Today’s readings: Amos 8, 4-7; 1 Timothy 2, 1-8; Luke 16, 1-13.

In the first reading the prophet Amos is quite violent with those who cheat and trample on the rights and dignity of the needy. He is writing in the year 8BC, yet his concern about the impact faith should leave on social issues remains relevant today.

The proclamation of the faith and the social critique of structural sin and of corruption go hand in hand. The way society is constructed and God’s vision for social order, for so long erroneously understood as a given, figure as major concerns in the Old Testament prophets and has served as inspiration to Church social teaching, particularly as it evolved in the 20th century.

Amos lived in a period of economic progress which unfortunately was grounded on the collective egoism of selfish classes and social groups. The Hebrew people, whom God had liberated earlier, had become enslaved once again – this time by their fellow Hebrews and in a social network that rather than generating love and communion as it should have, perpetrated injustice and corruption instead. For Amos, beneath the appearances of prosperity and contentment, Israel’s soul was desperately sick.

Even in the Gospel, Jesus speaks about mismanagement and lack of accountability, which cost the manager in the parable his job. It is a parable that raises, rather than resolves, queries. Particularly puzzling are the words attributed to Jesus: “the master praised the dishonest steward for his cleverness”.

What I consider focal in this story is what Jesus says about “the children of this world” and “the children of light”. Jesus’ words are more a warning than a statement. If we let go and give in to pressures, Christianity would lose its power, its lure, its prophetism. When that happens, we would have nothing to say to the world, and when we remain mute, we become accomplices to evil.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis that brought world economies and governments to their knees, it seems that economically we are on the way to recovery. What remains to be seen is whether we’ve really acknowledged what caused the crisis in the first place.

People have spoken of greed as the source of the crisis. Probably it goes deeper than that. It may be too simplistic to blame the crisis on an accumulation of individual greed. John Dunning, a professional analyst of the business world, argued how ‘circles of failure’ could be created in the global economy by a combination of moral indifference, institutional crisis, and market failure.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams affirmed in a lecture on ‘Ethics, Economics and Global Justice’, “economic justice arrives only when everyone recognises some kind of shared vulnerability and limitation in a world of limits and processes that cannot be bypassed”. Christian living is not just seeking to be less greedy. It also demands a change of ­mindset.

This aspect of our faith needs to be rediscovered and renewed. As believers, we need to be engaged in world affairs at the service of faith and the promotion of justice so that God may truly be present where there is a battle between good and evil, faith and unbelief, the desire for justice and peace and the networks of injustice and corruption.

The challenge ahead for all who believe in a God who “wants everyone to be saved” is expressed by Paul in his letter to Timothy: “In every place, then, I want the men to lift their hands up reverently in prayer, with no anger or argument”.

The Christian believer is also someone who prays, who still believes in the power of prayer that is offered for others and for the world, as Paul writes, “as petitions, intercessions and thanksgiving”. It is not an anachronism to believe that the world today still needs our prayers of intercession, besides our commitment to have clean hands when it comes to social virtues.