Dear Parishioner,
I love the cartoon which shows two men in a dungeon, without windows or doors. They are manacled to the wall by their wrists, ankles and necks. Both have long beards; they have obviously been there for some time. One is leaning over to the other and whispers: “Now, here’s my plan.”
Today’s gospel is often referred to as the Rich Man and the Dishonest Steward or Manager. It is a difficult story and it not always clear what Luke intends by it. And by the end of the story we are hard-pressed to determine whether we should applaud the steward’s astuteness, laugh at his solution to his problem or feel guilty for enjoying an account of cheating, which on one level is precisely what it is. Perhaps there was no single point to begin with or maybe that after two millennia on we have just lost sight of what the author intended in the first place. No matter.
In an earlier story in Luke, you will recall that the younger son takes his inheritance and squanders it. And as he hits rock bottom a survival plan occurs to him though his plan is trumped by the wild welcome of his father. In today’s story of the dishonest manager, property is also squandered and the manager, at least in his imagination, also hits rock bottom. He isn’t immediately threatened with starvation as is the ‘prodigal son’ but he faces job loss, being shunned by all and sundry and that will ultimately lead to hard times and maybe even starvation as he is unused to manual labour and begging. But he too seems to have the makings of a plan.
Neither of these characters however, whilst believing they can see a way out of their immediate miserable circumstances, is particularly skilled in what we might call spiritual survival. Each might see some kind of temporary ‘escape plan’ but for a spiritual survival plan what is needed is something far greater. We may be shrewd in matters of the world, or we may be fortunate in financial acumen but maybe we are not so good in keeping the spiritual alive. Someone out there put it thus: “The more I thought about it, the more I became determined not to live an unlived life.” A commitment to live spiritually is an important first step to finding a way to live spiritually. The aphorism at the end of the gospel “You cannot serve both God and mammon” at first glance seems a bit out of place in the story but it is there for a purpose: it serves to remind us that just as we cannot buy our way in to the kingdom of God, if the use of money is unrelated to the values of the kingdom then people will get hurt.
Deacon Alex
