In our First Reading from the Book of Amos, the prophet rails against the unjust economic practices of merchants and businessmen. They long for the end of the Sabbath so that they can have more time to exploit the poor, “buying the lowly for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals.” For the love of money, other people have become mere things to them that they can buy and sell for their own selfish gain.
In today’s Gospel, we hear a parable unique to Luke known as “The Unjust Steward.” It is one of the most enigmatic parables in all the Gospels, and it is only made all the more confounding when it is paired with the First Reading from Amos. At first glance, Jesus’ parable seems to be condoning the very unprincipled economic practices that Amos denounces!
Jesus tells of a steward, a manager of a wealthy person’s household. Some kind of audit has uncovered the fact that he has “squandered” his master’s property. The master demands an immediate accounting and announces, “you can no longer be my steward.”
Realizing that he can make no account for his financial mismanagement, and loathing the thought of being sent to do manual labor to make up his debt to his master, the unjust steward devises a plan. He wants to be “welcomed into the homes” of his master’s debtors – he wants a job from one of them when he is fired – and so he aims at currying favor with the debtors.
He calls each one in and examines what they owe. One owes 100 measures of olive oil, which the steward immediately halves. Another debtor owes 100 bushels of wheat, which the steward reduces by 20 percent.
One would expect the master to become all the more enraged. The steward has further cheated him out of money that was owed to him. And yet, the story concludes with the shocking reversal that is so typical of Jesus’ parables: “the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.”
The rest of today’s Gospel isn’t of much help in determining the message that we’re intended to glean from the parable. Luke presents us with a string of Jesus’ sayings that hardly explain the parable and rather seem to be contradictory. Jesus surprisingly tells the disciples to “make friends with dishonest wealth” and praises the shrewdness of “the children of this world.”
Easier to predict, is Jesus saying that “the person who is trustworthy in small matters will be trustworthy in great things,” . . . but the steward who has been praised wasn’t at all trustworthy! Jesus also says, “no one can serve two masters,” but that is precisely what the steward seems to have pulled off!
The most common explanation of the parable hinges on one word: “the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.” Jesus obviously cannot be praising the dishonesty of the steward, but He could be commending his prudent, shrewd decisions in the face of crisis.
A similar explanation suggests that when the steward cooks the books, he is really only eliminating the profit he himself would have been skimming off the loans. By reducing the amount owed, the steward is still restoring to his master the amount of the initial loan and his usual profit. Thus the steward shows himself to be willing to sacrifice his own gain when faced with a critical choice. In this reading, the steward is a model for us because we too must respond immediately and make sacrifices to answer the demands of discipleship with Jesus.
I think there may be a still better reading of today’s Gospel, but it requires us to think back to last weekend’s Gospel, which directly precedes this passage in Luke’s Gospel. Last Sunday we heard three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the Prodigal Son. I made the point that all three stories involve an extravagant, over the top, even crazy example of forgiveness and mercy that seeks out and brings home those who were lost.
Think back with me on some of the details of the parable of the Prodigal Son, and compare them with the parable we hear today of the Unjust Steward.
Both parables portray a person who is facing a life-threatening situation. The son is literally starving to death, and the steward is about to be fired; and it’s all because both of them “squandered property.” This same phrase is used for both the son’s wasting of the father’s inheritance, and the steward’s mismanagement of the master’s possessions!
In both parables, Luke says that the son and the steward “said to themselves.” That is, we hear both of their internal monologues as they both hatch a plot to solve their dilemma. In both cases, the solutions are at least somewhat self-serving. It’s not clear that either is actually sorry or has learned a lesson.
In both parables, the son and the steward’s goals are to be welcomed into a house. The son wishes only to be welcomed back as a servant in his father’s household, and the steward is angling to be welcomed into the homes of the debtors he has helped out.
Finally, and most importantly, in both parables, the son and the steward’s plans are never fully realized – rather they are transcended by the surprise intervention of the parables’ powerful figures: the father and the master of the house. In both cases, the son and the steward, were thinking in terms of obligations and in terms of justice. But both are rescued from peril not by the success of their own plans, but by the unexpected and lavish mercy they receive.
The parable of the Unjust Steward is therefore really about the rich master of the household. Like the foolish shepherd who looks for one sheep, the crazy women who celebrates finding one penny, and the prodigal father who forgives both of his wayward sons, this parable might better be called “The Foolish Rich Man.” He acts illogically, but he acts with the kind of mercy that typifies the Divine Mercy of God.
And I think there is some proof of this interpretation in the very next line in Luke’s Gospel – a line that is cut off from today’s reading. Luke says that in responding to this parable, "the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed Him." Like the merchants and businessmen in our First Reading, the Pharisees were so blinded by their love of money that they mocked a person who showed great mercy and forgave debts.
So perhaps now, we can return to the steward in today’s Gospel and ask once more, what exactly it is that Jesus is commending in this parable? What precisely is it that the steward does well even if he does it for the wrong reason? Well of course, the answer is that he too forgives debts.
Yes, he forgives debts he wasn’t authorized to forgive. And yes he forgave for all the wrong reasons, for his own personal gain and to cover up his own misdeeds. But when he encountered a wake-up call from the master of the house, the decisive action he chooses to take is to forgive.
The moral of today’s Gospel thus builds on the lessons of forgiveness we’ve heard in the previous parables. The shepherd and the sheep, the woman and the coin, the prodigal father and his son, and now the rich man and his steward are all given to us as images of our heavenly Father and the radical, crazy forgiveness we are given by God.
And now the steward is commended in today’s Gospel because he models for us how we too are meant to extend the same radical forgiveness we have received to others.
Like the steward we might not be capable yet of doing it for the right reason. We might not do it out of love, but instead out of some sense of obligation. We might do it because we know that holding a grudge ultimately destroys only us, and we do not want anyone to have that kind of power over us. We might simply recall the words of the Our Father, and know that we will be forgiven only in the measure that we forgive others.
But brothers and sisters, no matter how or why we forgive – whether we are being selfish or self-less; whether others think us generous or merely insane – whenever we forgive another person we have participated in the merciful love that defines God our Father. Despite our weakness and our mixed motivations, it is by forgiving, that we come to share more deeply in God’s Divine life.
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