This morning’s Gospel reading is Luke 16:1-13:
Jesus said to his disciples,
“A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another the steward said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ The steward said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.
“For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones. If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.”
Many years ago, I sponsored the son of a good friend through his confirmation process, and the topic of wealth came up. I recall sitting at my dining table, going over some paperwork from the classes that didn’t really interest either of us, and he brought up his confusion about wealth and salvation, as I recall. Both his family and mine lived in relatively comfortable middle-class settings, and he was a bit torn about how to feel about it.
We discussed it for a bit, and then I brought up the concept of stewardship. This particular passage may or may not have come up, but it applied to his questions, and it applies to our lives in precisely the manner Jesus lays out in this somewhat contradictory parable.
At first, this seems … confusing. The master dismisses the steward for his profligacy and, by implication, theft of the master’s property for his own ends. The master demands a full accounting for the stewardship, at the end of which he plans to boot his servant into the street. One would think that the steward would offer to replace what he has stolen from his master in order to get back into his good graces. That is what justice would look like — to us.
Instead, though, the steward decides to ingratiate himself to his master’s debtors. The motivation for this seems pretty self-serving, too. He wants a safety net for the time in which the master will cast him out, and hopes that by allowing the debtors to reduce their liabilities, they will treat him with kindness and generosity. In terms of what we see as justice, this looks very much like the kind of act that got the steward fired in the first place — using his master’s property for his own purposes.
However, the master sees this differently. Rather than casting the steward out immediately, the master approves of the steward’s actions. Why? This has always puzzled me, and in the end, it comes back around to what I told my friend’s son. We are all stewards, and all we own belongs to the Master.
In my chat with my friend’s son, I used my house as an example. I owned that house, in legal terms, as well as the land it sat on. That land was mine, in the secular civic sense. I could make use of it as I wished; I could alter it, within reason and regulation; I could sell it; I could choose to neglect it as well. This arrangement works best in secular terms, because owning the property allows me to maintain the dignity of the family and incentivizes me to properly care for the house and the land. No other man-made system works as well as that which protects private property for those ends. There is no need to feel embarrassed or ashamed about providing for one’s family in this manner.
However, I told the young man, at some point I would no longer own it (and I did sell it four years ago). While I had a legal right to do with the property as I would as an “owner,” I had a moral obligation as a steward to maintain the property for its next owner. The property would outlive me, especially the land, and my ownership of it only meant that I had control of it for a little while. I did not create the property, nor could I hold it eternally. And I would be held accountable in one way or another for how I maintained and treated that property, mainly financially in this world, even though I “owned” it.
So how does that relate to today’s parable? Consider who the Master represents, and what He intends for the wealth, and the rest of the teaching becomes clear. Jesus intends this as a parable about greed, obviously, and how it cuts against the purpose of Creation. The Lord created this world for the benefit of all His children, with equal opportunity to work it and enjoy its fruits. The Law and the scriptures inveigh constantly against the hoarding of those resources by the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Our first reading today from Amos is hardly remarkable in that message, although certainly notable for its urgent tone:
Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land! “When will the new moon be over,” you ask, “that we may sell our grain, and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat? We will diminish the ephah, add to the shekel, and fix our scales for cheating! We will buy the lowly for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!” The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Never will I forget a thing they have done!
This, then, explains why the master is pleased when the steward uses the wealth to reduce the misery of the debtors. That was the purpose of the wealth all along. The master wanted his wealth to be enjoyed by many, not serve the appetites of the steward alone. The Lord trusts us with His wealth for the same purpose. When we act to prioritize our own appetites to the exclusion of all others and hoard what we only steward and do not own, we are “serving mammon.”
And “serving mammon” is really just another way of saying “serving ourselves.”
This is also why the steward cannot restore his relationship to the Master by simply returning the wealth to Him. The Master already owns the wealth, eternally. It cannot be “given back,” but only properly managed for His purposes rather than for our own selfish interests. Granted, the steward in this parable does the right thing while still mainly prioritizing his own interests, but it’s also in our own interest to focus on salvation. The steward has at least learned to use the Master’s wealth for the Master’s purposes rather than only his own, with salvation in mind.
This goes just beyond worldly wealth, too. This parable speaks to another treasure: the Gospel itself. As members of the Church, we are also stewards of the Word. We have a duty not to just receive it for ourselves, but to share it with others to reduce their debt of sin in their own relationship with the Lord. Even more than with material wealth, we are given the Word as a gift but as stewards rather than its owners. If we “hoard” the Gospel and do not “invest” it for the Lord’s purposes, we are no better than the steward in this parable, or the steward in another parable who buries his Master’s wealth rather than “invest” it (Matthew 25:14-30).
The Lord sees justice differently than we do. He sees treasure differently as well, and constantly reminds us of both throughout the scriptures and in the Gospel we are called to share. To truly grasp both, we must let go of our delusions of “ownership” and form ourselves as instruments of His will in both, trusting that He will provide both justice and mercy when our stewardship has ended. Until we recognize our own true poverty, we cannot address that of others. And when we do that, we stop serving ourselves and learn to love and serve the Lord.
May the Lord bless you on this Sabbath and in your stewardship in the coming week.
Previous reflections on these readings:
The front-page image is “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” by Andrei Mironov, 2022. Via Wikimedia Commons.
“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature that looks at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.
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