The Unjust Steward … part of the East Window in Saint Michael’s Church, Limerick, made in 1878 by Mayer & Co and illustrating 10 parables (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
We are in the Kingdom Season, the time between All Saints and Advent. The Calendar of the Church of England in
Common Worship today remembers Saint Willibrord of York (739), Bishop, Apostle of Frisia (7 November).
Before today begins, before having breakfast, I am taking some quiet time early this morning to give thanks, and for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
‘The Unjust Steward,’ by the Kazakhstan Artist, Nelly Bube (Bubay)
Luke 16: 1-8 (NRSVA):
1 Then Jesus said to the disciples, ‘There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2 So he summoned him and said to him, “What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.” 3 Then the manager said to himself, “What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.” 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?” 6 He answered, “A hundred jugs of olive oil.” He said to him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.” 7 Then he asked another, “And how much do you owe?” He replied, “A hundred containers of wheat.” He said to him, “Take your bill and make it eighty.” 8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.’
In the Gospel reading for the Eucharist today, we read the parable of ‘the Unjust Steward’ or the ‘Parable of the Dishonest Manager’.
Whatever name you give it, this morning’s reading is about ignoring and exploiting the plight of the oppressed and the poor and tells us that this amounts to turning away from God and turning towards idolatry. We are called to turn around, and in turning to the needs of the poor we find that we are turning to God.
So, let me tell this morning’s Gospel story (Luke 16: 1-13) in another way. When I left school, I started training as a chartered surveyor and in estate manager. I never finished that training, but I can visualise some of the characters in this story.
A very, very rich man lives in a big city, let’s say it is Dublin. He has a luxurious lifestyle made possible by the income from the apartments, hotels and office blocks he owns in the city centre. He has been a major property developer, and a key shareholder in one of the business banks lending to developers.
He has hired an estate manager to run his property holding company, his building society, and his insurance agency while he spends most of his time in his large country house in Co Kildare or Co Meath, in the Algarve playing golf or in Marbella on his yacht.
All the work of painting, maintaining the lifts and the plumbing in his apartment blocks, working the bar and servicing the rooms in his hotels, and working at the call centres in the office blocks, is done by people who travel in and out from the rims of the city, people whose grandparents probably once lived in the small terraced houses that once stood along the docks or the canal banks but were levelled to build those apartments, office blocks and hotels.
They pay their mortgages to the bank that financed the apartment blocks and similar developments. Their overdrafts are from the same bank. Their mortgage, insurance and life assurance policies are from an agency he owns. They find themselves increasingly in debt, paying school fees and health insurance, running a car or two cars, meeting term loan payments for fridges, freezers, TVs and laptops … What they earn is never enough to pay off their mortgages, their overdrafts, their term loans.
These families are slipping further and further into debt, working harder and harder to pay what cannot be paid.
But they never meet the rich developer. The immediate face of this system, of his companies and his investments, is the face of the estate agent who manages the blocks – a man whose grandparents came from the same families as the people who now suffer under his management.
However, his parents had escaped the system, he got a good education, and then got sucked into the system.
The developer hears rumours that the estate manager, who is also his insurance agent, has been squandering the developer’s resource, and gives him his dismissal notice. Now, remember that ‘squandering’ is not necessarily a bad word here – the sower in another parable squanders seed by tossing it on roads and in bird-feeding zones, and the shepherd in one of this week’s parables potentially squanders 99 sheep by running after the lost one; the widow searching for her lost coin risks losing her other nine as she sweeps everything out.
Meanwhile, the estate agent has to work out his notice, but is no longer authorised to let, to rent, to buy, to sell, to do anything at all in the developer’s name.
He probably shares the same background only a generation or two ago with the maintenance workers, the tenants, the workers in the office blocks. But when he is out on his ear, they are not going to help him to find a place to live, or find a new job, given that up to now he has allied himself with the developer’s interests, collecting high rents, refusing to bring down rents when the reviews are due, managing the work rotas for the maintenance workers, forcing them to work longer hours rather than taking on the staff needed for the job, dealing unjustly with both tenants and workers.
He has been demanding higher rents and premiums, and longer working hours, yet providing fewer and fewer services – doing what certain economists have advised him to do: increasing profit margins and productivity and cutting costs and outlays at one and the same time.
He may be shrewd, but that is why he is called ‘the dishonest manager’ (verse 8).
The agent then does something that is extraordinarily clever.
He gathers all the tenants and workers who owe him money, and he declares that their debts have been written down, more than the courts could ever write them down, to something that might be repaid, freeing families from heartbreaking choices. He has been upping their rents and their premiums; now he brings them all back to a payable rate. And in doing this, he manages to wipe out the arrears that have been mounting up.
