You Cannot Serve God and Wealth

Jesus said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property.

Ah – another of Jesus’ familiar parables, or perhaps not so familiar. A friend of mine, a regular churchgoer, said to me, when I mentioned this parable to her, that it was one with which she was not acquainted. Perhaps that is because it is one of those parables that at first sounds fairly straightforward, but the more you think about, the more complicated it becomes.

There was a rich man, but who is he?  Who does he represent?  When Jesus presents us with a “rich man”, a master, a landlord, the person at the top, we tend to think of God the Father, but is this rich man meant to draw our attention to God, or might he be in some way dishonest himself, like his manager? He does seem to run a tight ship, so when he hears he is being cheated by his manager, he has no hesitation in dismissing the man. This doesn’t quite fit our image of a forgiving God, a God who will give us another chance if we repent. But – the rich man is the one with property, the one whose riches the manager has mishandled. Who is he?  We won’t know for certain until later in the parable. 

Who is the manager? He is the one who dispenses the property of the rich man, the one to whom all the rich man’s goods have been entrusted. That is a rather staggering responsibility, and to have been given such a job, the rich man must have truly trusted the manager. And here we have an example of what temptation can do, because over time the manager has begun to treat the rich man’s goods as if they were his own.  Thus, he has begun squandering them, using them in a way that best profits himself. 

The parable doesn’t tell us just how the manager did this, but if we look at the way we treat all the gifts we have been given by our “rich man”, who in our case definitely is God, from the smallest scrap of bread to the entire planet, we can see how quickly we forget whose property it is with which we are dealing. As the manager has done with the property of his landlord, we’ve gone off the deep end when it comes to squandering God’s gifts to us.

So – getting back to the manager - having been caught out, what does he do? He certainly doesn’t throw himself on the mercy of the rich man, confess his crimes, and beg for forgiveness.  Instead, he uses his talent for the dishonest to come up with a plan to cover his loses and provide for his future. He summons the rich man’s debtors one by one, and reduces their bills, so that when he is dismissed as manager, the people whose debts he reduced may welcome him into their homes.

The alarming thing about the manager’s reasoning, is that at first it doesn’t sound all that bad to us. It sounds very clever, very shrewd, a wise plan to provide for his future – but it is also dishonest, and another example of the manager treating the rich man’s goods as if they were his.

We have been presented with a shrewd and worldly manager who, if we are honest, has in many ways done the same things we do every day. I doubt any of us are free of the tendency to see things as “ours”. It is our house, our car, our clothes, our job, our toys, our time, our money. But everything we have, that we claim to “own”, is a blessing, entrusted to us by our loving God. And on a larger scale, we see this as “our” world, and often mistreat it and our brothers and sisters with reckless abandon – though we rarely admit to ourselves that we are doing so.

Up to this point we understand the picture Jesus is painting. The manager, having mishandled the property of the rich man, has been caught out, and has come up with a worldly solution to his situation. We are the managers of that which belongs to God. If we squander what God has given us, there will be a reckoning, and it will not go well for us. But, since we often do misuse God’s gifts, are we meant to then, like the manager, go out and find a more devious way to support ourselves and thus thwart the punishment of God?  And what does all of this mean for our souls?

Jesus tells us the rich man commended the dishonest manager, and this is where we come to realize the rich man definitely does not represent God. Because the rich man is himself dishonest, which is why he is impressed with the cunning way the manager has handled the situation.

Jesus follows this by saying, “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes”. What???

Luke, who wrote down this parable, clearly had difficulty understanding it himself.  It is obviously something Jesus really said, because were it not, such a confusing statement said by our LORD would not have made its way into Luke’s Gospel. What does it mean?

Thomas Acquinas believed that, “By this we are given to understand, that if the master of this unjust [manager] could commend him for his worldly prudence, though it were an overt act of injustice; how much more will the Almighty be pleased with those who, obedient to His command, seek to redeem their sins by alms-deeds?”

The parable reminds me of a story from WWII, about a Jewish woman who was a prisoner of the Nazi’s, and the young soldier assigned to execute her. In the dead of a freezing winter at one of the camps, the young soldier was told to take the woman to an open courtyard, strip her of her clothes, douse her with water, and leave her to freeze to death. He did as ordered, but as he turned to go, the woman cried out, “Is this what your Jesus would do?”.  The soldier stopped.  He was in full uniform, which included a heavy, warm overcoat. In that moment of truth, he took off his overcoat, and gave it to the woman.

How the story ended, I do not know, but the soldier, in a sudden flash of grace, realized that the woman’s life had been given to her by God, and that he had no right to take it.  And so, he risked his own life in giving away that which had been given to him by a worldly master, so that he might respect what he knew would certainly be the wishes of his heavenly one. In this life, he probably got into a lot of trouble with his superiors for handing over his overcoat and disobeying what he had been ordered to do. But that act of selflessness, no matter the worldly cost, certainly shone brightly for him before God.

This is the point Jesus is making in the parable. The more of our worldly wealth we part with, the more we realize the distinction between what is eternally important and what is merely perishing, the more we give away in order to support others, the more we spread the Love that does not perish, the better it will be for us, not just in the next world, but within our hearts and souls during our lives here on earth.

We need to be faithful with our perishable worldly wealth, so that we may be entrusted with the true riches of the Spirit. We need to stop saying “mine” about everything. The temptation we face is to forget whose world this is and by whose grace we have what we have, and thus forget to handle all things with reverence, generously, lovingly sharing what we have with others.

We need always to remember that, No one can serve two masters; for a servant will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

 The choice is ours.

Let us pray: (attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola)

Teach us, Lord Jesus, to be generous: to serve You as You deserve; to give, not counting the cost; to fight, not heeding the wounds; to toil, not asking for rest; to labor, not seeking any reward, save that of knowing that we do Your will. All this we ask for Your love and mercy’s sake.  Amen.