Week 52 — The Unjust Steward
Luke 16:1-13

We are in week 52/70 of the appointed year of the Lord. We are walking week by week through Jesus’ ministry. Today, we will cover what many say is the most challenging parable Jesus told. It is found in Luke 16.

Luke 16:1-8   He also said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions.   And he called him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.’   And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.   I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’   So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’   He said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’   Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’   The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. 

Let me see if I have this straight.  A landowner finds out that the person managing his land was cheating him.  So he fires the manager and tells him to turn in his books.  But before word gets out about his being fired, he calls in the renters one at a time and quickly changes the books so they will owe much less, hoping to gain friends and influence by being generous with his ex-boss’s money and cheating his boss even more.  Surprisingly, his former boss commends him for his ‘shrewdness.’  This is a tough one.

First, does it bother you that Jesus used a dishonest manager to make a point? It didn’t bother Jesus, for he tells several stories that use characters who act unrighteously to teach lessons in righteousness.  Jesus tells stories that include righteous and unrighteous people, for the world these disciples live in has both.  

For example, there is the short parable of the man who accidentally discovers that his neighbor’s field has buried treasure in it.   He doesn’t tell his neighbor but deceives his neighbor into selling him the field.  Is that good business practice?   It certainly isn’t righteous, but Jesus uses this real-life example to say that the kingdom of heaven is like that treasure you give up everything to obtain.  He says nothing about the man’s behavior; the parable is about the treasure, the kingdom.

Then there is the unneighborly neighbor in Luke 11 who doesn’t want to be bothered by his neighbor who needs food at night.  This man is not loving his neighbor as himself.  This is followed by Jesus asking What kind of father would give his child a scorpion if he asked for food?   This is a “how much more” parable, as seen in the explanation:

Luke 11:13  If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”  

Jesus says if an unrighteous neighbor will eventually help, how much more will righteous God help you?  Finally, there is the unrighteous judge in Luke 18:

Luke 18:1-5  He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’  For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’”

Again, this is a ‘how much more’ parable.  If even this unrighteous judge will eventually give in and give justice, how much more will a righteous God give justice to his people who cry out to him?  So don’t get hung up on the idea that Jesus uses unsavory characters in his parables.  Let’s see what Jesus is teaching using this story.

In Jesus’ day, the way to gain wealth was to play the game.  That is just the way the economy was set up. There were some honest jobs, such as fishing and being a craftsman.  But the way to get ahead financially was land ownership.  Since much of Israel in this day was occupied by the Romans, many wealthy Romans bought up land in Israel and then hired managers to collect their profits while they lived back in Rome.  This is much like many vacation towns in the US now, where wealthy people buy up many of the hotels and Airbnb’s and then hire locals to manage their property.  So, it is a story we can all identify with.  But this manager was doing a poor job, so he was fired.  The manager then acts dishonestly, cheating the owner even more by adjusting the books to gain favor with the renters.  

Then, something completely unexpected happens in the story.

Luke 16:8   The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness.

You would expect the landowner to be angry and perhaps have the manager arrested.   The story has jumped the rails.  That is not a reasonable way for the rich land-owner to act.  The story no longer makes sense in our world.  This wealthy landowner is nothing like a typical landowner, as they know.  This parable has to be an allegory to make sense.  Jesus never explains the allegory (as he did with the parable of the four soils), but he does clarify the lesson from the parable:

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

Here is where we know without a doubt that the story is an allegorical parable.  Who could possibly reward you with “eternal dwellings?”  This only works if the wealthy landowner is God, for he is the only one in charge of ‘eternal dwellings.’  He owns all of the riches and all of the land.  The manager is one of God’s people who was placed in charge of managing some of God’s resources.  (Recall that Adam in Genesis was placed in the garden in Eden to manage it.)   But this manager was doing a poor job of managing God’s resources.  Such a poor job that God decided to fire him and take away his resources.  But then the manager completely changes his way of dealing with people and acts in such a way that makes God commend him.  He takes God’s resources and deals them out with extravagant grace and mercy.  And God is pleased with him.  By treating all the people living on God’s land with grace and mercy and freely dispersing God’s resources, the manager has made a friend using wealth as a tool and is received into the eternal dwelling.

