The Parable of the Dishonest Steward

This past weekend, the Church set before us one of the most mysterious parables Jesus ever told, the Parable of the Dishonest Steward (Lk 16:1-12). It's the sort of thing that makes homilists all over the world feel their collars tighten and gives them an overwhelming urge to just skip the Gospel and focus on some nice social justice message about helping poor people based on the reading from the prophets. The whole parable is baffling, not least because Jesus (not for the only time in His preaching) seems to love using a sort of whimsical anti-logic that reminds me of nothing so much as Douglas Adams.

Adams, in one of his more wonderful lines, describes the fleet of spacecraft that comes to demolish earth thusly: "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." It's a classic sort of sense of humor that the Irish have come to perfect. When I was in Belfast a few years back, my host took me to dinner and, as we were leaving the restaurant, he gestured to a painting of a hunting scene and said, "Have you ever seen an Irish wolfhound?" I peered at the picture of the baying dog and tried to recall if I'd ever encountered the breed before. I was just about to turn to him and say, "No," when he gestured to the picture again and said, "That is not an Irish wolfhound." He wore a smile of deep pleasure as he said this.

And I can't help but suspect that Jesus felt rather pleased with His little parable gag, too. Like the Parable of the Unjust Judge (Lk 18:1-8), Jesus' Parable of the Dishonest Steward holds up for our inspection a character whom we hesitate to set before our children as a model citizen. After some scandalous behavior by the main characters, each parable is then brought to a close with a curiously odd denouement. In the parable of the Unjust Judge, Jesus tells us that God is just like that Unjust Judge isn't. The Unjust Judge was a curmudgeonly slugabed who couldn't be bothered with the widow's plea. In just exactly not that way, God will vindicate His elect speedily. It's one of the quirkiest forms of emphasis Jesus uses.

Similarly, in the Parable of the Dishonest Steward, Jesus' moral appears to be, "Observe the crooked steward: Be just the way he isn't. Instead of screwing people out of money, instead of being focused on money at all, use money to help the poor so that you can have real treasure in heaven." It's an extraordinarily strange (and I think deliberately funny) parable that is, like a lot of peasant humor, played straight-faced to an audience that is not certain whether it's supposed to laugh.

Part of the difficulty, of course, is that we are certain we know all about parables, so when these parable zig where we are certain they are supposed to zag, it throws us for a loop. But the reality is, we don't really understand parables as well as we are sure we do, because (as the above-mentioned parables make clear) we don't always think like Jesus (and we especially don't tend to think that He had a sense of humor or a puckish joy at saying odd things calculated to make us think).

Part of the reason we feel especially self-confident that we know what's going on with parables is that we have been conditioned to think that Jesus always taught in parables. And part of the reason we assume this is because we suffer from chronic chronological snobbery and the conviction that we are 2,000 years smarter than the supposedly dumb peasants Jesus addressed. So we assume that parables are just a good way of teaching these simple folk deep truths, whereas we can skip the parable and just breeze on to the (we are certain) obvious and now well-worn moral of the parable.

This assumption is, however, dead wrong. For example, we know that Jesus did not always speak in parables. We know this because in the first two books of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus' teaching is not parabolic. You may say, "First two books? I thought there was only one Gospel of Matthew!"

Right you are. Just one Gospel. But Matthew is a very subtle literary architect. His Gospel consists of a prologue (the infancy narrative), then five "books," with each book containing a narrative and discourse section. The narrative section of Book 1 is Matthew 3-4, telling the story of Jesus' baptism and temptation. The discourse section of Book 1 is the Sermon on the Mount. The narrative section of Book 2 is Matthew 8-9, and the discourse section is Matthew 10.

Why five books? The hint is given by Matthew in 5:1-2: "Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them." Matthew's point is that Jesus is a Second Moses, going up a second Mountain to deliver the New Law of the New Covenant. Just as Moses' revelation is delivered via the five books of the Torah, so Jesus' revelation comes in five books as well.

Now the thing to note is this: The Sermon on the Mount in Book 1 and the Missionary Discourse in Book 2 both employ clear language, not parables. It is not until we reach Matthew 13, after Jesus has found the leadership of Israel so hardened against him that they accuse him of being possessed by the "prince of demons" (11:24), that He begins to obscure His message by delivering it in the form of parables. Why?

For an answer, we must (as usual with Matthew) look back at the Old Testament. There are two parables in the Old Testament that are most prominent: Jotham's parable and Nathan's parable. Jotham is a prophet who tells a parable to King Abimelech in Judges 9. Abimelech was not supposed to be king, but after he killed his 70 brothers, there was nobody left to fill the job. So Jotham told Abimelech a parable about a bramble who was made "king of the trees" after other, worthier trees were passed over for the job. In short, Abimelech is the bramble.

