Parable of the Unjust Steward.September 27 2007
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The Parable of the Unjust Steward confuses many people because on the surface it would appear that Christ was condoning dishonest behaviour. But I think that in part its richness comes from its self contradiction which causes us to think about what it really means and what are its deeper implications.
In the story "the Master" tells a servant that he will be released because he has failed to keep his own financial life in order and that if he cannot manage his personal finances he cannot be trusted to manage the larger finances of "the Master." The servant reacts by calling all on the Master's clients and discounting their bills. He does this in return for the hope of future concessions on the part of the people he benefited. Rather that criticize the servant the Master praises him for finally acting shrewdly in his own self interest.
We never learn if the Master keeps the servant after praising him. Some sources say that the discount the servant gave to the Master's clients represented his own legitimate commission which he wouldn't otherwise collect after leaving. Regardless of the details, which we will never know, there is obviously some lesson in this story, if we can only find the right way to look at it.
I believe that the servant's biggest weakness was "lack of courage." The lack of courage lead him to avoid making the short term sacrafices needed to manage his own affairs.
The Master did have the courage to do a difficult thing. In this case it was releasing an existing servant in exchange for what he knew would be the long term benefit of pursuing a policy of only associating with people who could manage their own affairs.
It might have been easier for the Master to put up with an ok servant today than to fire him, but his commitment to his strategy for making a better life for himself and his courage to follow it, caused him to do the difficult thing today and to fire a servant who he knew would bring him trouble in the future.
When the master finally praised the servant for looking after his own interests he acknolwedged that it was preferable to deal with someone who had a bad strategy for his life, but the courage to execute it, than it was to have a relationship with a person with no courage to create a long term life strategy and no courage to pursue one.
In our own lives we are all "that servant" and we are all "the master." To be successfule we need to recognize that: - A bad plan is better than no plan; that:
- Our long term security depends on having the courage to pay the short term costs required to pursue our long term life strategy; and that
- Tying our lives to people who have set themselves adrift on the sea of life, will lead us to a similar fate.
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