25th Sunday Year C - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2022

I find tonight’s Gospel passage really teasing, and yet having a great depth and relevance. It comes from a different age, with different customs, yet can still be as stimulating for us today as it seems to have been for Jesus’ actual hearers.

I shall first clarify a few points. There is the master, a rich [possibly newly-rich] landowner. His debtors were probably former small-time owners now leasing the land that had previously been their own. The steward was the middle-man charged with negotiating the terms of the various leases, apparently adjusted year by year depending on the seasons — not unlike the way some farmers today [I think!] deal with future’s trading, or their annual insurance payments on their crops or livestock. Personal interactions in those days were determined less by law, than by the culturally sacrosanct unwritten obligations of their “honour code, where “losing face” in the community was a worse fate than losing life.

In this situation, the steward unexpectedly, unbeknown to anyone else, renegotiated downwards the contracts entered into earlier, individually, privately, with the each of the various small-time farmers. Such renegotiation was not uncommon when seasons turned out unpredictably. Each debtor would have been thrilled, even though the “honour code” would have obliged him to “return the favour” to the steward in some way in the future. By doing this, the steward assured his peace of mind for the years ahead. What the debtors interpreted as an act of genuine concern on his part, however, was in fact an act of sheer self-interest

No doubt word got around, and the master’s honour would also have risen correspondingly. For him to proceed with his intention to dismiss and perhaps charge the now popular steward would then have led to a great “loss of face” on his part in the small community. The steward had effectively silenced him. All he could do was to remain silent, to shake his head, acknowledge to himself the steward’s astuteness, and accept the outcome.

There, Jesus’ story probably ended — and the listeners were left to work out for themselves what Jesus was getting at by telling it. That, I presume, is how Jesus wanted the story to end: open-ended, confusing, yet also teasing — and inviting his hearers to make sense of what on earth he was driving at within the context of their personal individuality and their ever-changing and often-challenging life experiences. Luke used the story as a hook on which to hang a number of sayings of Jesus dealing with the general issue of the proper use of wealth. Most of the sayings have some tenuous relationship to the story, but little connection to each other.

Personally, I suspect that Jesus is reminding me — again! — to prepare my homilies out of genuine concern for his truth, and to share them as an act of love for you all, and, unlike the steward, not out of self-interest and the hope that you will be favourably impressed.

As you listen now, each of you can well ask, ”What might Jesus want to say to me tonight through this story?” And if tonight is not long enough to work out why Jesus wanted you to hear the story and what light he wants to throw on your life now, then keep on chewing it over for the next week or so. If you think through the story again in a few months time, you may hear Jesus challenging with some other quite different insight, just for you.

That is why Jesus told parables. He wants to treat me and you as the intelligent and responsible adults and unique individuals that each of us is, in the ever-changing “here-and-now’s” that comprise our lives. How he challenges or invites you will, quite probably, be quite different from how he challenges or invites me or anyone else.