We each make hundreds of decisions every day. Some are inconsequential and others carry more weight. Some are seemingly inconsequential until we realize the eternal consequences. In this episode of By Your Life, we talk about the price of honesty.

Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/2019/19_09_22.mp3

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time – September 22, 2019

Welcome to the seventy-eighth episode of By Your Life. I’m Lisa Huetteman and I know that you have a hundred different things you could be doing right now, so I thank you for choosing By Your Life. If you haven’t already, please sign up for notifications on your favorite podcast app or on the right side of this page so I can let you know when each new episode is posted. If you know of someone who can benefit from By Your Life, I’d appreciate it if you’d forward to a family member, co-worker or a friend. You can also click the icons on the top of the blog page to share on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time. If you are like me, Sunday’s Gospel from Luke and the Parable of the Dishonest Steward is very troubling. What on earth was Jesus trying to tell us with that parable? Jesus is known for taking our earthly way of thinking and turning it on its head with teachings like “The last will be first and the first will be last.” (Mt 20:16) or “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (Mt 23:12), but he can’t be saying that being dishonest should be commended, can he?

Since I’m not a biblical scholar, I had to do a little research to see what scripture scholars had to say about how to interpret this parable.

First, with anything in the Bible, to understand what God is trying to reveal to us, we need to understand the literary form of the passage. Parables were told to reveal truth, not hide it, but they can be confusing, and this literary form can lend itself to misinterpretation. A parable is told to personally criticize the person to whom the parable is told, to raise that person’s consciousness to a new level of understanding, and to call the person to conversion and reform. To understand a parable, we must understand the social context in which it is told.

So, what is the social context of the Parable of the Dishonest Steward? The commentary on this parable in the USCCB online bible says:

The parable of the dishonest steward has to be understood in the light of the Palestinian custom of agents acting on behalf of their masters and the usurious practices common to such agents. The dishonesty of the steward consisted in the squandering of his master’s property (Lk 16:1) and not in any subsequent graft. The master commends the dishonest steward who has forgone his own usurious commission on the business transaction by having the debtors write new notes that reflected only the real amount owed the master (i.e., minus the steward’s profit). The dishonest steward acts in this way in order to ingratiate himself with the debtors because he knows he is being dismissed from his position (Lk 16:3). The parable, then, teaches the prudent use of one’s material goods in light of an imminent crisis.

Another aspect of a parable is that it compares someone in the story to someone listening to the story, so who was Jesus talking to? Luke chapter 16 generically says “his disciples.” So, I went back to Luke chapter 15 and I found last week’s Gospel with the three Parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. Even though they are separated by chapter numbers, since Luke didn’t separate his writings into chapters, the Church did, these stories could be related. So, can we find an explanation there?

Well, yes there is one possible interpretation that can be found there. The video reflection on the USCCB site does just that. Quoting an explanation from Jesuit scholar Fr. John Donahue, it says:

This parable can be compared to the one of the Prodigal Son. In both parables, we hear of a man whose life is threatened because he has squandered something. Realizing that he’s gotten himself into a bad situation, he formulates a plan to get out of his dilemma and be accepted into the house. In the end, the father of the son and the master of the steward overturn the plan of the sinful character with a surprise ending. In the Parable of the Dishonest Steward, the lesson is not to be taken from the action of the steward, rather from the response of the master. The master evokes a world where God does not enact punishment but gives time and cancels debts, even in the midst of our human scheming. God’s extravagant generosity is the lesson for today. Our Heavenly Father, like the master and the Prodigal Son’s father, goes out of his way to find what was lost.

What an awesome truth but, what lesson should we take away from this week’s scripture’s readings that we can apply at work this week? We don’t usually encounter “masters” in our workplaces who are this generous when we squander their wealth. We usually aren’t this generous ourselves. Is it possible to run a profitable business and be this generous?

Even asking this question puts us to the test that I think is the point of this week’s Gospel. That is, “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.” (Lk 16:13) If you will only be generous if it is profitable, then you’ve picked which master you are choosing to serve.

Our first reading from the Book of Amos talked about those who can’t wait to get out of church, so to speak, so they can go into the marketplace and abuse and exploit others. They are no model of generosity and go to great lengths to gain a few extra shekels. Certainly, that’s not us, or is it?