In the same way, in 2 Samuel 12, Nathan told David the parable of the rich man who stole the poor man's one lamb and offered it to his guests. When David replied, "The man who has done this deserves to die!" Nathan answered, "You are the man!" and spelled out for him his crime of adultery and murder with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite. Why then are parables told? Because leadership has become corrupt, and corruption has blinded those who say they see and deafened those who say they hear.

With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: "You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them."

The original context of this passage was Isaiah's account of his own call as a prophet, in which the Lord assured the prophet that he would be rejected by his countrymen and that his message would fall on blind eyes and deaf ears. Isaiah would prophesy "until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without men, and the land is utterly desolate, and the LORD removes men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land" (Is 6:11-12). In other words, God told Isaiah that his prophecies would only result in the hardening of Israel, who did not want to hear what he had to say. And that hardening would result in the judgment of the Assyrian invasion. Now, Jesus warns of the same thing and, paradoxically, makes that warning clear by beginning to veil His message in parables.

This hiddenness of the message is reflected by the fact that there are two collections of sayings in Matthew 13: one in the boat to the crowds, and the other in the house to the disciples. Those locations are not accidental, but are invested by Matthew with a theological significance.

In the case of the boat, there is, of course, a mundane reason for the location: Jesus goes out in the boat to speak to the large crowd on shore, because it's easier for everyone to hear. Matthew, however, hints at a deeper significance here as well. To the ancient Jewish mind, "the waters" are always symbolic of death and chaos. Boats (for example, Noah's ark), in contrast, symbolize salvation. Jesus Himself, in Matthew 24, will link salvation (and judgment) with the image of Noah. Peter also will make a clear connection between Noah and the Church's sacrament of baptism (1 Pet 3:18-22). So Matthew draws our attention to Jesus in the boat as He speaks to "the crowds," that is, to those who "do not see," "do not hear," and "do not understand" (v. 13). As the Church, the new ark of salvation, shall do later, Jesus speaks over the chaos to the world (often portrayed as a chaotic and tossing sea in Scripture) and is not understood, because the world does not want to understand him.

The message, then, is "hidden" in a way that is almost a satire on the world's blindness. For note what the parables have in common: Seed is sown. But where is it? It's invisible. Does the seed vary in quality? No, it's the soil that varies in quality. The harvest is poorer or richer not because God is competent some days and bumbling on others, but because His revelation falls on rocks, shallow soil, and good soil (vv. 3-9). In the same way, good wheat is hidden among the weeds (vv. 24-30), mustard seed is hidden by its tininess (vv. 31-32), and leaven (v. 33) is simply invisible, kneaded into the bread as the Church is kneaded into the world. After this, there is a treasure that is (once again) hidden, a pearl (hidden in an oyster), and a net that scoops up every kind of fish, good and bad, and thereby keeps the good fish obscured among the bad fish who will be thrown away (vv. 44-50).

But the kingdom that is hidden from the world is not hidden from the disciples. As Jesus says to His disciples, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given" (v. 11). And so Matthew tells us Jesus "left the crowds and went into the house" where He proceeds to explain the parables. In other words, it is only within the Church that the mystery of Christ can be fully understood. As G. K. Chesterton put it in The Everlasting Man, Jesus is the riddle and the Church is the answer. The Church is the leaven of the world making it holy. The Church is a net pulling in both good and bad fish, a field growing both wheat and weeds. But whatever chaotic waves of history the boat must ride, the King of the kingdom remains enthroned forever, yet Himself hidden -- in the bread of the Eucharist and in the least of these where He appears to us in the faces of the poor.

That is why the Parable of the Dishonest Steward brings us forcibly back to the vision of the use of "dishonest mammon" for the sake of making eternal friends. The master of the steward has enough common sense to realize that, crook though he was, the dishonest steward at least knew the moral of the parable of the sheep and the goats: that if you hope to come to a happy ending when (not if) your luck in this world runs out, then you should do your best to get in good with the ones with whom the Judge will consult when He is deliberating His verdict about you on That Day: the hungry, thirsty, sick, naked, and imprisoned. If you come with tip-top recommendations from the upper-crust citizens of hell, but don't have the least of these to put in a good word for you, then Heaven help you, brother, because the hope of your salvation is hidden indeed.

This was the teaching this sunday at my church. I’ve NEVER understood it. Was the dishonest steward supposed to be getting in good with the master’s creditors so he’d be welcome there if he got kicked out? Why did his master “commend” him for his cleverness? Then the parable ends with saying you can’t serve God and money.

Thanks for this interesting commentary. I always wondered if something was lost in the translation because this one always had me scratching my head. I’d like to show it to our Pastor and see what he thinks: He’s from Nigeria and has a wonderful sense of humor, so it would definitely be interesting to get his take on it.

