Sermon: "Christians and Money"

Who would want to be the Chief Executive of Northern Rock Bank? He has found himself to be in a very precarious and uncomfortable situation over the last few weeks – needing to borrow money from other banks to remain solvent but due to world economics finding that this is not possible. The Governor of the bank of England initially seemed to be of the opinion that Northern Rock had been taking too many risks and therefore had to take the consequences. The ensuing panic of savers withdrawing their money and lengthy cues graphically presented by the media caused a re-appraisal of the situation where the Governor of the Bank of England recognised the importance of sustaining stability and confidence and effectively did a U-turn in guaranteeing the safety of savings. The outcome for both Chief Executive and Governor of the Bank of England is that they were able to save face and salvage some credibility out of a disastrous situation. 

I don’t pretend to fully understand the complexities of world economics that has brought this furore about – it is a very involved and convoluted chain of events.

In a similar way I don’t pretend to fully understand this parable of Jesus of the so called unjust servant – but I do think that there are some interesting similarities between these two human stories. 

The first point to make about this parable is that it is a human story. Quite often the parables of Jesus are allegory – meaning a direct inference can be made between the characters in the parable and between God and us.

The Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep (last Sunday’s Gospel) among many others can all be thought of in this way. This parable of the unjust steward, however, does not fall into this category – we are not meant to understand the Master as God and the unjust servant as ourselves. This parable is told as a story to illustrate the reality of how people can often behave – especially where money is concerned. There is often a shrewdness, a craftiness, a cagy-ness about how we deal with money. There is often a very fine line between outright dishonesty and being shrewd.  

Two examples from personal experience:

Dishonesty is effectively stealing – when I worked for Panasonic the Financial Director was found to have embezzled £250,000. As we would expect he ended up in jail. Being shrewd could be described as being “creative” within the bounds of the law – when I worked for Panasonic I remember the Director of one of our suppliers once saying that his partner left him to look after the finances of the company because he felt that he possessed a certain cunningness in dealing with money matters). 

How are we to view the steward in this parable – described in various ways - unjust, shrewd or crafty. One interpretation of this difficult parable seeks to understand it in terms of the commercial practices of the day. Jews were forbidden to take interest from fellow-Jews when they lent them money – this is known as usury. (Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. Deut. 23:19) Human nature being what it is people looked for a loop-hole in the law. Those who wished to make money from loans evaded this by reasoning that the law was concerned to prohibit exploitation of the poor. It was not meant to forbid innocent transactions that were mutually beneficial and where the payment of interest amounted to the sharing of profits. If anyone had even a little of a given commodity such as oil or wheat, then he was not destitute, and so lending to him was not exploitation – it was seen as mutually beneficial. As almost everyone possessed these basics for life – then a legal loophole had been found – and such practices were commonplace. The practice worked something like this - whatever was borrowed was given a value (say, 80 measures of wheat), the interest added on (say, 20 measures), and the bond made out for the repayment of the total (in this case 100 measures of wheat). The transaction was usurious, but the bond gave no indication of this. Commonly such transactions were carried out by stewards, in every likelihood without the tacit knowledge of the owner or perhaps the owner simply turning a blind eye to the reality of what was going on. Understood in this way, the parable presents us with a steward who, faced with the loss of employment, protected his future by calling in the bonds and getting the debtors to rewrite them so that they no longer carried interest. He looked to their gratitude to express itself by their taking him into their homes.  

His action put the owner in a difficult position. He would have the greatest difficulty in establishing his claim to the original amounts now that the first bonds were destroyed. In any case he could not repudiate the steward’s action without convicting himself of taking usury (in terms of the law he would be morally obliged to pay back all of the past transactions in which interest had been involved). So he put the best face possible on the situation and “commended” the steward. The steward was now seen as conforming to the law of God and the owner as applauding this. Both were acting decisively in what was a very murky, convoluted and difficult situation. 

The question we are faced with in this human story is what is Jesus trying to teach? What does it mean? 

The human story about the unjust steward is used to show that when the crunch came the steward had to set some priorities (it was for him a life or death situation) and had to make some urgent decisions. 

It also serves to illustrate, rather uncomfortably, that the keenness with which we pursue our material objectives is often far more zealous than that devoted to “spiritual” ones. 

Jesus ends this section of Scripture with a kind of ultimatum to his hearers by saying quite starkly you cannot serve both God and money (16:13). Now, if we are not careful we can interpret these words to mean that “never the twain shall meet” – God and money are very separate entities – spiritual things and material things are kept securely in different compartments having nothing to do with each other.  

This is perhaps why in Church we tend to feel embarrassed and shy away from issues to do with money. Money has nothing to do with spiritual things – very often using the much mis-quoted line from the Letter of Timothy – money is the root of all evil. What it actually says, of course, is love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Here lies the key to understanding the heavenly meaning within this parable and the message o the Gospel. If we believe that God in Christ Jesus came into the world then, of course, spiritual things and material things are inextricably bound and tangled together. Jesus knows this to be true – the point he makes goes back to the parable – within the messy and complicated ways of the world – the human stories - where do we set our priorities and how do we go about making important decisions?

The meaning behind this parable for us is that our priority (in preserving our life) must be God and if this is the case then the decisions that we make (how we go about preserving our life) affect what we do and all that we possess.

We all need money – like I or loathe it, it is part and parcel of our daily lives. But money should be our servant for good and not our god. Therefore, as Christians our priority is the living, loving God and our decision must be to live our lives as God’s stewards - faithfully, honesty and justly. 

Lord, the variety of sayings and warnings about money in the Gospel provides a mirror for the variety of ways in which money can prove a distraction or an insidious trap. Grant us to see the dangers of being seduced by the attractions of money, and to keep ourselves free to serve you. Amen.