Bible Commentaries

The Unjust Steward

Luke 16:2

We call this parable the Parable of the Unjust Steward—i.e. a fraudulent, dishonest steward—and such undoubtedly he did become; but not deliberately dishonest up to the time when his lord called him suddenly to account. He was accused to his lord that he had wasted his goods; not a purposed and continued fraud, but a long-continued faithlessness to his trust. He had forgotten that he was the trustee for his lord's possessions, and he had lived on neglecting plain duties, until at last the goods began to perish.

The Luke 16:4

I want to put before you a few thoughts not unfamiliar in one of the most familiar departments of our life—our work. We are constantly face to face with the contrast which comes before us when we leave the house of God and go back to mix with the world, and to do our work; and we immediately feel its pressure. The spirit of the world makes it very difficult for us to hold that true proportion which should exist between the things which are seen and the things which are unseen.

I. Saviours of Society.—Now the words of my text were put by our Blessed Lord into the lips of a thoroughly worldly Luke 16:5

This is a question which occurs, as is well known, in the Parable of the Unjust Steward.

The one characteristic, then, which the master signals out for appreciation in the steward is his shrewdness, his foresight, his prudence. "The lord," i.e. the master, "commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely"—not rightly, or honourably, but prudently.

I. That is the feature of his conduct, the one feature, which Jesus Christ holds up to the admiration and imitation of Christians. He says, in effect, "Why will not My disciples learn from men of the world the everyday lesson of common sense; why will they not follow the same business-like principle in the spiritual life as in commercial life"; why should it be true now, and is it to be true for ever, that "the children of this world are in"—or, "as regards"—"their generation wiser than the children of light?"

God says to every man: "You have only one earthly life to live. If you waste the golden days of youth, if you dissipate them in indolence or frivolity, they will never come back to you; and all that you might have been and ought to have been, you will never be." Yet how pitiful is the thousand times repeated tale of misspent years and squandered opportunities, and hopes as disappointing as the bitter apples of the Dead Sea!

II. "The children of this world," "the children of light"—how strange and sad is the contrast which the Lord in the parable points between them! It is as though He said: "Look at yon man of business; his heart is set upon making a fortune; see how careful he Luke 16:8

You remember the story, and how the lord commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely. He could not help admiring him because he was a good business man of the day, who had done the wisest and best thing for himself.

Let us apply this thought to our spiritual life.

I. Our Personal Salvation.—Are we sure that we are in a state of salvation? Surely we should be. If not, it is true of us that "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light".

II. Likeness to Christ.—How far have we attained to Christ's likeness? Daily we must be getting more and more like Him, and must be opening our souls more and more to the Holy Spirit and losing our hold on the things of earth. Remember it is true that "without holiness no man shall see the Lord," and if we are not cultivating it, do we not incur the reproach that "the children of this world are in their generation" wiser than we?

III. Use of Talents.—Are we using our talents properly, or are we intending to steal all the Gospel privileges without making any return to God?

(a) Money.—The time will come when God will say, "What about your money"? That is a talent which He has given to us.

(b) Influence.—What a tremendous talent! Parents, are you pointing your children heavenwards? Men and women in business or in society, are you witnessing? Think of the way political parties take trouble to get others to believe with them, and then take shame for the graceless way in which we go through life and never seek to win a soul for God.

If, instead of working for God, we only work for self; and if, instead of striving after holiness, if, instead of giving something to God, we keep it all for self, then remember we are living examples of the truth of these words: "The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light".

Luke 16:8

In Essay xvi. of The Friend, Coleridge, writing in1809 , declares that the maxims of genuine expedience are little regarded by the very people who profess to obey nothing higher than expedience—so much Luke 16:9

"The Eternal Tents:" This is our Lord's description of heaven; and if we would feel the force of it and catch its true interpretation, we must remember the history of ancient Israel. That history, so long, so troublous, began far back with the call of Abraham to leave his pleasant home in the land of Haran. Linked with the call was a promise, which came to him we know not how, that of his descendants God would make a great nation and give them a goodly land for their heritage.

