Can You Serve Two Masters?

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this position. I have. You’d been in a good job for a long time. You thought you were set up for life. All of a sudden, nasty things are being said about you, and then the boss calls you in and gives you notice! It happened to me. Maybe it’s happened to you. It happened to this guy in Jesus’ story.

This story is often referred to as the parable of The Unjust Steward or The Dishonest Manager. Even so, nowhere in this story does Jesus ever say that the manager was guilty of any of the things he’d been accused of. He may have just been maligned and misunderstood. Either way, he finds himself in a dilemma. No one else will employ him after he’s been sacked for mishandling his master’s money. “What will I do?” he asks. “I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg?”

I remember asking myself this same question five years ago. I hadn’t been accused of financial mismanagement. My marriage had broken down, and in my church system, if your marriage fails and you lose your wife and children, they take your job and home as well – kicking you when you’re down. It’s a toxic system, and I am by no means the only person to have been damaged by it. Even so, in its defense, it did give me a really good appreciation of this parable!

“What will I do? … I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.” That’s the dilemma. In my case, I actually wasn’t too proud to beg. The guy in Jesus’ story though came up with something far more creative.

“So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?'” He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 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.’ (Luke 16:5-7)

There’s some debate here amongst scholars as to whether this manager was further robbing his master by handing out these discounts or whether he was just removing his own commission. Either way, his goal was clear. He was ingratiating himself to his neighbours so that he’d have friends in the area after he became homeless.

When the master sees what the manager is doing, he commends him for being clever, which probably isn’t what we might have expected, though, of course, there’s a lot in this story that is confusing. We can’t be sure about the character of the manager. It’s not clear how he got away with all his discounts, and it’s a little odd that the master seems back on side with him by the end of the story. Even so, the message Jesus wants us to get from all this is clear:

“And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal home.” (Luke 16:9)

That’s not the punchline we expected! if the final verses here had somehow been lost, we might have guessed that this story would end with the dishonest manager getting his comeuppance or with him being exonerated, but it turns out that the story is not really about him at all. It’s about money, and the point about money is that’s it’s really only good for one thing—namely, for making friends!

Is that really what Jesus is saying?

“I don’t care too much for money. Money can’t buy me love!” (the Beatles). Well … according to this parable, it can!

When I was growing up and in school, there was a guy in my year who was very socially awkward, but we all loved him because he used to buy us all lollies all the time. Back then we figured that guy must have had a lot of money. Later, I realised that he probably had no more money than the rest of us and just wanted friends. I thought, ‘how tragic’. Now I read this parable, and I think ‘how brilliant’.

Is that how it works, or is Jesus just trying to shake us up in the way we think about money and ego and friends and the future? Sometimes we need to be shaken up—losing a job or losing a loved one or losing a marriage—before we can put things in perspective and understand that we are not going to get to the ends of our lives thinking, “if only I’d spent a bit more time in the office”—that there are indeed more important things in life than money.

We can’t get through life without money. We know that. Even so, Jesus concludes this story with a telling piece of wisdom:

“No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (Luke 16:13)

Søren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, said that we always mishear Jesus here. We think Jesus says that you shouldn’t serve two masters. Jesus doesn’t say you shouldn’t serve two masters. He says you can’t! It’s not possible. We must choose which master we shall serve and, in truth, too many of us make the wrong choice

Our Sunday Eucharist