25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C. Today’s readings: Amos 8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-8; Luke 16:1-13 (shorter version: Luke 16:10-13)
“You can’t talk to God while flying commercial!” is the justification which American televangelist Kenneth Copeland gave for purchasing yet another luxury private jet. When you share a normal plane with other people, he claimed, they agitate your spirit by flooding you with prayer requests. Copeland owns three private jets; perhaps he has mastered the gift of trilocation and uses all of them simultaneously.
His case is not even the most egregious; another “prosperity gospel” preacher, Jesse Duplantis, owns four planes. He holds that were Jesus to come into the world nowadays, he wouldn’t be riding a donkey; rather, he would be on a private jet spreading the Gospel around the world. Presumably, one of Duplantis’s jets is on standby for Jesus, just in case.
I don’t want to give the impression that Catholics can claim some moral high ground in this regard. We too have our fair share of shameful scandals and issues, with clerics (all the way up to cardinals) mismanaging finances, living in luxury or involving Church funds in extremely dubious investments. The Vatican’s finances remain a perennial Gordian Knot, sadly without an Alexander the Great in sight to dispatch it.
Yet these scandals neither deny nor undermine the validity of today’s gospel. Quite the contrary: they make it all the more necessary and imperative, just as the gravity of an illness highlights the importance of its cure. And the prescription for the worldliness so frequently decried by Pope Francis (especially in religious people) is to be found in Christ’s conclusion today: “No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon [money or wealth].”
Speaking about the way we should treat wealth, Jesus also relates a rather odd parable. In it, he appears to be placing as our role model a conniving administrator who – having been denounced for being wasteful with his master’s property – is about to be fired. Dreading destitution and hard manual labour, the man calls his master’s debtors and cancels significant portions of their debts. Thus, he reasons, when he is out of work, they will look kindly upon him and take care of him.
Yet, this story must be understood properly if it is to make sense. Jesus is in no way presenting this cunning steward as a model of integrity; rather he is using him to illustrate to his listeners how far the children of this world are willing to go in order to ensure their survival and well-being. Similar cases from our own times abound: people who have clawed their way to the top of the political and/or financial food chain using all the means at their disposal.
Jesus neither expects us to admire these people nor does he intend for us to emulate their behaviour. Rather he wishes us to reflect that if human beings are capable of going to such lengths for wealth (which is tainted and transitory), then we should put in as much thought and effort to attain that true wealth which lasts forever: salvation.
We should put in as much thought and effort to attain that true wealth which lasts forever: salvation
Famed biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias (1900-1979) put it this way: “You are in the same position as that steward who saw disaster, his life in ruins; but the crisis that threatens you – in fact, you are already involved in it – is incomparably more terrible. That man realised that the situation was critical. He did not let things drift; he acted at the last minute before the threatening disaster overtook him, and gave himself a fresh start. For you, too, the challenge of the hour demands prudence; everything is at stake!”
bgatt@maltachurchtribunals.org