That was the beginning of Israel's national history—the call of Abraham and the promise to his seed after him. And you remember how nobly he made the heroic venture of faith and, at the call of God, abandoned all that he had—all that, in the worldly judgment, was worth having—and set out in pursuit of a far-off hope and a transcendent ideal. He went forth with his tent and his family and his flocks and herds, and journeyed to and fro; and through the discipline of his homeless life the revelation grew ever clearer and the hope more sure. He died ere the promise was fulfilled, but he left his children a heritage of tents and flocks and herds, and a heritage more precious still—a faith and an example.

I. Such was the ancient history of Israel, and it was never forgotten. The Jews in after generations looked back to it with wonder and pride, and it served them as an emblem of human life. They recognised in that long and weary wandering a parable of the hungry-hearted life of the children of men. "We are strangers before Thee," they said, "and sojourners, as were all our fathers"; "Here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come". And the entrance into the Promised Land and the winning of the Holy City—that prefigured to them the glad consummation when they should be gathered home to the City of God and the Father's house.

And this, you observe, is the thought which underlies the curious phrase of our text—"the Eternal Tents". Its peculiarity is that it is what is called a contradiction in terms; for, if there be one thing which less than any other can be predicated of a tent, it is that it is eternal. This is precisely what a tent is not. It is a frail and fleeting thing, pitched today and struck tomorrow, a fitting image of life's transience: "Mine age is departed, and is removed from me as a shepherd's tent". Yet Jesus says "the Eternal Tents". Had He followed the line of thought familiar to the Jewish imagination, He would have said: "Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the Eternal City, the City which hath the foundations". But no, He gives the phrase this odd turn and says "into the Eternal Tents," combining two contradictory ideas—on the one hand, stability, endurance, and, on the other, un-settlement, uncertainty.

II. What would He teach us by this description of heaven. I think He means, in the first place, to disabuse our minds of an idea to which they are prone. He would have us understand that, while there will be rest in heaven, it will not be the rest of inactivity.

And there is another lesson in our text It was not for nothing that the Israelites endured that long ordeal of homeless wandering ere they reached their "city of habitation". It was their discipline in faith and courage, their preparation for the heritage which God had appointed for them. And so our earthly life, with all its unrest and weariness and disappointment, is our discipline for the service which awaits us in the City of God.

—David Smith, Man's Need of God, p165.

References.—XVI:9.—W. M. Sinclair, Christ and Our Times, p279. T. C. Fry, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p390. E. W. Attwood. Sermons for Clergy and Laity, p327. F. B. Woodward, Sermons (1Series), p268. W. C. Wheeler, Sermons and Addresses (2Series), p134. C. Moinet, The Great Alternative and other Sermons, p215. R. F. Horton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p289. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p34; ibid. vol. ix. p165. XVI:10.—J. Keble. Sermons for Sundays after Trinity, pt. i. p283. W. Scott Page, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxii. p46. XVI:10-12.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—St. Luke 16:13

One inevitable characteristic of modern war Luke 16:14

There was a laughing Devil in his sneer,

That raised emotions both of rage and fear,

And where his frown of hatred darkly fell,

Hope withering fled, and mercy sigh"d farewell.

—Byron, The Corsair.

"I do not recollect," says Washington Irving, after a visit to Sir Walter Scott, "a sneer throughout his conversation, any more than there is throughout his works."

Reference.—XVI:14-18.—Expositor (5th Series), vol. iv. p183.

Luke 16:15

"I often have a kind of waking dream," Dean Church once wrote to a friend. "Up one road the image of a man decked and adorned as if for a triumph, carried up by rejoicing and exulting friends, who praise his goodness and achievements; on the other road, turned back to back to it, there is the very same man himself, in sordid and squalid apparel, surrounded not by friends but by ministers of justice, and going on, while his friends are exulting, to his certain and perhaps awful judgment. The vision rises when I hear, not just and conscientious endeavours to make out a man's character, but when I hear the loose things that are said—often in kindness and love—of those beyond the grave."

References.—XVI:16.—Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p156. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p31; ibid. vol. x. p8; ibid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p379. XVI:16-24.—Ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p100. XVI:17.—Expositor (7th Series), vol. v. p371. XVI:17-19.—J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p79. XVI:18.—Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p70; ibid. (5th Series), vol. viii. p103. XVI:19.—C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p333. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p175. XVI:19 , 20.—J. H. Jowett, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p97. H. M. Butler, Harrow School Sermons (2Series), p224. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. i. p291.

