁷ Now “the Lord” here means the spirit; and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. ¹⁸ And all of us, without any veil on our faces, gaze at the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, and so are being changed into the same image, from glory to glory, just as you’d expect from the Lord, the spirit.

The parable of the shrewd manager

16 Jesus said to his disciples, “Once there was a rich man who had a steward, and charges were laid against him that he was squandering his property. ² So he called him and said to him, ‘What’s all this I hear about you? Present an account of your stewardship; I’m not going to have you as my steward anymore!’

³ “At this, the steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do? My master is taking away my stewardship from me! I can’t do manual work, and I’d be ashamed to beg . . .

⁴ “ ‘I have an idea what to do!—so that people will welcome me into their households when I am fired from being steward.’

⁵ “So he called his master’s debtors to him, one by one. ‘How much,’ he asked the first, ‘do you owe my master?’

⁶ “ ‘A hundred measures of olive oil,’ he replied.

“ ‘Take your bill,’ he said to him, ‘sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’

⁷ “To another he said, ‘And how much do you owe?’

“ ‘A hundred measures of wheat,’ he replied.

“ ‘Take your bill,’ he said, ‘and make it eighty.’

⁸ “And the master praised the dishonest steward because he had acted wisely. The children of this world, you see, are wiser than the children of light when it comes to dealing with their own generation.

⁹ “So let me tell you this: use that dishonest stuff called money to make yourselves friends! Then, when it gives out, they will welcome you into homes that will last.”