Coffee With God

Reflection: Luke 16:1-8

Today’s parable brings a certain confusion because, apparently, Jesus is praising the dishonest administrator and this cannot be recommended for us Christians to imitate! We are expecting a different conclusion. Jesus should have said to his disciples: “Do not act like this villain; be honest!” Instead he approves of what he did. The difficulty lies here: how could a dishonest person be offered as a model? This difficulty does not exist if the parable is interpreted in a different way. Remember, the owner praised his former administrator for his shrewdness. If he had further cheated the owner before leaving the office, the owner would have been outraged. It means, in the process of the dishonest steward making the debtors rewrite their promissory notes, the master has not lost anything. The reason was that the deal between the stewards and the owner is that the stewards must deliver a certain amount to their owner; but they would usually charge a much higher amount from the debtors and whatever extra was collected could get into their pockets. It was the technique used by the tax collectors to enrich themselves. What does the shrewd servant do? He decides to forgo the profit he was expected to have. Then the admiration of the owner and the praise of Jesus have a logical explanation. The administrator was shrewd—says the Lord—because he understood on which to bet on: not on goods, products that he was entitled to, that could rot or be stolen, but on friends. He knew how to renounce the first in order to conquer for himself the second. Therefore, Jesus is not praising bribery or corruption, but he is appreciating his shrewdness to give up his bad profits to gain friends! It is the path of “Christian cleverness”. This path allows us to be cunning but not according to the spirit of the world. Jesus himself tells us: “be wise as serpents, innocent as doves.” This Christian cleverness is a gift; it is a grace that the Lord gives to us. Explaining this passage, Pope Francis called on Christians to pray for people who are dishonest and corrupt in their work places. They feed their children with dirty bread, earned through dirty, unjust, dishonest money. This will deprive them of their dignity. Ask the Lord to change the hearts of those who are corrupt and take bribery. That they may understand that dignity comes from noble work, from honest work, from daily work, and not from the easy road which in the end strips them of everything. When they face death, these people who lost their dignity through the practice of bribery do not take with them anything they earned. Let us pray for them.