Homily for 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time

 Homily for the
25th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Sept. 22, 2019

Luke 16: 1-17
St. Anthony, Bronx, N.Y.

“If you aren’t trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth” (Luke 16: 11).

In one description of his educational program, St. John Bosco said that he aimed to make of his pupils upright citizens and good Christians.  In his mind these 2 objectives were almost identical.  A good Christian is necessarily an upright citizen.  An upright citizen is infused with the goodness that comes from God even if that citizen isn’t a professed Christian.

No one can serve 2 masters (cf. 16:13); a person of integrity has only one master, one higher power whom he or she serves, whether that service is expressed in worship or in daily living.

Jesus’ parable today is a little puzzling.  It doesn’t seem to illustrate what he says about serving either God or money, and on the surface it can be read as tho Jesus is giving credit to dishonesty.  He tells of a situation that his listeners would have been familiar with.  1st-century Palestine was an agricultural society, with numerous great landowners who lived in Jerusalem, Damascus, or elsewhere and entrusted their estates to property managers—like the fellow called a steward in today’s gospel.

Parable of the Dishonest Steward (Jan Luyken)

This particular property manager has been caught “squandering his master’s estate” (16:1)—perhaps embezzling funds or spending his boss’s money too freely, living lavishly, like the German bishop who earned the nickname “Bishop Bling” or the former bishop of West Virginia who’s been found to have spent hundreds of thousands of diocesan dollars on jewelry, chartered jets, 1st-class vacations, and more.  He’s in very hot water now and isn’t allowed to set foot in his former diocese.  Both of these church leaders have been called to account, like the gospel’s steward.

The steward, however, before turning in his accounts, has recourse to his master’s debtors—tenant farmers who had to give the estate owner a share of their crops.  It would’ve been the property manager’s responsibility to set their rents, and what he does today in adjusting those fees isn’t necessarily crooked.  It does aim to make friends with those tenants, however, so that after he’s been fired he might find employment and not be reduced either to begging or to hard manual labor.

The master praises his shrewdness—not his past wastefulness, whatever that entailed.  Perceiving his predicament, the steward has taken decisive action to deal with it.  He knows how to use mammon, material goods, money.  So Jesus observes that “the children of this world” (16:8), worldly people, know how to deal with their own kind—as you and I can observe in any day’s news headlines about business people, politicians, Hollywood elites, sports stars, and others.

Then Jesus contrasts that worldly prudence with the behavior of “the children of light” (16:8), those who profess to be devout, those who say they walk along paths lit up by divine truth.  Are the children of light prudent or decisive like the dishonest steward?  Knowing their predicament, do they take appropriate action?

What’s the predicament?  All of us are going to have to settle our accounts.  The day will come, sooner or later, when we’ll all come before the divine master to give an accounting of our service.  Would we like to face death like Cardinal Wolsey, the ambitious, unscrupulous chancellor of Henry VIII who fell out of royal favor after 15 years and died just before he could be put on trial?  His last words were to the effect that he ought to have served God as diligently as he did the king.  Or would we not rather die like another of Henry’s lord chancellors, St. Thomas More, as “the king’s good servant but God’s first”?

Mammon, material goods, money can be our friend.  It can be useful as long as we keep it in perspective and use it wisely, to provide for what we truly need and to assist our neighbor; in other words, if we are the masters of our possessions and not the other way around; if we recognize that all we have comes from God, belongs to him and is lent to us for a brief time in order that we might serve him well, that by our actions we might reveal ourselves as “children of light,” upright citizens and good Christians, ready to give a good accounting of ourselves when we meet our divine master.