A homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois on Sunday, September 19, 2010
“Don't Be Like This Guy, OK?”
(Homily text: Luke 16: 1 – 13)
“Don’t be like this guy, OK?”
That could easily be Jesus’ message for today, as He tells us the Parable of the Dishonest Steward.
Now I will admit to you that this parable can be very confusing.
There’s a lot going on in it. So perhaps we’d better begin by trying to put ourselves into the situation as best we can, in order to see more clearly what’s going on.
As Jesus tells the story, here’s what we know:
- The dishonest steward, who is a manager of the rich man’s estate, has been caught being dishonest.
- The rich man demands an accounting of the steward’s actions.
- In haste, the steward calls together some of the rich man’s debtors, and reduces the amounts they owe as sharecroppers to the rich man.
- The dishonest steward creates an “unholy alliance” with those whose debts he reduces, by making them complicit in his actions, and by creating a future obligation to him once he is dismissed by the landowner.
- The amounts of oil and of wheat that are owed show that the farming operation involved is a large one. 100 measures (in the Greek: batos = baths) of oil is about 900 gallons of olive oil. 100 measures (in the Greek: kors) could be anywhere from about 650 – 1200 bushels of wheat. The large scale of the operation will be reflected in Jesus’ comments, heard a little later, when He says “He who is faithful in very little is faithful also in much.”
- What is going on with the reduction in the amounts owed? People have struggled with that aspect of the parable over the years. Three possibilities offer themselves as the dishonest steward reduces the amounts owed:
a. The steward is simply cheating his master out of what he is owed,I will leave you to choose which of the three ways the dishonest steward is using to guarantee his future.
b. The steward is merely taking his commission out of the amount owed (an amount that was already figured into the total),
c. The steward is removing the interest that was figured into the debt. This last point needs some explanation: Deuteronomy 23: 19 – 20 forbids the charging of interest on a debt. In order to get around that requirement, people in Jesus’ day would pad the total amount owed, including in it the actual amount expected, plus an additional amount, which was really the interest. However, the agreement would show that there was no interest charged on the amount, only the total amount. In this way, the requirements found in Deuteronomy are shrewdly avoided.
Whatever the steward’s means, the intent is quite clear: “You owe me for the favor I did you by reducing the debt you owed my boss” is what he’s trying to do. By changing the amounts owed in writing, he also obligates his boss to honor the written documents.
“He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much,” Jesus says.
But the converse is also true: “He who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.”
Jesus is getting at the issue of integrity, and at the matter of stewardship.
We would do well to unpack each of these concepts as they apply to our walk with God. We begin with the matter of integrity:
Integrity can be defined in this way (a way that fits the circumstances of the story quite well): Integrity is when we do what we would do if everyone could see what we were doing, when no one is looking. Put another way, we could say that we act the same way, with the same honesty, in every situation, whether people know about it or not.
As to the matter of stewardship, we are reminded by today’s parable that to be a steward is to take care of someone else’s property. We don’t own it, we are simply tasked with managing it for the welfare of someone else.
Applied to our faith walk, the matter of integrity means that our insides must match our outsides. What people can’t see must be the same as what people can see.
Applied to our faith walk, the matter of stewardship asks us to realize that all that we have: our time, our talents, and treasure, are all gifts from God, to be used for His purposes in advancing His kingdom here on earth. We don’t own any of these gifts, we are simply the managers of them.
For the Church, whose purpose is to be the bearer of the kingdom of God in this world, the matter of integrity affects the Church’s ability to witness to the world. When the Church’s leadership, or its members, do not act in ways that match the words they say, then integrity is destroyed, and the Church’s witness is also destroyed.
Small wonder then, that the Parable of the Dishonest Steward has often been applied to the Church’s leaders down through the years.
“He who is faithful in a very little, will also be faithful also in much, and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.”
AMEN.
