Echoes of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) A Challenge to Rethink Our Perspective on Salvation (Click to Listen) In any case, your ultimate security is in God’s generosity and hospitality. Needless to say, this should be done wisely, in ways that truly benefit others, and not merely to assuage your conscience or flatter people targeted as future benefactors. Other people's responses to your generosity and hospitality may bring you more security than saving more money would. Instead, spend the little you have on generosity or hospitality. This suggests that if you do not have enough savings to feel secure, the answer is not trying to save more. If God can trust you to be generous with a little bit of money and use it build good relationships, he will be able to entrust you with greater resources. Good relationships produce good fruit, which gives us greater ability to build good relationships and be generous to others. True riches are good relationships with people founded on our mutual adoption as God’s children, and a good relationship with God is realized in generosity to the poor. “If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?” (Luke 16:11). Jesus does not say which matters more to God, the generosity to the poor or the good relationships with people. When you build good relationships with other people, you come to have a good relationship with God. This points to God as the guarantor that using money for relationships will lead to lasting security. The story turns quickly from the debtors to the master in the story (Luke 16:8), and Jesus endorses the master’s maxim, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10). Yet Jesus is not saying to depend on the fickle sentiments of people you may have helped over the years. The dishonest manager is not depending on their riches but on the relationship of mutual dependence has built with them. Note that the people the dishonest manager helps are not wealthy people. But if you have provided for others, you may find them providing for you in your most difficult hour. In a refugee camp, a prison, or a hyperinflated economy, the wealth you formerly may have had cannot procure even a crust of bread. The word eternal signifies that good relationships help us in times of trouble in this life, and they will also endure into eternal life.Īn extreme example of this principle occurs whenever war, terror, or disaster destroys the economic fabric of society. Building relationships is far more effective for gaining security than building wealth is. But apparently it is better than not building relationships at all. Mutual fraud is probably not the best way to build relationships. By providing for his master’s debtors, the dishonest steward is creating friendships. “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes” (Luke 16:9, NRSV footnote b). Instead, we should spend our wealth to provide for other people, and depend on them to do the same for us when the need arises. Therefore, building up large savings offers no real security. Even during this life our savings can be destroyed by hyperinflation, market crashes, theft, confiscation, lawsuits, war, and natural disaster. Like the dishonest manager, we cannot take anything with us when we depart this life. Instead, he fraudulently reduces the debts of his masters’ debtors, hoping that they will reciprocate the favor and provide for him when he is unemployed. Perhaps he knows it will be impossible to take anything with him when he leaves the estate. He does not try to steal from his master. He uses his last days on the job to defraud his master further, but there is a strange twist to how he does it. In it, a manager squanders his master’s property and, as a result, is notified he will be fired. This is the point of the parable of the dishonest manager. If God can trust us to spend our money to meet the needs of others, then the money we ourselves need will also be provided. The key to security about the things we need is not anxious earning and saving, but trustworthy service and spending. The Parable of the Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-13)
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