If, then, you have not been faithful in handling worldly wealth, how can you be trusted with true wealth? Luke 16: 1-13
Worldly wealth can often have a precarious future. You save to buy a new electric car only to see its lithium battery explode and reduce your purchase to ashes, and, to make things worse, you have inadequate insurance cover. Higher up the pecking order, you venture into strip mining developing countries of their natural resources and, almost without notice, you see them out-voting you at the United Nations. You work long and hard to build your superannuation and then learn that the bent fund-manager has absconded with a large slice of the quantum. You skimp and save to provide for your retirement, only to hear your doctor tell you that you have a terminal illness. Worldly wealth does not play favourites. Rich and poor alike frequent horse-racing tracks, take tickets in the pools, lotto and national lotteries, wager on the outcome of football games and even dabble in the stock-market, only to discover that success or failure hinges on a bolter being first past the post, a last-minute unexpected score at the football stadium, a late rush on Wall Street or a number on a gaming machine.
We know in advance that, when one person makes a killing, a host of others end up on the losing end. That’s the point of today’s first reading in which we hear the prophet Amos ranting against those who increase their wealth at the expense of strugglers. The wheelers and dealers of his day were fitting the price of their produce to the cynical evaluation they had of the people who bought from them: “We can sell inferior grain at exorbitant prices and purchase as a slave a person who can’t pay his debts or afford even the price of a pair of sandals.” (Amos 8:6) What riled Amos more than anything else was that some of these bent people tried to make their personal rapaciousness sit comfortably with their religious devotion. Their religious practice was no more than a hindrance to their money-making activities: “When will the Sabbath end, so that we can start selling again?” (Amos 8: 5). However, they had no problem allowing religious shrines to flourish, provided their own profits were not affected by the success of the shrines. In today’s gospel-reading we hear Jesus issuing to his audience a challenge that resonates with what Amos had said some 750 years earlier: “You cannot serve both God and money!” (Luke 16:13)
Still, the gospel-reading goes even further, as Luke attributes to Jesus the insight that even the energy we invest in making a living is God’s creative activity operating in and through us. It is logical, then, isn’t it, that we ought consult God as to where and how we might direct the prophets we accrue?
When it comes to the gospel-reading itself, we have to be careful to read it closely. While Jesus seems to be in admiration of the steward and his clever use of his acquired cunning, he is not holding the steward up as a model of discipleship. The size of the debts which the steward adjusted suggests that the landowner was far from being on the road to destitution. The steward had gone far beyond the limits of his lawful authority, but the landowner realised that he stood to lose his new-found reputation as a man of compassion and generosity if he were to go in search of full repayment of the debts his steward had reduced. The steward had locked his master into honouring the discounts he had given the debtors, and the master was well aware that he would lose face if he were to set about collecting full repayment.
Jesus was making the point that the accumulation of more and more capital simply increases the gap between rich and poor and does nothing to enhance relationship between people in those two categories. The steward, realising that his own future was in jeopardy, used his cunning to gain popularity with the landowner’s debtors as he decreased the profit of the landowner whose fortunes had been built up through extorting his workers who were in debt to him. At least the steward realised that money, instead of being accumulated by a landowner who has more than enough, can be used to ease the burden on those who have been imprisoned by debt.
It would seem that Jesus saw in the steward a potential for a ministry in social justice. The steward in the parable had the rudiments on which God’s Spirit could capitalise. Are we open to allowing the promptings of God’s Spirit to transform us into instruments of God’s love and compassion for others?