What Should We Do With Our Money?

I gather that some people think this parable of the Dishonest Steward is one of the most difficult and confusing of all Jesus' parables.

What we've got here is a man who is working as the steward (combined accountant, manager etc.) to a rich man, but who's really not up to the job. Not that he's stealing his boss's money and filling his own pocket: it's just that he's inefficient, wasting or squandering it. (More like the Church Commissioners than Robert Maxwell.) So his employer calls in the accounts. The steward knows he's for the high jump, the long walk of shame lies ahead. What to do? He won't be able to get a labouring job; he hasn't got the physical strength, he's always been a white-colour worker. He is too proud to go begging. So he hits on a scheme that will make him a whole lot of friends who will look out for him when he does get the sack. He calls in his master's creditors, and lets them off huge chunks of their debt: 20% or even 50%. That man's going to have a whole town full of grateful friends who will look after him when he needs it.

Now so far, Jesus' listeners are following along, thinking I wish the people I owe money to had an accountant like that. But then Jesus delivers his whammy: the master praises his steward, who has been dishonest, for his shrewdness.

I think this is what makes the parable seem difficult to some people. This is such an outrageous response that they can't believe it even within the story. And next, they can't believe that Jesus could be commending it as a right way of behaving. The trouble is, he does. Not as a way of keeping your job and rising to the heights of the corporation, perhaps; but as a way of getting on in the Kingdom of God, yes.

Jesus' parables are meant to be shocking, subversive. That's the whole point of them. The reason that this seems to us more shocking and subversive than, say, the parable of the vineyard (which went down a whole lot worse in its own day) says more about us that it does about Jesus. It forces us to face, perhaps, where our real values and allegiances lie. Perhaps we are, if we did but know it, more in the camp of Mammon than of God.

But Jesus is in no doubt about the nature of Mammon. NRSV translates the word as 'wealth', but in the Greek it's Mammon, which makes it sound personified, like some deity or idol, who is in competition with God. Not far wrong. And Jesus gives it the epithet unjust, or unrighteous. Calls it unrighteous Mammon, or the Mammon of unrighteousness.

I don't want to speculate about whether all wealth is unrighteous, or whether there are some kinds of wealth that are not unrighteous. What's certain, is that many many kinds of wealth are unrighteous; and perhaps one of the problems we have with this parable come from the nasty suspicion that our own wealth (and we all are wealthy, in global terms) may be among the unrighteous sort.

How do people get rich? Sometimes it's by good honest hard work. But good honest hard work doesn't make everyone rich, not by a long chalk. So what else is involved? Well, a lot of luck, that's also for sure. But very often, the person who gets rich does it at the expense of the others who don't. By making them do the work, and getting a bigger share of the rewards. (That's called, employing people.) By buying cheap and selling dear. (That's called, trade) By lending money you have, to someone who doesn't, and making them pay back much more. (That's called, normal - it's what our whole system is built on. But in OT times, and through much of Christian history, they called it by its correct name, usury.) No doubt there has to be employment, and profit, and unequal sharing of profits, and rules for lending and borrowing; without them it would be the end of civilisation as we know it. (We might have a more civil civilisation instead ...) But the way these are practised in the modern world, has gone way beyond the healthy and necessary, into the idolatrous and sinful. The salaries of footballers, celebrities, the fat cats of industry and commerce. The poverty of most of Africa: I don't know if you've seen this advert from Christian Aid:

Free Trade - Some people love it
Our Government claims Free Trade is the solution to the world's problems. But that's exactly what you would expect them to say when it allows them to profit. It's the millions of farmers in poorer nations who are being gradually ruined by FREE TRADE. Take the case of the onion farmers in Senegal. With Free Trade forced upon them, they are unable to sell their produce because their local markets are flooded with onions imported from Europe. The farmers are helpless to do anything but stand by and watch their crops rot and their livelihoods disappear. STOP THIS MADNESS. These farmers deserve a chance. Help us to get Tony Blair to listen by filling in the coupon below ...
Or go to www.votefortradejustice.org

It's not that the Senegalese farmers want to sell their onions in Europe and compete with us. Only to their local markets. But European farmers can grow them cheaper and fly them to Senegal cheaper (thanks to the regulations governing the costs of aircraft fuel, which favour the wealthy) than the Senegalese. 'Madness' doesn't seem too strong a word.

So what's the purpose of money? Jesus' message is: Make friends for yourself with unrighteous mammon (or wealth). Use your money to help the poor, those who need it. So that when it fails (because it will; and if nothing else this means when you die, when you have to leave it all behind because you can't take it with you) you'll have friends in heaven when the Judge examines whether your earthly wealth was won and held at the expense of the poor.

As I say, I suspect we feel uneasy about this parable not because we don't know what it means, but because subconsciously we know very well what it means. It means that in terms of that other parable Luke tells, of the rich man and Lazarus at his gate, we are the rich man whose fate is to languish in the fires of torment, while the poor man who suffered because of his greed rests in the comforting bosom of Abraham.

Preached at St Nicholas, Marston, September 16, 2004