Luke 16:20

After describing the profligate luxury of the Court of Louis the Great, Thackeray (in The Four Georges, 1.) adds: "A grander monarch, or a more miserable starved wretch than the peasant his subject, you cannot look on. Let us bear both these types in mind, if we wish to estimate the old society properly. Remember the glory and the chivalry? Yes!... But round all that royal splendour lies a nation enslaved and ruined; there are people robbed of their rights—communities laid waste—faith, justice, commerce, trampled on, and wellnigh destroyed."

Compare Professor Villari's account of the castle of Ferrara: "That grim, quadrangular building," with "subterranean dungeons guarded by seven gratings from the light of day. They were full of immured victims, and the clanking of chains and groans of human beings in pain could be heard from their depths, mingling with the strains of music and ceaseless revelry going on above, the ringing of silver plate, the clatter of majolica dishes, and clinking of Venetian glass."

There is a greater army

That besets us round with strife,

A starving, numberless army,

At all the gates of life.

The poverty-stricken millions

Who challenge our wine and bread,

And impeach us all as traitors,

Both the living and the dead.

And whenever I sit at the banquet,

Where the feast and song are high,

Amid the mirth and the music

I can hear that fearful cry.

And hollow and haggard faces

Look into the lighted hall,

And wasted hands are extended

To catch the crumbs that fall.

—Longfellow.

Very sensitive people, who cannot overcome their sensibility, are perforce selfish in this world of pain. They must forget that there is suffering. Their pity makes them cruel. They cannot bear the sight of suffering; they must shut the door upon it. If he is a Dives, such a man must first of all insist that the police shall prevent people like Lazarus, covered with sores, from lying in plain sight at the gate. Such men must treat pain as, in these days of plumbing, we treat filth. We get the plumber and the carpenter to hide it so well that even our civilised nostrils shall not be offended. That we call modern improvement in house-building. Even so we get the police to hide suffering from us; and, when that help fails, or is inapplicable, we appeal to the natural sense of decency in the sufferers, and demand, on the ground of common courtesy, that they shall not intrude their miseries upon us.

—Prof. Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp99 , 100.

References.—XVI:19-21.—A. P. Stanley, Sermons on Special Occasions, p127. XVI:19-31.—Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p465; ibid. vol. viii. p121. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—St. Luke 16:23

There is a well-known picture by Gustave Doré, which portrays this parable of the rich man and the beggar. We are shown the rich man in the midst of Oriental luxury, and at the foot of the marble steps the diseased Lazarus. So far the picture is worthy of the genius; but Doré has introduced one other feature which shows that he has misread the Saviour's story. Over the beggar an Eastern slave is bending with a scourge of twigs in his uplifted hand. He has been bidden drive Lazarus away, for his misery is as a death's head at the feast. And Doré is wrong in introducing that, for our Lord does not hint that Dives was disturbed—he was not consciously and deliberately cruel; he was only totally and hopelessly indifferent. What wrought the ruin of that pleasure-lover was not inhumanity so much as inattention. The attitude of innumerable people toward the great questions of the religious life is just the inattentive attitude of the rich man to Lazarus at his gate.

I. How perilous the inattentive spirit is we have only to open our eyes to see. (1) It is one of the lessons that reach us every day as we walk through the crowded streets of a great city. Readers of Marcus Aurelius will remember how he bases the art of life upon attention. (2) Again we might throw light upon the matter by considering the common laws of health. You never meet a man who hates these laws, or breaks them in a spirit of rebellion. But you meet many who are inattentive, and who constantly and recklessly neglect them. Whatever other functions pain may have, one is that it serves to fix attention.

II. I wish now to say a word or two on some of the causes of this inattention. (1) Perhaps the commonest cause of all is custom. "One good custom doth corrupt the world," and it does Luke 16:24

I. The parable teaches, first, that if we dedicate our lives to the good things of this world, we shall forfeit the good things of the next. This is written in broad and deep lines throughout the picture, and if this is not intended as a serious truth, then the whole parable is a mischief and a snare. Earthly greatness gives no warrant of heavenly greatness. We may most truly possess the present life by living for the next, but we cannot gain a drop of cold water in the next by living for this. If we store up our good things in this life, death will make us bankrupt. This is the first solemn lesson of the parable, this is the unchanging law of righteousness.

