This morning’s Gospel reading is Luke 16:1–13:

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 the steward said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ The steward 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 are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones. If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.”

In recent years, a dispute has percolated among historians and activists about the manner in which we view the past. Do we judge people and their actions on the basis of the context of their times, or do we judge them on the basis of our own values, advancements, and beliefs? The latter is termed “presentism” and has become a hotly debated topic of late in academic and political circles.

Today’s Gospel speaks to a similar issue, although one with far greater implications for eschatology and our understanding of the spiritual warfare involved in it. Do we allow the context of our fallen world to blind us? Or can we lift our minds above the systems of our times to see truth clearly?

In his parable of the shrewd steward, Jesus challenges us to think through these implications. It’s one of the more impenetrable parables Jesus leaves us, because on the face of it, it seems like an endorsement of cheating and theft. The rich man threatens his steward for squandering his resources, and the steward responds by cheating his patron of what he is owed by allowing his debtors to trim off their debts to the rich man. This is a blatant attempt to curry favor with the debtors in the hope of finding shelter once the rich man casts the steward in the street, as Jesus explicitly states.

And yet, rather than rage in anger at the further theft of his resources, the master commends the steward for prudence. What explains this contradiction?

The contradiction is the point. Both the rich man and the steward are part of a corrupt system, and the system rewards that kind of corruption. Neither man serves justice; both are looking out for their own material positions. Their “context,” their value system is structured around material wealth, and as such their incentives lead them into false and sinful behavior.

Today’s first reading from Amos 8:4-7 touches on this as well. The prophet vents the Lord’s anger at the Israelites in the Northern Kingdom not long before the Assyrian destruction about their dishonest systems. Like the steward of Jesus’ parable, they cheat by diminishing the measures by which they conduct their commerce:

Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land! “When will the new moon be over,” you ask, “that we may sell our grain, and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat? We will diminish the ephah, add to the shekel, and fix our scales for cheating! We will buy the lowly for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!” The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Never will I forget a thing they have done!

This is not quite “presentism,” but it is its cousin in theological terms. We create systems within our cultures to rationalize greed and avarice, and these dishonest systems incentivize dishonest people. It leads to our destruction in the long run, but because those incentives serve dishonesty, it rewards the sinful most of all.

The Lord didn’t approve of it in pre-Assyrian exile Israel, and Jesus doesn’t approve of it here either. Jesus gives us this clear signal the moral to the parable: “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” The children of light are His disciples and their eventual disciples after Jesus founds His church. The others are those stuck in the context of “their own generation,” which lives in the perverse incentive structures meant to reward the pursuit of material wealth and power — “mammon,” as Jesus names it.

We can only expect salvation by freeing ourselves of the traps of these incentive systems in a fallen world. To achieve this, Jesus teaches His disciples to become trustworthy in all matters, despite being trapped in dishonest systems. We are called to transcendence over mammon and its systems, not shrewd machinations within it.

Some other scholars see this passage differently. In some analyses, the action of the steward removes his own dishonest commissions from these exchanges, which is why the rich man praises him. That certainly may be one interpretation, but that argues for the system itself — and doesn’t really address the steward’s dishonest motivation to ingratiate himself with others rather than perform his stewardship honestly. After all, a steward’s primary fiduciary duty is to his patron, not himself.

And this is where we fail most often. We are stewards of Creation and the material world, and we also have a duty to our Lord to use our resources wisely on His behalf. Instead, we use them for our own purposes and fall into systems of sin of our own creation. The cure for that is not to rationalize our remaining in those systems by somehow attempting to “pay off” our judgment, but to transcend them and truly repent of our sins. If we remain within those systems, we are not serving the Lord nor our own eternal, eschatological interests. We are serving another master altogether through our obsession with material wealth and power, one whose intent is to lead us away from the Lord.

The choice between God and mammon is in recognizing the context of this spiritual warfare — and then choosing firmly and completely one side or the other. Waffling may make us look like “shrewd stewards” from within the corrupt systems we have created, but … not for long.

The front-page image is a detail from “Parable of the Shrewd Manager” by Marinus van Reymerswaele, c. 16th century. On display at the National Museum in Warsaw. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.