Twenty-Fifth Sunday September 18, 2022
Amos 8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-8; Luke 16:1-13
An angel appears at a faculty meeting and tells the dean
that he has come to reward him for his years of devoted service. He was asked
to choose one of three blessings: either infinite wealth, or infinite fame or
infinite wisdom. Without hesitation, the dean asks for infinite wisdom. “You
got it!” says the angel, and disappears. All heads turn toward the dean, who
sits glowing in the aura of wisdom. Finally, one of his colleague’s whispers,
“Say something.” The dean looks at them and says, “I should have taken the
money.”
Today’s parable challenges us to be smart in the pursuit of
the kingdom of God just as godless people are smart in their pursuit of selfish
goals and ambitions. Jesus uses the example of a smart manager in his master’s
business to teach us the need to be smart in the Lord’s service. We are
challenged to imitate the manager’s shrewdness, not his dishonesty. “The master
commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly” (Luke 16:8).
We must note that the rich man did not praise the manager
for being dishonest. He praised him for having taken the proper steps at a time
of crisis to cancel the excessive interest that he was demanding for his
personal profit. He praised the slave for being shrewd in fixing things and
acting smartly so that he would find favour in the eyes of his master and those
who had borrowed from him. In a clever way, he managed to manipulate the
debtors and put the manager in a position where he cannot reverse these actions
without acting shamefully and accruing public disgrace. The dishonest steward will still be fired
from his job and we do not know whether he will fully benefit from his evil
actions. He had to do something and he did it very cleverly.
The listeners would have understood that this man was simply
finding a solution for his difficulties. The moral that Jesus gives his disciples is
the shrewdness of the people of the world which ought to be imitated by
all. The point of the story is not that
it is acceptable to be dishonest so long as one is clever or shrewd. The point
is that the time of crisis demands actions of some kind. For Jesus, the advent
of the Kingdom of God demands decisive action now. Caution must be set aside
and the moment of opportunity seized to make provision for the future. He says
that the children of this age are shrewder in dealing with their own generation
than are the children of light.
We are all called to be managers. God has entrusted the
whole of His creation into our hands as His managers. Jesus Christ, in
addition, entrusts the kingdom of God – the kingdom of love, justice and peace
– into our hands as his managers. World peace and harmony, and the renewal of
all things in Christ, are the business of us all, collectively and
individually. Jesus calls it the kingdom of God. Our business as followers of
Christ, non-ordained as well as ordained believers, is to help bring about the
kingdom of God starting from our own selves. We have all been given the
necessary resources to do this. We have been equipped with the truth of faith,
we have been empowered by the Holy Spirit who dwells in our hearts, and we have
been given time. Sooner or later we shall all be called upon to render an
account of how we have invested and managed these resources.
Events in our world show that we live in difficult and precarious times, like the manager in the parable. The manager faced squarely the truth of his helplessness and vulnerability and did something about it. Why do we keep on telling ourselves the lie that we are safe and secure and that nothing can ever happen to us? We do not have to wait, like the dishonest servant, for a last minute display of smartness to fix our eternal concerns. The time to be smart is now. The smart manager used what he could not keep to get what he needed so badly, friendship with his business associates. We should likewise invest all our temporal and spiritual resources to gain the only thing that matters in the end: the kingdom of God.
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