Jesus goes on:

Luke 16:10   “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.  If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?   And if you have not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?   

We put a lot of emphasis on ownership.  I paid off my truck last month and got the title in the mail this week.  It says that I own that truck.  But the Biblical view is that God owns this world, and we are his stewards, managing portions of God’s property.  That rancher in Yellowstone may think he owns the cattle on a thousand hills, but the Bible says differently.

Deuteronomy 10:14    To Yehovah your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it.
Psalm 24:1    The earth is Yehovah’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it;

Jesus ends his teaching on this parable with this verse:

No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”

Something interesting happens in the Greek in this verse.  The final word, ‘money,’ is not translated into Greek but left as a Semitic word, ‘mammon.’  So this is a Hebrew or Aramaic word spelled with Greek letters.  When the Bible was translated from Greek to Latin in the 4th century, it was again not translated but left as a Semitic word.  When the King James Bible was translated in 1611, it also kept the Hebrew word, Mammon in the verse.

Luke 16:13   “…Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

Jesus has personified “mammon” in his statement, which led many in the Middle Ages to falsely believe there was a demon of greed and money named ‘Mammon,’ as seen in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  But this was not what Jesus meant.

So what is the meaning of this Hebrew word, “mammon?”   It developed as a Hebrew word about 200 years after the last book of the Old Testament was written, so you won’t find it in the Old Testament.  It is, however, frequently seen in Hebrew documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so we know it was a commonly used word in Jesus’s day.  It was derived from a root word frequently used in the Old Testament.  It is a Hebrew word that you know: ‘Amen.’  It is another word the Bible doesn’t translate but leaves as a Hebrew word (like Hallelujah, Hosannah, Jubilee).   When we end a prayer, we say this Hebrew word, amen.  It is spelled in Hebrew with the letters, aleph, mem, nun (A, M, N).  We must understand the root word ‘amen’ to understand what mammon means.

This root carries the ideas of stability, reliability, and truth; various forms of the word are found throughout the Scriptures.  

A form of this word is found in one of the most important verses in the Old Testament.  It is in the two verses in the Old Testament that the writers of the books of the Old Testament quote more often than any other verses, Exodus 34:6,7.

These verses are the John 3:16 of the Old Testament. They are the most important verses of the Old Testament.  Let me give you the context.  In this section of Exodus, the children of Israel have left Egypt, passed through the parted waters of the sea, and camped at the base of Mount Sinai.  Moses has been up on the mountain, brought down the 10 commandments on stone tablets, and found his people worshipping a golden calf.  Moses returned to the mountain to intercede for the people and remake the stone tablets.  And Moses asks to see God’s glory.  God says, You can’t see my face, but I will show you part of my glory.  So God places Moses in a cleft in the rock, and God passes before him.  And when God is revealing himself to Moses, this is how God describes himself:

Exodus 34:6-7  Yehovah passed before him and proclaimed, “Yehovah, Yehovah, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…”

If you want to understand who God is, then study how God describes himself.  In a job interview, you are often asked to give several adjectives to describe yourself.  God does just that with Moses on the mountain.  It is no wonder this is the most quoted verse by the writers of the Old Testament.  See the balance of love, mercy, grace, truth, and justice in God’s self-description.  We could spend weeks and weeks on understanding these verses.  The Bible Project has a 14-week series on this; you should check it out.  That is where I learned much of what you hear now. But we are just looking at the word ‘amen’ and its variants to understand this word, mammon.  

