How to Win Friends and Secure Eternal Rest
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Luke 16:1-13
Most of the stories Jesus told lend themselves to easy application, do they not? Consider, for example, the story of the Prodigal Son or the story of the Good Samaritan. Everybody resonates with those two stories because everybody understands them and can relate to them. After all, who among us hasn’t felt the tug toward the far country and felt the need to come home once we had come to our senses? Or, who among us hasn’t wrestled with the responsibility of going out of our way to help another in need, especially when we at one point were on the receiving end of such aid? In almost every story Jesus tells, there is at least one character we can see ourselves in, or one character we can imagine ourselves working to become.
But in this parable that is before us this morning, that is not so much the case. It’s hard for us to wrap our hearts around its central character, the character of the Dishonest Steward.
Look at the story. It’s a story about a rich man who has so much money he can’t keep up with it. So, what does he do? He hires a manager. Only, the rich man obviously has not checked his manager’s references, because the guy he’s hired is slick and slimy, and as dishonest as they come. The rich man doesn’t see it, but evidently others do, and at some point they bring it to the rich man’s attention that his manager has been squandering his possessions, which by the way is the same word Jesus uses to describe what the prodigal son does with his inheritance while away in the far country. He squanders it.
The steward’s squandering has left the rich man’s reputation in shambles. In terms of standing, the rich man has taken a serious hit in the eyes of the town peasants, a most serious matter in the first century world. So when the rich man calls his manager in to give an account of his sloppy stewardship, the manager freaks out. He knows that he’s about to be shown the door and in the future he will have no place to land. “What will I do? I’m not strong enough to dig and I’m too ashamed to beg.” (The manager, you see, is also concerned about his reputation.) And then a light bulb comes on. And on the spot the manager comes up with a plan and quickly rushes it into action.
He calls all of his master’s creditors together and starts discounting their rates of interest in a way that would leave a banker’s head spinning. To the first he says, “So, how much do you owe the master? 800 gallons of olive oil? Here, take your bill and sit down quickly and crank out a check for four hundred and we’ll call it even.” To the next he says, “And how much do you owe? One thousand bushels of wheat? Make it 800 and you’re good to go.”
And when the word reaches the rich man about what his slimy steward has done, you’re thinking, “He’s going to get it for sure now.” But that’s not what happens. Remarkably, the rich man praises his dishonest manager because of how he acted so shrewdly! Instead of berating him, the master applauds his craftiness! And I know what you’re thinking. Why would the rich man do such a thing? He does so, because he is more interested in his reputation than in his money, and he knows that now all the peasants will assume that he has been stricken with a bout of generosity which has led him to instruct his manager to lower their rates of interest. The peasants won’t know that the steward has only acted to save his own skin, and as far as the rich man is concerned, what the peasants won’t know won’t hurt them. And so, at the end of the day, the peasants benefit from a sweet deal, the rich man sees his reputation skyrocket in the eyes of the people and the dishonest steward gets to keep his job. Win, win, win. And there is your story.
Well, actually it is not; it is not the whole story. Because while the Jesus’ disciples’ heads are still spinning over what Jesus has just told them, Jesus delivers the punch line: “For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their kind than are the people of the light.”
OK, and so the point is? Before we consider the answer to that question, let us think first about what the point of the story is not. Jesus is not teaching that the end of an action always justifies the means – that it’s OK to do something as long as everything comes out fine in the end. Jesus was not a relativist. Jesus held to absolute distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil. And he was always insistent that his disciples line up consistently on the side of right.
But what Jesus was teaching, and what is so instructive about his story for us today, is that we who call ourselves people of faith ought to be more imaginative and more resourceful and more forward-thinking about how we do the work of the Kingdom in the same way that people of the world go about their affairs. We ought to be more creative in how we express the benefits of our faith before an increasingly unbelieving world, at least as creative as worldly people are in theirs. That’s because business as usual just won’t cut any more. If we want to draw others into a spiritual community where we can together celebrate the new life and boundless grace God has provided through our Lord Jesus Christ, then we need to be more faithful with what God has given us to manage so that all who find themselves burdened down with a debt of guilt and shame might find the same release that we have come to know through our faith in Jesus Christ.
I think that’s what Jesus meant when he spoke with his disciples about “gaining for ourselves friends out of our worldly wealth so that when it is gone, we might be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” While on the surface that teaching might seem as if Jesus is encouraging us to employ our worldly gain for self-centered purposes (“leverage it now so that you’ll have a home in heaven”), in reality he’s simply reminding us that when we steward God’s gifts for Kingdom purposes – preaching good news to the poor, proclaiming freedom to the captives and recovery of sight for the blind and release for the oppressed (Luke 4) – we are bearing witness to how our wealth does not master us; we are instead mastering our wealth and using it in ways that honor God and that will result in God honoring us by entrusting us with eternal gain.
You’ve heard the expression, “Follow the money.” It’s a catchphrase from the world of politics that sheds light on how money drives so many of the decisions that result in government policies or explain who moves into what positions of power. The idea is that money is always the impetus for why people act they way that they do.
We don’t normally associate that saying with matters of faith, but if I am hearing Jesus correctly in this story, perhaps we should start doing so. After all, there is a real sense in which the resources we have really don’t belong to us; they belong to God. They’re the Master’s mammon, and we have been entrusted with that mammon to magnify His Kingdom’s presence in our world today.
Perhaps if we saw our worldly wealth in that way, as being on loan to us from God, we would be bolder. We would be shrewder. We would be more creative in our efforts in using it to bless others.
It’s a concern that we really do need to give more thought about. Because one day, you and I will be called upon by our Master to give an account of what He has entrusted to us. One day we will stand before the Lord to render an explanation of how well we have used the Master’s resources to draw our neighbors into the fold.
Will on that day there be others who will say of you, “I know him. I know her. He went out of his way to make me feel accepted. She did the most extraordinary thing to show me Jesus’ grace”? Or, will it be another way? Will it be, “God, you wouldn’t believe how badly that manager spent his life squandering your abundant assets”? However it will be is a matter that is being decided even as we speak.
Make friends, then, for yourselves with worldly wealth, the mammon of unrighteousness so that through your management of it, you will show that your mammon doesn’t own you. God does. And the many lives you have touched with it will show your loving service for God, which will allow you to receive God’s blessing today and in the future enter into His eternal rest.