Proper
20 :: Amos 8: 4–7 / Psalm 113 / I Timothy 2: 1–7./ Luke 16: 1–13
This
is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker
on Sunday, September 22, 2019.
“INTEGRITY”
(Homily text: Luke 16: 1–13)
Integrity
has been defined as “Doing something the same way, whether someone else is
looking or not.”
Integrity
is at the heart of Jesus’ parable, heard in our Gospel text this morning, the
Parable of the Dishonest Steward.
Luke
alone passes along this parable to us. Neither Matthew nor Mark do so, so we
have no other sources to turn to in order to unravel some of the complexities
which are present in this parable.
Turning
to the text itself, the basic problem is apparent and is easily
understood: A manager of an estate is
accused of cheating his employer. The employer demands an audit of the estate’s
books. Faced with this emergency, the manager comes up with a plan of action,
which goes like this:
·
I will reduce the amounts that the employer
is owed.
·
In so doing, I will obligate my employer’s
debtors to me as a matter of honor.
·
In that way, I’ll be provided for once I am
no longer employed.
So the manager (sometimes
called the “steward”) reduces the amounts owed to his employer. Here, the
complexities arise. Was the practice of reducing the debt a way of:
·
Avoiding the Law of Moses’ prohibition
against charging interest? Apparently, a common practice in Jesus’ time was to
write an invoice, adding charges to the actual amount owed, in order to realize
some gain. If so, then the manager is defrauding his employer out of something,
but that something is a something that the employer wasn’t entitled to, anyway.
·
Allowing the manager to continue to cheat
his employer by taking for himself a cut of the amount owed?
·
Realizing for himself his customary fee for
handling the accounts?
We don’t know what the
exact situation is, from what the Lord tells us in the parable. And,
ultimately, it doesn’t affect the meaning of the parable. The point of the
parable is that the “children of light” (a phrase which is sometimes more
commonly associated with John’s Gospel account…this phrase appears in Luke’s writing
only in this passage), that is to say, followers of Jesus, are to be honest in
their dealings and actions.
Which brings us back to
the matter of integrity.
The dishonest manager
tries to secure his future by obligating his employer’s debtors, telling them,
in effect, “Hey, I did you a favor, and now you owe me.” But the stark truth is
that such a plan will, eventually, fail. For one thing, those debtors may
renege on the deal. For another, their own funds and resources may run out,
leaving the dishonest manager out in the cold. What the manager tries to do
lacks integrity, which seems to be the very thing that got him into trouble in
the first place.
Integrity was an extremely
important issue for the early followers of Jesus. Again and again, St. Paul
admonishes those believers in the churches he had founded, telling them in
various places in his letters that they were not to live as they had lived
before they came to faith in Christ. They were, he said, to live uprightly, to
be faithful to the Lord, to be honest in their dealings with others, to welcome
the stranger and to care for the poor and the needy.
The matter of integrity is
just as important for the followers of Jesus today as it was back in the first
century when the infant Church was spreading throughout the known world. We are
to live uprightly, to be honest and forthright in all our dealings with others,
to welcome the stranger and to care for the poor and the needy.
The point to be gained is
that if we don’t live by those standards, then we’re quite likely to live as
the world around us lives. And if that’s the case, then there’s little evidence
that the relationship we claim we have with the Lord actually makes a
difference in our lives. So, if we Christians behave just like the outside world
does, then the question naturally arises, “Why bother?”
If we live just like
unbelievers do, the watching world around us might be tempted to say that we
Christians are just hypocrites, people who are possessed with “low judgment”
(which is the basic meaning of the word, coming from the Greek). Such people,
the watching world might be tempted to say, lack integrity, because Christians
who live the way the outside world does lack integrity. What Christians like
that say and profess isn’t “integrated” with what they do.
