Sermon: Wittenberg Academy – Tuesday of Easter 6

16 May 2023

Text: Luke 16:1-18

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia! 

Our Lord tells a story: the Parable of the Dishonest Manager.  In this parable, the hero is really an antihero: a crooked manager who is getting fired.  So during his transition out of employment, he makes quick friends with his boss’s “debtors,” doing so “one by one.”  He unilaterally and secretly renegotiates their contracts, offering them huge discounts. 

He does this so that “people may receive me into their houses,” hoping for some kind of opportunity after his management job is finally terminated.

The company’s owner finds out about it, and is amazed at the audacity, the “shrewdness” of his crooked employee.  For as our Lord points out, “The sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.”  Jesus encourages us to be spiritually shrewd and focused on the good of the kingdom, with the zeal that a crooked manager has in feathering his own nest.  And Jesus also teaches us that we cannot have “two masters,” for we “cannot serve God and money.”

Missing much of the meaning of this parable, owing to their self-centeredness and refusal to be called to repentance, the Pharisees rightly perceive that they are guilty.  But instead of hearing the Word of God from the mouth of Jesus with humility, “they ridiculed Him.”  For this is often the reaction of those who refuse to repent.  They do not offer a counter-argument.  They do not explain where Jesus is wrong.  Instead, they mock.  It is all that they have.  For they were indeed “lovers of money.”  Our Lord’s words hit too close to home.

Jesus’ parable and the reaction of the Pharisees, as recorded by St. Luke by the Spirit’s inspiration, teach us to hear the Word with open hearts and minds, ever willing to repent.  Instead of loving money and applying worldly cleverness to amassing more of it – even resorting to crookedness – let us shrewdly labor in the fields of the Lord’s kingdom.  Rather than loving money and serving ourselves, let us love the Lord and serve our neighbor, let us love “the Law and the Prophets” and the “good news of the kingdom of God” that are preached to us and recorded in Scripture.  Let us store up treasures in heaven rather than mock and cheat and embrace the ways of the world. 

For Jesus has torn up the bill of our debts, writing “paid in full” in His very blood, and justifying not Himself before men, but rather justifying us before His Father in heaven.  Let us amass “a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches” (Luke 12:33).

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.