Year C Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Amos 8:4-7; Ps 113:1-2.4-8; 1 Tim 2:1-8; Luke 16:1-13
Jesus’ teaching as handed on in the Gospels is often not as straightforward as we suppose it to be. Our Gospel reading for today, the Parable of the Unjust Steward, is an example of this. As a master teacher, the Lord used different techniques and methods depending on his subject and his audience.
The Parable of the Unjust Steward is only found in Saint Luke’s Gospel. It is material the inspired author did not take from Mark or from the source he had in common with Matthew. At first glance, the difficulty this teaching presents is that it can seem as if Jesus commends the steward’s shady business practices.
This steward’s practices are shady because, while he succeeds in hauling in a lot of income by collecting the debts owed to the master who is dismissing him, he cheats his soon-to-be former master by cutting great deals for the debtors. He does this so that perhaps one of these debtors will hire him.
What is the point of the Parable of the Unjust Steward? Well, the point Jesus seeks to make is a rather nuanced one. The difficulty with this is that we do not live a culture, whether secular or religious, that deals with nuance very well. While Jesus certainly does not commend the steward’s underhanded dealings, he praises what the late New Testament scholar Raymond Brown calls the steward’s “prudent and energetic initiative.”
1
This is borne out in Jesus’ own application of the parable. The heart of his application is: “make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”
2 What does Jesus mean by making “friends” with worldly wealth?
First, worldly wealth will
always fail you in the end, even if only at death. This is verified by the truth of the cliché “You can’t take it with you.” It is also verified by the treasures discovered in the tombs of the Pharaohs, which were filled with wealth the ancient Egyptian religion thought they would need on the other side, as it were.
Secondly, this is where our first, very challenging reading, from Amos, bears out “Luke’s theological tenet that abundant money corrupts.”
3 This comes into clearer view when you read Jesus’ very next parable about Lazarus and the rich man, which is our Gospel for next week.
Parable of the Unjust Steward, by Marinus van Reymerswaele, ca. 1540
Hence, the prudence and energetic initiative called for by Jesus it is always done in service to the Kingdom of God. In short, according to Jesus, you should spend as much time and energy making God's kingdom present as you do trying to get ahead in life. This requires you to love your neighbor in the same manner the Good Samaritan- another teaching found only in Luke- loved the man who had been beaten, robbed, and left for dead and who the religiously pious were intent on crossing the street to avoid.
When deeds lke that of the Good Samaritan are done for love of neighbor, God’s kingdom is visible because it is made truly present. In his song, taken from Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s observation that the poor and dispossessed are Jesus in a distressing disguise, Michael Card sang:
Every time a faithful servant serves
A brother that's in need
What happens at that moment is a miracle indeed
As they look to one another in an instant it is clear
Only Jesus is visible for they've both disappeared4
Inherent in Jesus’ teaching is that if you do not share your possessions, God will not entrust you with what he has in store for those who use their wealth wisely. Keep in mind the wisdom of God, as Saint Paul pointed out in his First Letter to the Corinthians, looks foolish to worldly eyes.
5
Being generous with your wealth, not holding on to it tightly, is how you acclimate yourself to God’s kingdom. In this way, you make yourself fit to dwell there forever. If you don’t prepare yourself, if you jealously guard what you have, storing up riches for yourself, what makes you think you will like or want to live in God’s kingdom?
Jesus concludes this teaching by the declaration that you cannot serve two masters: “You cannot serve God and mammon.”
6 According to Jesus, you are loyal to God by sharing mammon, which was defined earlier as “dishonest wealth,” with others, especially those in need.
If you are a disciple of Jesus, you cannot be double-minded, as the title of one the works by Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard exhorts:
Purity of Heart is Will One Thing. That one thing is to do the will of God. Doing God's will is often challenging, perhaps even impossible without God's grace.
Teaching
this challenging can easily make you feel hopeless. Be hopeful. God will give you the grace you need, if you want it. Attending our Diocesan Pastoral Congress yesterday, I was reminded that Jesus’ teaching on wealth in the part of Luke’s Gospel where he makes his single journey from Galilee to Jerusalem- the part from which our Gospel today is taken- can be summed in four interrelated points: 1) All is GIFT 2) Live in GRATITUDE for the gift 3) SHARE the gifts you’ve been given 4) Living in this way will bring you CLOSER to God.
In his
Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius of Loyola identifies three types of people. First, is the person who is all talk and no action. Next, comes the person who will do everything except the one thing necessary. The one thing necessary is to discern and then do God’s will. Finally, there is the genuinely free person.
7 This person does God’s will no matter what it is. It is only by doing this that you are truly free.
1 Raymond Brown. An Introduction to the New Testament, 249.↩
2 Luke 16:9.↩
3 An Introduction to the New Testament, 250.↩
4 Michael Card. "Distressing Disguise."↩
5 1 Corinthians 1:18 ff.↩
6 Luke 16:13.↩
7 Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Spiritual Exercises, sec. 149-153.↩
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