Good Stewards
St. Luke 16:1-13
In the name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Spirit.
St. Luke 16:11 Therefore if you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… In today’s parable Jesus teaches us to be circumspect about how we use the things God gives us in this life. He could have just said, “Everything you have is a gift from your heavenly Father. All your possessions, your wealth, your time, your energy, your talents and gifts, these are all bestowed upon you graciously from your Father in heaven. Therefore, be careful how you use them.” And that would be most certainly true. But that wouldn’t necessarily sink deep into our hearts.
To plant and drive this message deeper and more firmly in our minds, Jesus tells a parable of a master who had entrusted all his goods and possessions to a steward. We don’t have stewards anymore; we’ll call him a caretaker. This man was in charge of everything that belonged to his master. Now he may have been a trustworthy fellow when he first got the job. What’s important is that at some point he gave into temptation.
The temptation of the caretaker was twofold. First, he was tempted to disregard the fact that none of these possessions were his. Like Judas, at some point greed got the better of him. The caretaker realized that his master’s goods made for him a pretty good life. He used his master’s possessions for his own personal enjoyment, treating them as if they were his own and that he had produced them himself. Being ensnared by this temptation led him easily into the second temptation. Callous to the fact that what he had was not his, he was then tempted to forget that one day the master would want an accounting. Covetousness, greed, and a full belly had blinded the caretaker to the fact that there would be a day of reckoning.
And that day came. The caretaker had no time to prepare and cook the books. Once the report of malfeasance and mismanagement came to the rich man’s attention, the jig was up. The rich man sent for him with this message: “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.” Everything the caretaker had sinfully ignored came to a head in that moment. He lost his position as caretaker, which means that he lost access to all his master’s good things for future use.
Thinking of the impending judgment, he realizes that he can’t dig; he’s not accustomed to manual labor. He does not want to beg; begging was worse than death in his mind. But in that brief moment before he had to hand over the ledger to the rich man, the wasteful, slothful caretaker came up with an idea to save his future. He would use the few moments he had left in his position to make his life better. So he called every one of his master’s debtors and reduced their debt. “You own one hundred measures of oil? I’ll forgive half; write fifty. You owe my master one hundred measures of wheat? Scratch that out and write eighty.” He was not above stealing, but he had proven that already by his malfeasance, mismanagement, and misuse of all that belonged to his master. At the last possible moment, the caretaker got it. He used his master’s possessions for the sake of gaining friends so that when he was fired, he would have someplace to go.
This is what Jesus wants from Christians. He doesn’t want us to steal and defraud like the caretaker did. He won’t command us to do something that contradicts His own Word given in the Seventh Commandment. The master in the parable doesn’t commend the caretaker for his thievery and dishonesty; he commends him for his shrewdness. “So, the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.”
Christ wants to us be shrewd with our possessions. He wants us to be circumspect with our time. He wants to us be prudent with whatever we have in this life, whether we think it’s a lot or a little. He wants us to behave wisely with what we have because what we have isn’t really ours. St. Paul asked the Corinthians, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (I Cor 4:7) And that question can be pointed at each and every one of us. What do we possess in this life, whether material or spiritual, that is genuinely ours? The answer is: nothing. Everything is a gift from God our heavenly Father. He is the one who gives us our daily bread. And our daily bread, which Luther teaches in the meaning to the Fourth Petition, is: “everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body; such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self-control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.” Everything we have is a gift from God. It is His. By graciously giving us all things, He calls us to be stewards and caretakers of what is rightly His.
But if we truly look at our stewardship, we find that we have too much in common with the caretakers in Jesus’ parable. We tend to view our possessions with the possessiveness of children who horde toys away from others: “That’s mine; give it back!” There are many times when we are lazy and don’t make the best use of our time. We often grow complacent with our vocations – what God has given us to do – and imagine that they are only given to us to meet our needs. Then we look at our neighbor selfishly, imagining what they should be doing for us instead of what we can be doing for him.
Even spiritual gifts are often taken for granted. We find ourselves lacking in prayer for our neighbors and for the Church. We find ourselves tiring of hearing the Gospel because we’re so accustomed to it, so that we begin to think we don’t need to hear it continually. Like the caretaker in the parable, two great temptations surround us daily and are ready to pounce on us.
