Bible Text: Luke 16:1-13 | Preacher: Pastor Andrew Richard
In today’s parable Jesus sets two men before us. First there’s a rich man who has great wealth and possessions and lands. He lets out his land to sharecroppers who pay him with a portion of their harvest. Then there’s the manager, who oversees the business, manages the accounts, and draws up the contracts. The rich man has entrusted his finances to his manager, and the manager is free to conduct business as he sees fit.
Now it’s clear that the rich man is the true owner of the land and business, and the manager is a steward of someone else’s possessions. The manager is not the owner. And yet he’s been acting like it. Charges were brought to the rich man that the manager “was wasting his possessions.” Somewhere along the way the manager had changed from being grateful to the rich man for such a trust, to thinking that he was the rich man. Jesus warned us about such delusion in the parable of the sower where He spoke of “the deceitfulness of riches.” Riches are misleading. First, riches will try to deceive you into thinking that you’re the owner, not the steward, and second, that riches can give you even better security than God can give.
Martin Luther comments on this in the Large Catechism when he explains the First Commandment, You shall have no other gods: “There are some who think that they have God and everything they need when they have money and property; they trust in them and boast in them so stubbornly and securely that they care for no one else. They, too, have a god―mammon by name, that is, money and property―on which they set their whole heart. This is the most common idol on earth. Those who have money and property feel secure, happy, and fearless, as if they were sitting in the midst of paradise. On the other hand, those who have nothing doubt and despair as if they knew of no god at all. We will find very few who are cheerful, who do not fret and complain, if they do not have mammon. This desire for wealth clings and sticks to our nature all the way to the grave.” That’s what the deceitfulness of riches causes, and that deceit had laid hold of the manager.
The rich man, the real owner, kept hearing about what the manager was doing under the influence of mammon’s deceit, and summoning him, he said, “Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.” At those words the manager came to a sobering realization: the riches were never mine, and they have offered me no security. I’ve been living a lie, and now I’m suffering the consequences.
Now many people don’t come to this realization until they’ve died and it’s too late to do anything differently with mammon. But in the parable, the manager has a very small window of opportunity, which corresponds to this short earthly life. The manager realizes that mammon is failing him, and in a very short while he won’t be able to do anything with it. That’s life for all of us. God is the owner, we are mere stewards, and at the end of earthly life we will no longer have the mammon that was entrusted to us. But for this very short while the manager still has the books, and he can still transact with the rich man’s mammon. The manager is prudent. He sees that the season of mammon is coming to an end, and he thinks to use mammon in such a way that its effects will outlive its existence.
Did you know you can use money in ways that will affect eternity? Mammon is a temporal thing and will perish with this age, but there are two uses of mammon whose effects will outlive mammon. The first use of mammon, really a misuse, is to place one’s trust in it. We heard this described in Luther’s explanation of the First Commandment. This misuse of mammon is ultimately to believe in the wrong god, to have an idol. Now mammon itself will pass away, as it says in 1 Timothy 6, “we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.” But false trust in mammon does last and does have eternal consequences that outlive mammon itself. False trust, after all, happens in the hearts of men, whose souls never cease to exist, and whose bodies will be raised on the Last Day. So mammon will pass away, but those who falsely trusted in it will not. They will have to bear eternally the punishment of that false trust, because they believed in a god who was not Jesus Christ the only Savior.
But there’s a second way to use mammon, and the effect of this use also outlives mammon, except in a good way. The manager hits on this use. “When I’m kicked out of this place, I want someplace to go. So I’m going to use this mammon, that doesn’t belong to me, to make everyone love me, ‘so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’” Now the manager is completely self-interested as he goes about this use of mammon, but he still illustrates in a way the proper Christian use of mammon.
Now what use do we Christians have for mammon? What use do we have of earthly riches? You’ve felt mammon’s temptation, and you hate the fact that at times you’ve sought security from earthly possessions, that you’ve trusted it and sought your good from it, when you know you should trust in God above all things and seek your good from Him. You’ve acted like the owner when in fact you’re the steward. That’s a sin against the true God, and you don’t want to sin against the true God. So what do you need mammon for if it comes with the deceitfulness of riches? You’ve got the true riches of which St. Peter writes in 1 Peter 1, “you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” The blood of Christ is your wealth, by which He has blotted out all your sins and shown you the favor of God.
