For a moment, put yourself in this position. You are newly married and have a young child. You have been saving for a down payment on your first house and have managed to save $10,000, which is more money than you have ever had in your life. One day you take your child to the doctor for a routine checkup and your worst fears come true. You find out your child is sick and that there will be several expensive treatments needed if your child has any hope of making a full recovery. In this moment, saving for a future home instantly gets pushed down the list of things that are important, and you will use the $10,000 you saved to get your child the needed treatments.
As difficult as it would be to find yourself in this situation, the actual decision of how to use the $10,000 is an easy one. Your child is much more important than saving for a future home. In fact, your child is more important than money itself. Almost any parent would not hesitate to spend that $10,000 on treatments for their child or spend any money they could to save their child’s life. One of the parables of Jesus that is misunderstood is the parable of the shrewd manager. If you are able to understand using a $10,000 down payment on a house to help save your child’s life, you will be able to understand the main point of Jesus’ teaching. Please use this link to read through the parable, before we dig into the teaching.
The parable begins with a master letting his manager know that he will be fired. Jesus gives very little detail as to why the manager is being fired.The reader is only told that the manager is being accused of wasting the master’s possessions. This allows us to not focus on the why or how of the manager being fired and focus on the result, which is the manager being forced to make a decision.
What comes next is where this parable can easily be misinterpreted. The manager calls his master’s debtors and settles the debtors’ accounts for less than what is owed to the master. Once the master finds out what has happened, there is a real twist in the story. Instead of becoming angry, the master commends the manager for acting shrewdly. It is important to point out that the manager acted completely dishonest, and his dishonesty is not being presented as something that should be imitated. In fact, this manager is categorized as a person of this world and not a person of light.
So if this is not a parable telling us what to do when we lose a job, what is the point of the story? In order to understand this we should first go back to the decision the manager was forced to make. When faced with losing everything, the manager chose to value relationships over anything else. The manager decided money was less important than relationships (even though it was his master’s money). The manager then used his master’s money as a tool to develop relationships, which would be more valuable to him once he was fired.
At its core, the decision the manager made in this parable is the same as the decision the parent made about what to do with a sick child. In both cases, it was decided that there was something much more valuable than money. For the manager, money could be used as a tool to further relationships that would help him in the future. For the parent, money could be used as a tool to give the child every chance to live a normal healthy life.
Once it is understood that money can be used as a tool towards a bigger goal, this parable opens up a whole new way of looking at the world. Jesus talked often of the Kingdom of God and many of his parables were used to describe what that Kingdom looks like. In this parable Jesus is making a very bold statement that His Kingdom forces each person to make a decision, just like the manager from the parable and the parent with the sick child.
The manager in the parable was wise to use his master’s money to help develop more valuable relationships for the next stage in his life. In a similar way, our life here on earth is a period where we get to manage God’s resources. The Kingdom of God that Jesus so often talked about is being placed as the thing that is more valuable than money. Jesus wants us to see that we are managers of God’s resources and should be using those resources towards that larger purpose.
Practically, let’s explore how this can speak to a modern-day Christian. So far in 2020 several aspects of life that were previously relied on have been taken away. Many people have lost jobs, others have been isolated, and just about everyone has had to change their lifestyle. This creates a great opportunity to see the world differently. It is very easy to sink into the belief that you can provide security for yourself with money. A year like 2020 exposes how quickly money can be taken away and how little power it actually has. Just like the manager in the parable and the parent with the sick child, we have a decision to make. Are you going to use 2020 to see that there is something much more valuable than money, or are you going to rebuild your life around the false stability of money?
As Jesus puts it as He is closing out the parable, if the sons of the world cheat each other, but are still able to understand that money is an instrument and not a god, how much more should the sons of light understand that money is an instrument and not treat it as a god. This leads perfectly into the closing of verse thirteen where it says “You cannot serve both God and money.”
I will leave you with one final example of how this might work. Let’s say you manage your money well and want to use it to further God’s purposes. What if you use that well-managed money to help one family or individual with a meal weekly. If you do this consistently and with no expectation for repayment, how long do you think it will take for that individual to wonder why you would be so generous. What a wonderful opportunity it would be for you to share the freedom and love found in Christ. This is a simple example, but it gets to the core of what we are being called to do, use God’s resources towards the most important goal of furthering His Kingdom.