The first is the temptation to imagine that all that we have been given is actually ours. When we become entangled in this temptation, we begin to fret and worry over our wealth and possessions, which means we end up subtly or not-so-subtly worshiping mammon, expecting good things to come from mammon if we can just get more of it. When we become entangled in this temptation to think of all that we have as ours, or that we are able to provide for ourselves apart from God’s gracious hand, we become like the unrighteous caretaker, living on our master’s good things for our own pleasure and comfort.
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Not only this, but like the caretaker in the parable, there will be a day of reckoning for us as well – a day when our master demands an account of our stewardship of His things. That day will come like a thief in the night, just as it did for the caretaker in the parable.
But our Lord is gracious and has told us far in advance that this day of reckoning will come. St. Paul tells the men of Athens that God “now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained” (Acts 17:30-31). We know that day is coming. Yet when our bellies become full of God’s good things, we are tempted to forget that.
The rich man in the parable provided no advanced warning for his caretaker and caught Him completely unawares. However, Christ has graciously told us Himself and through His Apostles that that day will indeed come, though we are not told the precise day. Jesus says in Matthew 24:50, “The master of that servant will come on a day when he is not looking for him and at an hour that he is not aware of.” We ought to take this to heart and repent as St. Paul tells us. We ought to repent for wasting our master’s goods on selfish endeavors. We ought to repent for abusing His possessions by using them only for our own pleasure and comfort. In one way or another, we all have wasted the good gifts of God, be they material or spiritual, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23).
And then, dear fellow redeemed, we are to believe the Gospel. That, after all, is why we are here. Jesus says in Mark 1:15, “Repent, and believe in the gospel.” You may have been a wasteful steward of the many blessings God has given to you. You may not have used your blessings to serve your neighbor in love. You may have been slack and cold in your prayers, negligent in hearing God’s Word, and absent in using your gifts for the spread of God’s kingdom on earth. But there is the Gospel that God, because of Christ Jesus, is merciful to sinners. Jesus took our many sins and died for them upon the cross of Calvary. Jesus shed His innocent, precious blood to atone for every single one of your sins.
St. John says that “He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Though our sins against God and neighbor are many, grievous, and great, St. Paul comforts us in Romans 5:20, saying: “Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more.”
David sings of the mercy of God which is able to cover any sin, no matter how heinous or vile, saying: “For with Yahweh there is mercy, and with Him is abundant redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities” (Psalm 130:7-8).
We are indeed unrighteous stewards of God’s possessions, but Christ atoned for all our sins, so that we can be sure that He has fully forgiven our offenses and transgressions when we believe that, for His sake, we have a God who is merciful and gracious.
And then, having our sins forgiven, Christ puts us back into our stewardship. He doesn’t take His good gifts away from us. He places us right back into our vocations, surrounded by neighbors that need our good works of love just as much as they need our prayers. He wants us to be circumspect about how we use the things of this life, because being forgiven of all our sins, we know that these things aren’t ours to begin with.
It is as the hymn “We Give Thee But Thine Own” says, “All that we have is Thine alone, a trust, O Lord, from Thee.” Now that Christ has set us free from our sins we GET to be like that caretaker in the parable, although we do not emulate his sins of being wasteful, negligent, and dishonest. Rather, we are “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Mt 10:16).
Dear fellow redeemed, we are tremendously blessed to be able to use the blessings that God has given us to make friends in this life. This means shrewdly using God’s goods for the earthly and spiritual benefit of those around us, thereby serving God by serving our neighbor.
And we are tremendously blessed even more because we have been given all the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection as He continually delivers Himself to us in His gifts of Baptism, Absolution, Gospel, and Supper. There is where we are fed and nourished spiritually through His Word, Body, and Blood. There is where we receive the strength we need to continue to slog through this earthly life, keeping our eyes not on the things of this world, but on the life of the world to come.
And thankfully, that life is ours for certain because Christ is the ultimate caretaker of our souls. He never fails in that work. Of that, you can be absolutely certain.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