Years ago, while I was writing my book, but before it was published, I would give out copies of a colleague’s book when I had a speaking engagement. It was a way to gather business cards and build my prospect database. At one event, two people came up to me afterward asking if they could purchase a copy of that book. I said sure and they each paid me $10. Now, this was the first time this had ever happened, and my accounting system wasn’t set up for charging and paying sales tax. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was going to take some time to set it up and for $1.37 didn’t seem worth the effort, so I decided to just ignore it.

The problem was, I couldn’t ignore it. Later that week, I gave a non-profit two tickets to an event so their employees could attend. The tickets cost me $10 each. I justified that the $20 I donated equaled the $20 I received for the books, so the net/net was zero. The only problem was that the state was still out the $1.37. But then, I justified that it was going to cost me and the state more than $1.37 to process this transaction and it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t a material omission.

But then, I asked myself, “Lisa, at what point is honesty and integrity material? If it’s not at $1.37, is it $13.70? How about $137.00? Or maybe, it is $137,000? Where can you put a dollar value on what is the right thing to do? “The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.” (Lk 16:10) “You cannot serve God and mammon.” (Lk 16:13) I paid the $1.37. Reflecting on this now, it amazes me that I even considered selling my relationship with God for $1.37.

But then there was the time when serving God was going to cost me $700. I didn’t act so honestly. It was a long time ago when and I had borrowed a video from a colleague to use at a workshop. The problem was, technology was changing, the video was in VHS format, but the venue only had a DVD player. So, even though it was a violation of the copyright, I had the video converted to DVD so I could use it. I returned the VHS copy to my colleague but kept the DVD version, which I used a few more times. Each time I shared this video with clients, it nagged at me. Until I finally went online to see if I could purchase my own copy. To my surprise, because this video was often used in a corporate training environment, it cost over $700. That was crazy, so I kept using my pirated copy. “The person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.” (Lk 16:10) But it nagged at me and nagged at me until I finally had to bite the bullet and pay the $700 for a legal copy.

I know many others—good men and women—who have struggled with similar choices. In my book, The Value of Core Values, I share a story told to me by Jay Fechtel, CEO of The Fechtel Company. His company designs and builds high-end, high-quality custom homes. Unlike a lot of builders, their billing process is transparent. They charge their clients at direct builder cost and they tell their customers they don’t get any commissions, rebates or “kickbacks.” But there was one supplier who offered a 10% future credit or discount on every unit purchased. The invoices showed the regular price, but at the end of the year, the supplier wrote a check to The Fechtel Company for the 10% credit amount. So, in effect, Fechtel had charged their clients more than direct builder cost. It happened innocently at first, but when Jay found out, he delayed dealing with it and justified that they had charged their customers reasonable market prices. Later, however, he realized he had compromised the company’s core values that say, “be fair and straightforward in all dealings.” So, they sent checks to all the clients who had been affected, telling them that they had received a credit for their purchases.

In each of these examples, the choice is between honoring God or honoring money. In each of these examples, someone, (Jay Fechtel and I) would have benefited at someone else’s expense. In each of these examples, even though we knew what was right and we tried to justify doing wrong. Because in each of these examples, the other person (the state, the video producer, the clients) never would have known, so it was easy to justify that they weren’t being harmed. But we knew, and God knows, and he said, “Never will I forget a thing they have done!” (Am 8:7)

That brings me to what another scripture scholar, Dr. Scott Hahn, says about the Parable of the Dishonest Steward:

“The steward in today’s Gospel confronts the reality that he can’t go on living the way he has been. He is under judgment. He must give account for what he has done. He is no model of repentance. But he makes a prudent calculation—to use his last hours in charge of his master’s property to show mercy to others, to relieve their debts. He is a child of this world, driven by a purely selfish motive—to make friends and be welcomed into the homes of his master’s debtors. Yet his prudence is commended as an example to us, the children of light. We too must realize, as the steward does, that what we have is not honestly ours, but in truth belongs to another, our [Heavenly] Master.

What we have, our talents, skills, our life itself, is all a gift. We have a choice to use these gifts to honor God in service to others, or to squander them for personal gain. In his Gospel reflection for this week, Bishop Barron says that the Church has no quarrel with economic power and recognizes that creative entrepreneurs can lift others out of poverty. He encourages us to use the economic power we have for good, for the purposes of God. If not, we come under His judgment.

So, let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us be good stewards of all our gifts.

Lord, we ask for your guidance in all we do. We trust that you will bless the work of our hands. We believe in your leadership that you will guide us, advise us and strengthen us when we are weak. Please guide our hearts as we make decisions this week, so our work may be full of integrity, generosity, and fruitfulness and in all we do, we may glorify you by our lives.  Amen

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