II. The lesson goes still further, and teaches that self-gratification in this life will be followed by the retribution of anguish in the next. The subtle explanation of future pain as being nothing more than the gnawings of the sinner's conscience—an evasion intended to deny the direct infliction of retribution by the hand of God—will certainly not satisfy the picture given in this parable. The rich man has entered into a state and into circumstances in which pain is inflicted upon him. The retribution of our sin is not left to our own conscience in this life. Why, then, should we imagine that it will receive no direct punishment in the life to come? What, then, will be the form which such retribution will take? Thank God, I do not know. It is enough to know that the God of love is a consuming fire to the ungodly. Terrible is He in righteousness. Let us, therefore, fear Him.

III. The parable further teaches that the most un-honoured condition of earthly life cannot exclude from the most honourable status in the heavenly life. Poverty and affliction on earth are not a sign of God's displeasure.

IV. The parable, further, emphasises the genuine continuity of this life with the next. The life beyond death will be related to the life here with as perfect continuity as our life today is related to that of yesterday. Continuity is also taught here in the form of immediateness. Jesus teaches in this parable that judgment and reward begin immediately after death. It is true that the consummation of penalty and reward cannot come till the completion of His kingdom, but the beginnings do not tarry.

—John Thomas, Concerning the King, p154.

Luke 16:24

About eleven I preached at Elsham. The two persons who are the most zealous and active here are the steward and the gardener of a gentleman, whom the minister persuaded to turn them off unless they would leave "this way". He gave them a week to consider of it; at the end of which they calmly answered, " Luke 16:25

You recollect, of course, that these words are put into the mouth of Father Abraham in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. I need hardly do more than recall the barest outlines of that story of a rich Luke 16:31

I. Our Lord seeks to paint in this parable a series of solemn, dramatic contrasts that shall startle, if it may be, these Pharisees out of their complacent selfishness. (1) He first sketches the contrast between Dives and Lazarus in life, a contrast the more impressive because the painter does not bring his two figures together from the opposite ends of the earth, or even from east and west of the same city only. Lazarus gasping in the shadow of the gateway, and the purple drapery of Dives moving behind the blossom and leafage of the courtyard in the hall beyond, might have been seen by the passer-by from the same point of view; so it is no outburst of eccentric idealism that leads the painter to put two such figures on one canvas. (2) Christ now paints another contrast, a contrast dealing not with the things that are seen and temporal, but with the things that are unseen and eternal. The contrast is resumed beyond the grave, but the figures are transposed. The next world has its contrasts as well as this. (3) A contrast of character underlies this picture. Little is told us of the beggar beyond the contrast in character implied in the name chosen to describe him; Lazarus or "God my helper". The rich man's life was turned away from God, and turned towards himself; the beggar's was turned away from himself and turned towards God.

II. The parable or allegory passes from the dramatic into the didactic stage. (1) It teaches that in vain are the destinies of a lost soul appealed to the court of natural affection. Those destinies cannot be reversed or modified by mere relationship to Abraham. The rich Luke 16:31

I. God has done all that can be done.

II. The reason for men's rejection is wholly in themselves. Faith is an act of the will, not of the understanding. Hence the sole cause of unbelief lies in the man himself. "Ye will not come unto Me that ye might have life."

III. God will do no more.

—A. Maclaren.

References.—XVI:31.—Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p66. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. iii. p224. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p232. H. Windross, Preacher's Magazine, vol. v. p32. Archbishop Temple, Christian World Pulpit, vol1. p401. G. Bellett, Parochial Sermons, p228. H. Howard, The Raiment of the Soul, p177. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p344. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No143. J. H. Jellett, The Elder Son, pp15,30. K. C. Anderson, Christian World Pulpit, vol1. p332. XVII.—Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p114. XVII:1.—F. J. A. Hort, Village Sermons (2Series), p177. XVII:1 , 2.—H. H. Almond, Sermons by a Lay Head Master, p193. XVII:2.—Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p289; ibid. (5th Series), vol. iii. p210.