Friday in the 31st Week Of Ordinary Time, November 5, 2021

Luke 16:1-8

Jesus said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another he said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than the children of light.”

The Lord’s parables often described incidents of terrible injustice which, instead of telling how the offended party was avenged, as the reader expects and desires, ended absurdly, often without any resolution at all.  The reader is left to draw his own conclusions as to the point the Lord intended to make — indeed, forcing him to rethink how he understands reality.  We find this so in his more famous parables such as that of The Prodigal Son and The Good Samaritan.  The parable the Lord tells here particularly challenges us because at its conclusion, evil seems to be rewarded.  

“A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property.”  The opening line sets us up to expect the Lord to tell us of how this wicked man will be punished, and he is:  The rich man caught him and ordered him, “Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.”  The rich man wants to know how much of his money and property this steward has squandered, but he leaves the steward to prepare the report.  The steward, for his part, may be wicked, but he is a practical man: “What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg.”  From this we learn that the steward has truly squandered the property and has not even saved any of it for himself.  

After thinking it over, the steward comes up with a scheme by which he will ingratiate himself with those in debt to his master so that he might later sponge off of them.  He calls in the debtors to pay back what they owe.  The first man owed “one hundred measures of olive oil”.  Calculating from the unit given in the Greek text, this comes to eight or nine hundred gallons of olive oil in modern terms.  In the best of times, as an olive tree can produce only about a gallon of oil a year, we see right away the substantial nature of this man’s debt.  It is far more than he could repay.  This man would have trembled, thinking that he would be sold into slavery or put into debtor’s prison for the rest of his life.  But the steward said to him, “Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.”  Although still a large amount, the reprieve would have left the man shaking from relief.  The next man owed “one hundred measures of wheat.”  The “measure” in the Greek text is a transliteration of a Hebrew measure of volume, not of weight.  Each kor, then, had a volume of fifty-eight gallons of water: the wheat would have taken up as much space as fifty eight hundred gallons of water.  In other words, what would be held by several large barns, also nearly impossible to pay back over the course of a human lifespan.  “Here is your promissory note: write one for eighty.”  The steward makes the debt a little more manageable.  Again, the debtor would have been much relieved that he was not going to be sold into slavery and also that his debt was reduced.

“And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.”  Based on what the Lord has already said, the reader expects the steward to get into even more trouble with his master, but this is not what happens.  The reader is left dumbfounded that the cheated and defrauded master “commends” the steward for taking care of himself in this way.  We are left wondering that the rich man possesses such wealth that these losses mean little to him.  We might also consider that this man  himself became rich through immoral means, such as usury.  The steward then goes off from the man’s employment with his plans to live with the debtors whom he had saved.  The Lord’s explanation for the parable does not shed much light at first: “The children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than the children of light.”  The Lord means that the wicked shamelessly look to provide a hole for themselves to hide in so that they may get away with their crimes.  They even cheat each other to do this.  But the “children of light”, the baptized, often go about as though their baptism alone will save them for the next world.  But those who have been baptized must grow in faith and good works.  They must not become complacent.  St. James reminds us, “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2, 14-27).  That is, without good works, faith dies and the soul is lost.

The Lord tells us to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6, 20).  Let the children of light perform good works for the love of God so that they will be welcomed into heaven when they are dismissed from this earthly life.