Written by Last Sunday I quoted the following from the late Queen’s Millennium Christmas Message:
To many of us, our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and example.’ ~ Queen Elizabeth II, Millennium Christmas message.
The Queen’s declaration of being accountable to God for how she led her life echoes the theme of Our Lord’s teaching in today’s Gospel. To do so, Jesus explains his teaching through a story commonly known as the Parable of the Astute Steward but, really, could be called the ‘Parable of the Man who Cooked the Books’.
The story is about a person being sacked for his mismanagement of an estate. Before he leaves his post, he is ordered by the estate owner to hand over the books or ledgers that contain a record of al the transactions he has made with the estate’s tenants. Knowing that he was about to be jobless and thinking of how he would cope in the future with no income, he secretly offered the tenants new rent contracts that were much more favourable to them than the previous ones. If I scratch their backs, he thought, surely they’ll scratch mine and help me out in the future.
As the tenants paid their rent in kind, according to the crop they produced, he told one farmer who cultivated olive trees that his rent would be reduced by 50 per cent; and he informed another, who grew wheat, that he would have to pay only 80 per cent of the old contract.
Now the tenants did not know at the time that the land agent was being sacked. They would have presumed that the agent had persuaded the owner into accepting these more favourable rates. Consequently, they would have thought highly not just of the agent but also of the landowner for being so generous.
When the estate owner realised what the agent had done, he ‘took his hat off’ to him, admiring his cuteness and ingenuity. The agent had not only put himself in good favour with the tenants but he had made the landowner look good too; and he knew as the owner he would be foolish to undo what the steward had arranged behind his back.
Jesus ends the story wishing that his followers – ‘children of light’ – could have the same energy and inventiveness in following him as the ‘children of this world’ – such as the crooked agent – work for themselves.
Then Our Lord goes on to warn that we – the ‘children of light’ – should “use money, tainted as it is, to win you friends and thus make sure that when it fails you, they will welcome you into the halls of eternity.” He wants us to live in a way that will win favour with the ultimate landowner of this world, God, to whom we all are accountable. We are to use what wealth we possess to win friends in the ‘halls of eternity’ And we can do this in the ways that Jesus teaches elsewhere in the Gospel, that is by helping to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and, generally, supporting the kind of people identified in the First Reading (Amos 8:4-7) who are the innocent victims of the sharp practices of the rich and powerful. So when the time comes for us to die and we have to account to God for how we lived, Jesus says that the poor we have supported in life will put in a good word for us to God ‘in the halls of eternity’.
The broader point Jesus makes consistently in the Gospels is that the goods of this earth belong to God and not to us. However much we accumulate while we are alive, we are accountable for how we use it. We are stewards of these resources, not their owners, and our duty is to use them not just for ourselves but in the service of others. A time will come when money and possessions will fail us; they won’t stop us dying sometime. So while we temporarily have them, Jesus asks us to use our resources well before, inevitably, they are taken from us and God examines the ledgers that record the transactions of our lives.
As the Queen’s funeral takes place tomorrow, and she is fittingly honoured for her faith and service, may God have mercy on her soul – and on ours as we too try to lead our lives according to the teachings of Christ, as she did.
Michael Campion
Holy Name, Jesmond
18 September 2022
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 