God is abounding in steadfast (covenantal) love and faithfulness.  What we translate as ‘faithfulness’ is ‘emet,’ a form of our word, amen.  Tim Mackie from The Bible Project said ‘amen’ has to do with stableness and reliability.  When Moses had to hold up his hands for hours for the Israelites to defeat the Amalekites, they put a rock under his arms so they would be stable or steady.  When emet is used for people, it describes reliable and stable character or trustworthiness. For example, when Moses appointed leaders in Israel, they were to be “people of emet,” trustworthy people who wouldn’t take bribes or distort justice.  God is stable and reliable, and his character is unchanging. he is dependable and worthy of trust because he is faithful. This is why Moses describes God as a rock.  

Jesus often said, “Verily, Verily, I say to you….

John 3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Or in the ESV:

John 3:3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Verily is an English word from the Latin ‘Veritas,’ which means ‘truth.’  But again, in the Greek New Testament, this is our untranslated Hebrew word ‘amen.’  So Jesus literally says,

 “Amen, amen, I say to you….” Jesus says, “This is the truth; you can count on this.   I stand as a witness that this is true.”  Jesus says this over 100 times in the gospels.  

In the Old Testament, prayers, blessings, and curses were often concluded with “amen.” Paul does the same in his letters, concluding his prayers or blessings with “amen.” 

1 Chronicles 16:36 Blessed be Yehovah, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting!”  Then all the people said, “Amen!” and praised Yehovah.
Romans 15:33 May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.
Philippians 4:20 To our God and Father be glory forever and ever. Amen.

 By saying ‘amen,’ you say, “This is true, and I stand witness to it.”  

When Jesus is talking with Pilate before he is sentenced to die, Jesus tells Pilate his purpose in coming:

John 18:37-38 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth.

Jesus came to be God’s witness to the truth.

Rev. 3:14   “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.

Jesus is God’s  ‘Amen’ – his life is a witness to who God is and what God has said all along.

2 Corinthians 3:20  For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.  

Jesus is the amen.  He is the fulfillment of the promise of God given thousands of years before. He is the witness that all God said is true.

Amen is spelled a m n. (Hebrew is written right to left, typically with no vowels אמן ).  Mammon is the noun form of the verb amen.    In Hebrew, you often make a noun out of a verb or other word by adding the letter ‘mem’ (our ‘m’) to the front of it.  So we take the verb ‘amen’ and add a preceding mem and get mammon (מאמן).  Amen, the verb, means to affirm or testify as true or trustworthy.  So the noun form (mammon) is“the thing in which you put your trust.”  It came to be a word for wealth or riches because many people who have riches have put their trust in their riches instead of God.

In our scripture today, Jesus says you can’t serve both God and mammon.  It has to be one or the other.  You can’t put your trust in God and also put your trust in wealth.  Where do you place your trust?  

I have a friend who is a ‘prepper.’  He has an entire room of his house filled with food and supplies and equipment he feels he will need one day when the world system collapses.  He has spent thousands of hours researching and a small fortune and feels sure he will be ready to survive almost any catastrophe. Now, don’t get me wrong.  I was a Boy Scout, and the scouts’ motto was “Be prepared.”  There is nothing wrong with being prepared. But this friend has gone way overboard.   He has placed his hope in the future in the contents of that room.  Where do you place your trust?  Let’s see what the First Testament says:  

Proverbs 11:28   Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf.
Proverbs 18:11   The wealth of the rich is their fortified city; they imagine it a wall too high to scale.

And one from the Psalms:

Psalm 20:7    Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Yehovah, our God.

The Bible tells the king of Israel never to build an enormous army or purchase horses and chariots from Egypt.  They should not trust their army for protection but trust God to be their defender.   If they build a vast army, they say they don’t trust God to protect them.  This is why David got in so much trouble for taking a census in 2 Samuel.  Remember, an enemy was threatening them, and David decided to take a census to see how many soldiers they had to fight.   The reason the Bible shows this as a terrible sin is that David showed his lack of trust in God by putting his trust in the number of his soldiers.

Mammon is something that you put your trust in instead of God.

Look at a coin or the back of some US currency.   You will find the phrase “In God We Trust.” Since 1864, this has been on coins and paper currency since 1957.  This motto was adapted from a line in Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner”  (though you probably only know the first verse).   Here is the fourth verse:

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“In God we trust” became the official motto of the US in 1956.