Now if God is favorable toward you such that He did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, then as Paul writes in Romans 8, “how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?” And thus you don’t pray to mammon, but to your Father in heaven, “Give us this day our daily bread.” “The eyes of all look to You, O Lord, and You give them their food at the proper time. You open Your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.” So what do you need mammon for? You’re right not to desire it. You’re right to regard it with suspicion. Having riches is like having a lion for a pet, or like handling hazardous material. We Christians are far more interested in getting rid of mammon than acquiring more of it. But we also realize that we’re stewards of what in fact belongs to God. So we’re not going to heap up our money and set fire to it. We’re going to put it to good use, but in such a way that corresponds to faith in Christ and to our goal of inheriting eternal life.
And therefore we have something in common with the prudent manager. He decided to use mammon in such a way that the effects of his use would continue to benefit him even when mammon was no more. For him that meant buttering people up so that he could freeload for a while after he was fired. And for this the master commended him, because the manager finally understood, “How I use mammon now will affect my life even when mammon is gone,” and he finally used mammon in a good way. It may seem ridiculous in the parable that the rich man would commend the manager for being a cheat. In this we don’t see Jesus encouraging wrongdoing. Instead, we see Jesus commending those who, like the manager, use mammon rightly and toward a good outcome that will outlast mammon. Jesus commends those who realize, “How I use mammon now will affect my life even when mammon is gone.”
So the manager wanted to be able to freeload for a while. He wanted people to welcome him into their homes. While we have far different motives, and an eternal rather than an earthly goal, our right use of mammon nevertheless leads to much the same thing as it did for the manager. Jesus says, “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” You can’t take mammon with you to eternal life. But in eternal life there will be those who passed before you in the faith, whom you benefited with your mammon while you had it, and who will give you a warm welcome as you pass into the inheritance of the saints. Now this doesn’t mean that we buy our way into eternal life. It’s only because of faith in Christ that we make right use of mammon instead of trusting it like a god, and it’s by faith that we’re saved, not by our use of mammon. At the same time, the fact remains that when we enter eternal life because of faith in Christ, there will be those who will greet us because we spent our mammon on them.
Now you may wonder: what does this right use of mammon look like? How could I spend mammon now in such a way that someone will thank me for it in eternity? I can think of three good examples. First, use your mammon to support your congregation. Now this doesn’t seem like a great act of philanthropy. We imagine that the philanthropist has millions of dollars and builds children’s hospitals and gets clean water for Africa, and thus we never imagine that we could be philanthropists. But the word philanthropy simply means “love of man,” and what better way to love your fellow man than to support the Gospel for his sake in a given place? Every faithful congregation is a beacon of the Gospel in the midst of a dying world. By supporting our congregation you not only ensure that you’ll get to continue hearing the good news of eternal life in Christ; you also provide others with a place to hear the Word, that they also may believe and be saved. When you use mammon to support the Gospel, you are the world’s greatest philanthropists. There are those who will receive you warmly into heaven because you spent mammon in order that the Gospel might continue in this place.
Second, use your mammon to support the education of young Christians. You see the need as clearly as I do. How many children walk away from the faith in which their parents are raising them because of schools that promote rebellion and unbelief under the guise of critical thinking, that promote immorality under the guise of freedom of expression, that promote atheism under the guise of science, that don’t even mention God and thus teach children to suppose that He doesn’t exist, in a word, schools that reject the Word of God and replace it with the vain imaginings of man? I thank God that we have a place in Casper where I can get help in raising my children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Christian children who benefit from your mammon will thank you in the eternal dwellings of heaven that you used the stuff of earth to care for their eternal wellbeing.
Third, use your mammon to care for one another. As you learn of needs yourself or as your pastors bring them to your attention, force unrighteous mammon to serve your purpose of Christian love. Jesus will commend His Christians on the Last Day, saying, “I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me drink, I was naked and you clothed Me,” and those three all involve spending mammon on a fellow Christian, which is nothing other than doing such good works for Christ himself.
I bring up these examples in order to explain Jesus’ words in a concrete way, not because we should trust our good works, obviously. In eternity it’s others who bring up our good works, not us. For our part, we know that even the good we do is not completely pure, and we ever stand in need of Christ’s riches. As long as we have a sinful nature, we will be inclined to use mammon wrongly, and to trust it and feel secure in it, to rejoice at the gain of it and lament at the loss of it, as if mammon were our life. But He who had no place to lay His head, who asked a drink of water from the Samaritan woman, who hung poor and beggarly on the cross, who is yet the owner of all things―this Master of the house of God has mercy on us, His stewards, takes away our sins, and wins our hearts with the true wealth of His Gospel. This wealth is our hope and trust, and having such riches, we despise all other riches on earth. Praise be to Him who has saved us and prepared for us a dwelling that will never pass away. Amen.