HOMILY:  EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2017 (EF Mass)

For us today, the meaning of the Parable we have just heard is not at all clear.  Jesus obviously does not mean that the ‘Unjust Steward’ – or the ‘Dishonest Manager’ (as the modern translation has it) – is to be an example for us to imitate.  And the extra sentences at the end of the Gospel Reading – even though they are all about the same  topic of money and worldly possessions – are no help in shedding light on the meaning of the parable.  It is generally agreed by biblical scholars that they were originally independent sayings of Jesus, attached to the parable at a later date.

As Fr Henry Wansborough says in his commentary on today’s Gospel in ‘Wednesday Word’, the parable reflects the particular economic and financial customs of the time of Jesus – which were radically different from those of our own day – even though they still persisted in parts of India right into the twentieth century.

In the parable, we have two characters:  the rich, probably absentee, landlord; and the manager of his estates.   News gets to the landlord that the manager has been swindling various clients.  So he orders him to get the books up to date, ready to hand over to a more reliable successor; because he is now to be fired, sacked….

 

To understand what the manager does, we need to know that in the economic and financial set-up of the time, the manager had power to lend out his master’s goods – oil, wine, wheat and so on – at interest.  But the accounting procedure was such that the bond that was issued made no distinction between what was lent out (the ‘principal’) and the interest due.  One single sum appeared on the document as ‘owed’.

So the manager takes decisive action – and that capacity to take decisive action is in fact the point of the parable, as we shall see in a minute.  He takes decisive action, and thus makes friends with his master’s debtors.  The decisive action is this:  he forgoes the interest due on the loans that he would normally have collected for himself.

‘You owe 100 measures of oil’ – ‘Write down 50’.  He gives up the 50% interest he was charging.

‘You owe 100 measures of wheat’ – ‘Write down 80’.  He gives up the 20% interest he was  charging.

Understood in this way, the landlord’s praise of the manager makes very good sense.  By his decisive, astute action the manager has won friends who will look after him in the future, when he is jobless.   And the point of the parable is clear:  Jesus tells the parable to press home on his hearers the need for them – and us – to act decisively, to get prepared at once for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the moment when the Lord comes to call us to account.

For each one of us, what Our Lord’s call to decisive action may mean will depend on our own particular circumstances, our own particular temptations, our own particular opportunities.   But perhaps on this ‘Home Mission Sunday’ we may do well to call to mind those words in the First Letter of St Peter: ‘Always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you’.  When someone challenges us about our Faith, about the Church, we so readily duck the challenge.  Instead, let us call to mind today’s Gospel and dare to decide for once to speak out about why we believe, why we go to Mass, why we try to be honest.  It takes courage – but we have the Lord’s own promise: ‘Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven’.