The master of the steward has enough common sense to realize that, crook though he was, the dishonest steward at least knew the moral of the parable of the sheep and the goats: that if you hope to come to a happy ending when (not if) your luck in this world runs out, then you should do your best to get in good with the ones with whom the Judge will consult when He is deliberating His verdict about you on That Day: the hungry, thirsty, sick, naked, and imprisoned.

Yes. It is not that mysterious.

The manager does something good and something bad. The good that he does is firstly, good in the economic mundane sense: when a business is burdened by "bad debt" -- that is, debt that won't be repaid because the debtor is too poor, -- it is good business practice to discount debt, that is, write off a part of the principal in order to motivate the debtor to uindertake the repayment of the rest. This is why the owner praises the manager.

The economic good is also a spiritual good, as it is an exercise of charity. Inadvertently, the self-serving motivation that the manager had turns out quite valid. This is why Jesus praises the manager indirectly advising us to make friends with "the mammon of iniquity".

But the manager did his discounting dishonestly: instead of suggesting that as a strategy to the owner, he falsified the records. Therefore, the parable concludes with the exhortation to honesty.

The simplest way to look at this is the steward is called dishonest from the start, this means he was likely overcharging or taking a larger share of the transaction than he should have. An indictment of the religious ruling class of Jesus time would also be that they high priests were taking a larger share of both the offerings and of God’s grace than they should have been doing.

A parallel indictment could have been made of Judas who was also dishonest with both the money and the grace entrusted to his care.

Jesus says the master was impressed with the steward when he returned this excess to others. You and I may be misers when it comes to using our gifts for others and we may overcharge for them until we realize that we are going to account for our actions to the master. When that realization, we should do our best to return the grace and gifts God has given us.

This parable is best understood as satire. The Lord used this before “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick...”

In this case, he addresses the unbelieving Jews and challenges them to live the paradigm they propose....they lie, cheat, defraud during life...so do that to your master...and see if they say “well done” and give you an eternal reward...he takes it to extreme...”they will receive you into everlasting habitations...”

Jesus offered the conditions of everlasting habitations to them and they rejected it...so he turns it around on them and says they will have to depend on bliss in the next life based on their behavior now which is dishonest...but I’m sure you have that all figured out...NOT...

Otherwise, the parable makes no sense

You need to think of this parable in the construct of a satire. The Lord was speaking to unbelieving Jews...(no doubt the ones he accused of having the Devil as their father in John 8).

Anyway, the Jews rejected his message so the Lord tells this parable where wickedness and treachery are rewarded in the next life and then he says...” they will receive you into everlasting habitations...of course, we know the children of light are not as wise as the children of the world (wink).”

He is challenging the Jews to take their precepts all the way and logically fit them to reward and ultimate outcome....of course they can’t. They defraud people, love money, lie, warp the commandments of God...so Jesus says...ok, you’ll be rewarded and be received by your ilk in the next life...it is ridiculous.....

See it as satire and it makes sense....literally, it makes no sense at al.

The only problem with this is that the owner COMMENDED the unrighteous steward for unlawful behavior (”I know, I will get these debtors to like me...perhaps one of them will hire me some daay if I get fired..”). He had not consulted his master on this.

No, Jesus is pointing out the absurdity of the illogical system of behavior/reward the Jews had erected. They defraud and cheat, are slothful, commit unlawful usury....and he sarcastically states “they will receive you into everlasting habitations....(sure they will) for we all know (wink, wink) the children of this world are much wiser than the children of light (yeah, right).

Carry on as you have....your “god” will commend you and you will receive a heavenly reward....these people were so blind, they thought their deception of their master here must issue in a reward to them eventually.

But Paul tells us the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God as Jesus points out here in this parable.

I can imagine the body language of Jesus if some disciples were present...winks, eyes rolling....and the disciples trying to use up face control to keep from laughing out loud.

It is a literary device....sometimes allegory as Paul states in Galatians 4...other times it must be deduced. Here it is the only sane explanation or the passage makes no sense.

Matthew 9:: 10-12
Verse 10 And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.

Verse 11 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?

Verse 12 But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

This is sarcasm....dripping with it. Self righteous Pharisees judge people Jesus associates with so he calls them “healthy” and says he is attending to the sick (at least those who know they are)

We don’t need to be informed the healthy don’t need a physician, it is obvious. Here the Lord uses this as a dig at the Pharisees....

It helps immensely to have a sense of Whom God is, His character and personality. In one passage Jesus refers the Pharisees back to an Old Testament passage where judges of the people are referred to as 'gods', little "G". He was mocking them because the Old Testament is ONLY about 'Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God is One.' That he would refer the self-righteous sticklers to something anathema to the Torah is a clear put down in that light. There is a modern religion which tries to cite that passage as proof that God has said we may become gods. But to take Jesus's words that way is to contradict all that the Old Testament stood for.

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