Investing Wisely
Twenty-fifth Sunday of the Year. Fr Martin Ganeri advises us to be canny with our unearthly riches.
The parable of the unjust steward is surely meant to make us laugh. Faced with dismissal, he sets about winning favour with his master’s debtors by getting them to cut down what they owe, before he gives the account to his master. He acts as a complete rascal. We are meant to laugh at the figure of the unjust steward, amused at his craftiness, though unsympathetic to his character and what he does.
Now, on one level, the parable serves to make the point that we should strive for the riches that God offers to us. As we laugh at the unjust steward, so the slightly sharp comment that Christ makes strikes home:
For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the sons of light.
The parable leads on to Christ also contrasting and opposing seeking material wealth and seeking the wealth that God offers us. As Christ tells us at the end of the Gospel passage for this Sunday:
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other, of he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
There is a lot about money in this Gospel passage and much of it seems to be presenting a negative view about material wealth, or at about the way people are interested in it.
In these days of economic uncertainty, money is certainly very much on our own minds. The rising rate of inflation is evident; the stagnating state of the economy in general; rising taxes and a sense that people are struggling to make ends meet; the difficulties many have with finding affordable housing. All this is making life hard for people.
We are very much aware of the need to think very carefully about money, about how we spend money, about what we get from our money. We know the consequence of good or bad management of money and how easy it can be to end up with not enough money to pay the bills.
Now, certainly, Christ is telling us that money can ensnare us, when greed for getting as much wealth for ourselves as we can takes hold of us, or meanness in sharing wealth with others makes us closed to the needs of others. We know all too well how the desire for money can corrupt people’s minds, can cause terrible friction within families when it comes to wills and inheritance or can lead people to defraud or to steal.
Christ is also telling us that there is a scale of value between material riches and spiritual riches. The riches of salvation, of communion with God and of love for God and neigbour, are more valuable than worldly wealth. If our desire for material wealth causes us to forget this or to sacrifice it, then we have gone very wrong. Christ is telling us to use material wealth to get spiritual wealth, for instance in by spending money out of charity for others, which will bring about the spiritual wealth of love.
However, with the parable of the unjust steward, Christ is also encouraging us to think of the search for spiritual riches as being similar to the way we search for material riches, to the way we are rightly concerned with making the best of the money we have, as we face the material needs we have in our lives.
Christ is telling us that we need to as canny with making the best of our spiritual wealth as we are with material wealth. Our spiritual wealth is something that is given to us by God, but we can be canny or we can careless when it comes to receiving them, cultivating them and keeping them. And we can also lose them, if we are reckless.
For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the sons of light.
These words challenge us to think how astute we are when it comes to the spiritual riches on offer to us. Do we care for them as much as we do for material riches in the sense of investing the same care in getting, using and keeping them as we do with material riches?
In these days of such material uncertainty, it is a great joy to us that we know that there are spiritual riches that remain always freely on offer to us, that we need never have to go without this spiritual wealth. All we have to do is to want them, to be open to receiving them, to strive for them and to rejoice in them when we have them.
Readings: Amos 8:4-7 | 1 Timothy 2:1-8 | Luke 16:1-13
Image: detail from The Parable of the Unjust Steward by AN Mironov via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
