Explaining the Parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16:1-15)

In Luke 16:1-15, Jesus tells the story of the dishonest steward. It begins thus: "There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, 'What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.'" We all are citizens of the earth. The world gave us our body, and provides for its nourishment and sustenance. Every material thing we need to live in this world is given to us by it: plants and animals for food; rivers, streams, brooks and fountains for water; flax and cotton; fuel and energy sources - we get all of this from the earth. We cannot live human lives without depending on the earth and its resources. So, in some sense, the earth is our master, and we are stewards or managers of its vast resources. We are supposed to use these resources frugally and carefully; modestly and prudently; with practical wisdom. 

All the foregoing becomes ever clearer to us when we are about to die. We observe that we do not take anything with us. Even our own bodies, with the flesh, bones, blood, sinews and joints that compose them, are left behind. We take absolutely nothing with us. The earth keeps them. It is at this point of death, at this point of being stripped of every material thing that our harsh master, the earth, says to us: "Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer." When we depart the earth, we are unable to continue to participate in the task of prudently using the earth's resources. We cannot be managers of the earth's wealth any longer - we don't have the participatory framework for it any longer; we have no bodies. One thing to note is that we were accused of being wasteful. We did not do enough good with the earth's resources; that's how come we were wasteful. We were not charitable enough. We were not kind and loving and giving enough. There was a lot of good and care we could have afforded to others, but we did not, caught up in our own greed and selfishness. All this is how come we were wasteful. 

And at the point of death, all of this becomes clear to us. At the point of death it is not the number of cars we bought and drove, or the houses we acquired, or the money piled up in bank accounts that we care about. No. What we care about is the friendships we made and kept; the joy and peace we brought to the lives of those around us; the amount of charity we did on behalf of others; what sort of lives we led. We question whether we have been good and liberal with our resources in assisting other people, who are less fortunate than we. And nearly always, we fall short.

Romans 3:23 says, "All have sinned and fallen short." And realizing all of this, we begin to take stock of our lives, hoping we can make amends before it is too late. As we draw closer to taking our last breath, we remonstrate with ourselves. "The manager said to himself, 'What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg. I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses'" (v3-4). On our deathbeds, we see clearly that people are more important than material wealth. We see that because people have souls - their spiritual aspect - and it is only through souls that they enter into the afterlife, the same place we are going after death, we begin to court people rather than hanker after wealth, so that we can deserve to join the souls in the afterlife in peace. We seek to trade in physical possessions for soulful capital, the only viable legal tender in the afterlife.

It's like traveling from a country where the currency is say, booboos; to a country where the currency is coocoos. Since we cannot spend our booboos in the new country, we find a way to exchange all the booboos we're going with, with the coocoos we'll need in the new country. Otherwise we won't be able to buy the things we need for our survival in the new country. In the same way, realizing that our wealth will not come with us from earth to heaven and will be unsuitable capital for any venture in the afterlife, we try to convert it even on our deathbeds with the viable capital of human souls.

 

Valuing people over and above things, we give our things to people in this life, hoping that they give us their eternal love and goodwill which, unlike physical wealth, can be spent in the next life. This spiritual wealth of love, companionship, goodwill and fraternity can go with us to the next life, because they are spiritual goods. They come with us in our reason and our consciousness, containers that are non-degradable, and non-biological. If on the other hand we focus solely on physical wealth and never once seek to exchange it for spiritual wealth, we end up with nothing to take to the afterlife, and so we do not get there at all. This is the same point Charles Dickens tries to make in his famous work, A Christmas Carol, with the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. Jesus also makes a similar point in the parable of the sheep and the goats, as contained in Matt 25:31-46.

"So the manager called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' 'Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,' he replied. The manager told him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.' Then he asked the second, 'And how much do you owe?' 'A thousand bushels of wheat,' he replied. He told him, 'Take your bill and make it eight hundred.'" The manager began immediately to convert physical wealth to goodwill; human capital. He hoped that in lessening the material burdens of his master's debtors; in other words, in giving financial relief to them, he could obtain their gratitude and goodwill. This spiritual wealth of gratitude and goodwill would be useful in the afterlife, where the monies of this life would be useless. The bible tells us that the master commended the steward for what he did. In the same way, as people of conscience, when we do good with our material possessions, we feel a sense of satisfaction, of wholesomeness and pleasure that is abundant indeed. It is even greater than the pleasure we got from increasing our material wealth, when we were not conscious of the afterlife. Jesus wants us to apply the same zeal with which we once chased after physical wealth in our pursuit of spiritual wealth.

He said, "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own? No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." When we become conscious of the relative worthlessness of material wealth when juxtaposed with spiritual wealth, we begin to prefer the latter. This preference for the latter makes us positioned for admission into heaven, because "what earth-focused people value highly is detestable in God's sight" (v15c). This message clearly concerns us all, and educates us on how to use physical wealth in a passing life. It shows us how to use wealth that belongs not to us but to the earth in such a detached and sacrificial fashion as to merit wealth that does belong to us for all eternity.