Luke 16:1-13

Let’s say that you are on a boat with all your belongings as you are transferring house. Then there is a big storm and slowly the boat is taking on some water. And as if things couldn’t get worse, the boat is slowly sinking. So what would you do? There are only two options, either you throw some of your heavier furniture out of the boat and hopefully you and some of the most important things would survive; or you might decide that materials are more important than your life and you and all of your possessions would sink to the bottom of the sea.

The gospel for today is all about having a good attitude on material possessions. In the parable, a master has a manager who was caught squandering his property so the master decides to fire him. But before the news of his sacking spreads throughout the whole village, he decides to settle and gives discounts to all his master’s debtors.

Now, at first we should be wondering how could he afford to give generous discounts to his master’s debtors and would this be legal? In Palestine during the time of Christ, there are a few people who owned so much land that they would lease their land to tenants, then as payment the tenants would do any of three things; either, they pay a percentage to the owner of the land of the produce that they make; a fixed amount of produce (i.e. one hundred measures of olive oil or fifty bushels of wheat); or they could pay by using money. However, because most of the villages during the time of Christ had no access to money, they would rather do the second option and that is to pay through a fixed amount of produce.

Now, this steward, as an agent of the master, is allowed to make some commission from these transactions. And it is not unusual that stewards would make huge commissions from debtors. So this steward must have made a killing from all of his transactions so that even if he gave seemingly generous discounts to all the debtors in order for him to look good, he would still make substantial money out of the transaction. In other words, he would just be cutting his losses in order to look good to his clients in the hope that he would be hired by them in the future as maybe another steward.

The master praised his dishonest steward not because of his dishonesty but because of his prudence. So Jesus in a way is also praising this steward because of how he handled this dishonest money. He used money as a servant and not as his master.

There is a saying, “Money is a good servant but a bad master.” Jesus is not saying that we should not work for money for he recognised the importance of money in order to survive in today’s world. However, making money as a master is a different story. For money can drive us to have more and more and more and in the process we lose friends and relatives and people we love.

The steward in the parable used his money to gain friends. He may have lost a significant amount of money but he has certainly made friends of clients so that he would survive after his sacking from his job.

In our lives, if we are good with money which is something that is very temporary in this world, then we should also be good with things that would last more than our lifetime and those are treasures in heaven. We should be more than the dishonest servant. We should resist the temptation of amassing so much money at the risk of losing all our friends and loved ones. We should be taking care of what really matters in this world, and that is our brothers and sisters, so that we may gain treasures that are out of this world and that is in the next life after this.