Saturday November 11, 2017
This reading is a collection of attempts to raise the tone of the parable of the unjust steward. Some of them are so desperate that they actually make the opposite point. For example, “If you have not been trustworthy in handling filthy money, who could entrust you with true wealth?” But in the parable, the owner didn’t blame the unjust steward, he commended him. A more recent, and equally desperate, attempt was to suggest that there must have been a scribal error: that the word translated as “with” should have been “and not.” That would make things nice again, “Make friends and not the Mammon of iniquity.” Everything back in its right place. Some critic, commenting on Shakespeare’s lines, “Books in the living brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything,” suggested that the text was corrupt: that it should have read, “Stones in the living brooks, sermons in books….” Everything back in its place! Critics are sometimes far too clever.
But we can still take the messages of these early Christians, even if they have little to do with the parable.
Take this one, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” It is common experience that those who have most want most. This must be because they don’t really have what they have: it doesn’t fulfill them, it only baits them into further accumulation. Greed is a bottomless pit and nothing will ever fill it. Many misers even live very poor lives—in order to die rich! Whatever oversees your whole life, right into the arms of death, must be a religion. It’s the other religion, God’s main rival.