This Sunday, Jesus Is the Shrewd Steward Who Writes Off Your Debt

The readings for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, present us with a parable about a mediator between a great one who holds vast wealth and his debtors who owe more than they can pay. He reduces their debts to what they can handle. Who does that remind you of?

Here are five takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: Call this parable the “Shrewd Steward,” not the “Unjust Steward.”

Jesus’s parable of the “Shrewd Steward” is sometimes called the parable of the “Dishonest” or “Unjust Steward,” but that’s not quite right. Yes, it is a humorous, exaggerated “tall tale” about a wily character who outsmarts his boss — but the parable ends up saying something life-changing and serious.

The parable starts out with a rich master firing his steward for wasting his resources and asking for a full accounting. The steward, seeing he has nothing to lose, decides to make himself “guilty as charged” of the accusation that he has squandered property. In preparing the accounting for his master, he cancels giant debts for a fraction of what the master is owed for them.

Why, then, is he “shrewd” rather than “unjust”?

First, he is exercising his power to dispose of his boss’s property. He has the freedom to set rates of return; he exercises that freedom in favor of the debtors. Second, he isn’t enriching himself; he is making friends among the debtors. In fact, his actions are the opposite of greedy. He shows that he denies that profit is the sole criterion of business dealings. In doing so, he strikes at the heart of an idol, the idol of money.

Second: The most obvious application to our lives is just that: Be shrewd, but not unjust.

In the first reading, we hear of merchants who have attitudes that are quite the opposite of the Shrewd Steward’s: They want to cheat their customers in order to enrich themselves. The Lord, it turns out, is watching something so small as how they handle their scales. “Never will I forget a thing they have done!” he says.

Our devotion to wealth changes us and our relation to God in the same way.

In the Gospel, Jesus delivers one of his key sayings: “No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.” If you don’t think Jesus means it, count the times he makes this same point. To quote just a few: “Woe to you who are rich,” “Be on guard against all kinds of greed,” and “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.”

His point is that our relentless focus on money destroys our souls, while, as the Sunday Mass Psalm puts it, God “raises up the lowly from the dust; from the dunghill he lifts up the poor.”

Third: But that leads to another lesson — what we do with money affects what we do with everything else.

Jesus in the Gospel says: “The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.”

In other words: If we do what we are supposed to do in small things, we will be ready to do heroic things. My favorite example of this is Tom Vander Woude, who died in 2008. His sacrifice started with prayer: He knelt through the family Rosary he led each night and took a 2 am Eucharistic Hour each week. It continued through service: “He’s the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back,” said a neighbor. “And if he didn’t have one, he’d buy one for you.” And what did all of those acts of charity lead to? He jumped into a septic tank to save his 19-year-old Down Syndrome son, pushing him out and then drowning in his place.

Where did he get the ability to do that? From Jesus Christ, who did the same things first.

Because, fourth:  The first and final “Shrewd Steward” is Jesus Christ himself.

In the Second Reading, we get a picture of what Christ did as “steward” to God the Father.

“There is also one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as ransom for all,” St. Paul says. In other words, Jesus is in the same place with regard to us as the Steward in his parable, and when he was confronted with our unpayable debt, he answered it the same way. He refers to himself as this kind of Steward elsewhere in the Gospel.

As St. Pau points out, he did this for every human being. “God our savior … wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth,” he says.

Compare the Shrewd Steward and Jesus. The Shrewd Steward succeeded by “making friends with unjust wealth.” Jesus makes friends with sinners by giving us a “short cut to salvation” — unmerited Divine Mercy. He even offers this deal to those who oppose him. “I ask that supplications, prayer, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone,” he says, including “kings and for all in authority, that we may lead a quiet life in all devotion and dignity.”

Fifth: He asks us each to tell him how much we owe — then he tells us what we will have to pay.

“How much do you owe my master?” the steward asks, and receives enormous amounts in answer.

Jesus asks us the same question, and we have to answer: We owe him everything.

In America, he has given us what people worldwide long for — money and resources to spare — but we surrounded ourselves with luxuries rather than share them. He gives Catholics articulate expressions of hard truths to tell the world, but we told our neighbors easy lies instead. He gives us goodness but we chose selfishness, he gives us beauty but we chose ugliness; he gives us love but we chose indifference.

He sees what we have done and says, “Come to the confessional. Tell me how much you owe.” We line up and tell him: “I have sinned before God and man and I owe more than I can pay.” In reply, he gives us the deal of a lifetime, saying, “Here is your penance: Forget what you owe, and pay it with prayer; pay it with an act of mercy; pay it with a personal sacrifice. I paid the full price on the cross. Now go and sin no more.”

He has set us free from a terrible burden for next to nothing, but he wants one thing more: He wants everyone to hear about this deal of a lifetime. St. Paul was appointed to tell the Gentiles. We are appointed to tell our neighbors.

In his first homily as Pope, Leo XIV stressed the need to take our lay mission of evangelization seriously. “There are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied,” he said. “Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed.”

Telling the world about Jesus is our job. If we don’t do it, it won’t get done. But we don’t do it alone. At Mass, we receive Jesus the Prudent Steward into our very bodies in communion. There, he entrusts us with his greatest possession: his very life to carry out of the church and bring to others. Now, it is our turn to be the Shrewd Steward in the lives of those we know.

Image: Raven Memorial Park at
Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

By Tom Hoopes