The lectionary has put the same word on both sides of the morning, and once you see it the day is a single argument.

Paul's account of himself in Ephesians 3 is a job description, not a testimony. He is an oikonomos — the household manager, the freedman who runs the estate, a position of real authority and zero ownership. What he administers is the grace of Theos, and what he was given is not a doctrine to keep but a mystery to disclose: three words beginning with syn, one of which he apparently had to invent because the relation it names did not exist before. Co-heirs, co-bodied, co-sharers. That is the whole content of the secret hidden from the ages, and it is a set of prefixes.

And the disclosure is deliberately public. Phōtisai pantas — to bring to light for everyone — and then the sentence that is easy to skim and should not be: the many-coloured wisdom is made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places through the assembly. The congregation is not the audience of that revelation. It is the exhibit. Whatever the powers are learning, they learn it by watching a group of people who had a wall between them sit down together.

Which is why polypoikilos is the right adjective and not merely a decorative one. The wisdom is many-coloured because the church is — the whole point of Ephesians 2 was that neither party was absorbed into the other. A single-coloured congregation would not display it.

The canticle then supplies the pattern in miniature, and its verbs are the epistle's. You draw water — from a spring you did not dig — and then you make known among the nations what happened. Isaiah 12 is a song about receiving and telling, sung with words borrowed from the Song of the Sea, on the far bank of a rescue. Nobody in it manufactures anything. They draw, and they announce.

And then the Gospel, where the same office is described from the underside. The steward's task is to give out the grain ration at the right time — measured, scheduled, belonging to somebody else. Not to grow it, not to guard it, not to improve it. To distribute it on time.

And every element of his failure is that job run backwards. He was to feed the household; he eats and drinks. He was to serve his fellow servants; he beats them. He was to keep to a schedule; he decides the schedule has slipped and behaves accordingly. My master is delayed — and he is right about that, which is the most uncomfortable detail in the parable. What the delay does is not corrupt him but reveal what was already true when nobody was checking.

Then the graded sentence, one of the few places in the gospels where knowledge changes the arithmetic. The one who knew is beaten with many blows; the one who did not know, with few. Luke does not let the ignorant one off, and he does not treat the informed one as merely better-educated. He treats information as a debt.

Which lands, hard, on the man in the first reading. Paul calls himself elachistoteros, "leaster of all the holy ones" — and then in the same breath says he was entrusted with the Gentile mission. He knows exactly which side of Luke 12:48 he is standing on.

The month's word for it is oikonomia. You are handed a household that is not yours, a store that is not yours, and a list of people who are owed something at a particular hour. The only question the parable asks is whether the ration goes out.