The smart agent manages not to tell the tenants or the workers that he has been sacked. Nor does he tell them that the developer has not authorised any of his
largesse. But the tenants and the workers now think the developer, their landlord, is more generous than anyone else in his position could be. The developer is now a hero in their eyes – and, by extension, the agent is too.
The developer comes back for his quarterly or annual visit to pick up the income the agent has collected for him, and he gets a surprise that is exhilarating and challenging. The people are delighted to see him. Workers shake his hands, tenants lean out of the balconies to wave at him, children want to have ‘selfies’ taken with him.
Then, as he inspects the books in the small office the agent has worked from in the complex, he finds out what the agent has done in telling the tenants and the workers that the developer has forgiven their debts.
He has a choice to make.
He can go and tell them that it was all a terrible mistake, that the agent’s ‘stroke’ amounted not to generosity but to theft, or at least to dishonesty, and has no legal basis – he can tell them they are still responsible for the unpaid rent, for the overdrawn loans.
The warm welcome could quickly turn to nasty protests.
Or, the developer can go outside, bask in the unexpected welcome he has received, and take credit for the agent’s actions. At least he has cash in his hand where once he might have had nothing because of defaulting tenants and clients. That would save him going to court, but has he to take the agent back to work for him?
What would you do?
Picture yourself in this dilemma, both as the agent and as the developer.
From the agent’s point of view, does it matter any more what the developer decides to do? Whatever decision the developer makes, his future is safe – either he gets his job back, or his own people are going to look after him.
But here is the big problem: what the agent did is clearly dishonest. He has taken the landlord’s property and squandered it – even after he was sacked and had no right to do anything in the developer’s name.
What is it that the agent has done, without permission? Who has he deceived?
The agent forgives. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, for personal gain and to compensate for his past misconduct. But that decisive action that he undertakes redeems him from a position to which it seems he could not be reconciled, to the developer any more than to the tenants and workers.
So what is the moral of the story?
This story is unique to Saint Luke’s Gospel, and for him there is a significance that is important throughout the third gospel: Forgive. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want. Forgive for the right reason. Forgive for the wrong reason. Forgive for no reason at all. Just forgive.
Remember, Saint Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer includes the helpful confusion: καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν, καὶ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ἀφίομεν παντὶ ὀφείλοντι ἡμῖν: καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν (‘and forgive us our sins for indeed we ourselves are forgiving everyone who is [monetarily] indebted to us’) (Luke 11: 4) – the monetary indebtedness is obvious in the original Greek.
We pray it, but do we put it into practice?
The arrival of the Kingdom of God is no occasion for score-keeping of any kind, whether monetary or moral.
Why should I forgive someone who has sinned against me, or against my sense of what is obviously right? I don’t have to do it out of love for the other person.
I could forgive the other person because of what I pray in the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday if not every morning.
I could forgive because I know I would like to be forgiven myself.
I could forgive because I know what it is like to be me when I am unforgiving.
I could forgive because I am, or I want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Christ’s power to forgive and free someone just like me.
Or I could forgive because I think it will improve my life and sense of well-being.
It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, selfish or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive.
Extending the kind of grace God shows me in every possible arena – financial and moral – can only put me more deeply in touch with God’s grace.
If a crafty agent, a dishonest manager, an unjust steward, the sort of person we meet in this Gospel reading, can forgive to save his job or give himself a safety net when he is sacked, then those of us who have the experience of real grace, we who have been invited to the Heavenly Banquet, have a better reason than most people to forgive.
Where is the place for Christian values in today’s world of finance and debt? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Prayers (Friday 7 November 2025):
The theme this week (2 to 8 November) in
Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘From Solitude to Connection’ (pp 52-53). This theme was introduced on Sunday with a Programme Update from Ljudmila, a Ukrainian Refugee living in Budapest, Hungary.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Friday 7 November 2025) invites us to pray:
Father, we pray for the ministry of Saint Margaret’s Church as they seek to be a light for you in Budapest. Thank you for the way your love is modelled through the church’s open doors.
The Collect:
God, the Saviour of all,
you sent your bishop Willibrord from this land
to proclaim the good news to many peoples
and confirm them in their faith:
help us also to witness to your steadfast love
by word and deed
so that your Church may increase
and grow strong in holiness;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Post Communion Prayer:
Holy Father,
who gathered us here around the table of your Son
to share this meal with the whole household of God:
in that new world where you reveal
the fullness of your peace,
gather people of every race and language
to share with Willibrord and all your saints
in the eternal banquet of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Property developments and financial growth on the banks of the River Liffey in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Scripture quotations are from the
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
http://nrsvbibles.org
Saint James the Brother of the Lord … an icon written by Tobias Stanislas Haller, BSG, for Saint James Episcopal Church, Parkton, Maryland
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