Knowing this, you may find it ironic that Jesus said, “You can’t put your trust in both God and money,” and then we go and place “In God we trust” directly on that other thing we can’t put our trust in.  Theodore Roosevelt thought it was more than a little ironic to put “In God we trust” on mammon, the very thing Jesus singled out as something you can not place trust in.  Roosevelt, in fact, said to put the phrase on money would be “dangerously close to sacrilege” and ordered it removed from new coinage in 1907.¹  But the people of the US wanted it there, and there was such a public outcry that Congress passed an act in 1908 reinstating the motto on coinage.

I don’t have a problem with the motto being on our money. I only wish the people in charge of the money really meant it.   Perhaps we can use that to our advantage.  Every time you start to spend money on something, look at the motto and ask yourself, “Am I putting my trust in God or in mammon (money or wealth)?  (Maybe I need to have it printed on my bank card.)

When talking with a friend a few years ago about my upcoming retirement, he asked me if I felt I had enough money set aside to “feel secure.”  The answer was no.  I did not, and I do not have enough money set aside to feel secure.  And I never will.  What I have learned from the Word of God is that there is no security in money.  I have read the parable of the man who had so many possessions that he had to rent bigger storage units, excuse me, build bigger barns.  I read what God said to that man,

Luke 12:20-21 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’  So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

I heard Jesus say the birds of the air don’t store food in barns. They aren’t preppers, but God feeds them. I remember Jesus saying we should store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don’t break in and steal. There is no security in money or things.

But we are tempted to put our trust in money.  How do we combat that temptation?  One day, Jesus told a young man how to deal with this.  He came to Jesus saying he had kept the commandments, but what more did he lack?  What did he need to inherit eternal life?  And Jesus saw that he was a man of great possessions and prescribed the cure for putting his faith in his wealth.  Jesus told him to give it away.  Jesus told him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”

The cure for the temptation to put trust in money and possessions instead of God:  generosity.

Jesus didn’t ask anyone else in the Bible to give it all away.  He didn’t ask that of another man who came to him with the same problem, Zacchaeus.  Zacchaeus was a man who had put all of his trust in money and put aside following God. As a tax collector, he cheated his way into as much money as possible.  Until he met Jesus.  When he meets Jesus, he decides to put his trust in God and starts giving that money away.

Jesus’ message to the rich young ruler was the same as the message he gives in our parable today:

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

We don’t own anything.  We are given stewardship of God’s resources.  God will commend us if we resist the temptation to keep those resources to ourselves and, like the manager in the parable, be extravagantly generous in passing along the master’s resources to those around us in need.  

This parable of the unjust steward is challenging. We worked through a Hebrew grammar lesson and an American History lesson to understand it. However, applying Jesus’ words to our lives requires more work. As discussed last week, Jesus said, “Many people will hear what I am saying, but only a few will do these words.”

Randy Alcorn said it this way:

“When I grasp that I’m a steward, not an owner, it totally changes my perspective. Suddenly, I’m not asking, “How much of my money shall I, out of the goodness of my heart, give to God?” Rather, I’m asking, “Since all of ‘my’ money is really yours, Lord, how would you like me to invest your money today?”
As long as I hold tightly to something, I believe I own it. But when I give it away, I relinquish control, power, and prestige. When I realize that God has a claim not merely on the few dollars I might choose to throw in an offering plate, not simply on 10 percent or even 50 percent, but on 100 percent of “my” money, it’s revolutionary. If I’m God’s money manager, I’m not God. Money isn’t God. God is God. So God, money, and I are each put in our rightful place.”

1. President Theodore Roosevelt, 13 November 1907  from The New York Times 11/14/1907.
2. Randy Alcorn, in an interview with Joshua Becker, posted on Alcorn’s website (https://www.epm.org/resources/2017/Jul/5/christ-centered-stewardship/)