A Place for Us
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Have you ever noticed that the things that deliver to you the
grace of God don’t actually belong to you? You take what was never yours, and
yet God gives them to you: things like water, oil, bread, and wine. What’s
more, He converts them from things that help your body into the holy Sacraments
that lead you from this life to the life of the world to come. Bread and wine,
water, and words: our Lord gives them to you precisely so that you would offer
them back to Him, ask His blessing on them, believe the blessing He speaks, and
receive from His hand the gifts which renew your life in Him.
In that way, we are no different from the unjust steward. He
made friends and made sure others would welcome him into their homes by taking
what was not his—things that really belonged to his master—and using them to
secure his future. He used what had been entrusted to him and, before the ax
came down, made it work to his advantage so that he would not live in the outer
darkness, outside the city gates.
Modern politicians have nothing on this steward. This man,
who had already defrauded his master, defrauded him once more. This sinful man,
when he was caught, used sin again to make sure he would not get hurt. He was
caught with his hand in the till, and he reached back in to make a new
beginning. The nerve of that guy! What audacity! He did not sit around and
whine. He didn’t even put up a fight when he was fired. Instead, he did
whatever he had to, whatever it took to come out on top.
The master has no choice but to commend the man. And all the
time we commend men just like him—usually because we are jealous. Think about
it. When we complain that the evil get all the breaks, aren’t we really
complaining because we are jealous and wish a little would come our way? And
doesn’t that complaint surface strongest when we feel the weight of our sin, or
the aches of our sicknesses, or the burden of our age, or the stress of our
life? So we admire people who take matters into their own hands, who grab life
by the tail and give it a good shake, who turn the tables, who do whatever it
takes to land on top. And that’s exactly what the unjust, unfaithful,
unscrupulous, unprincipled steward does. He uses unrighteous mammon—things that
never belonged to him. But in the end, he will fail, because he is received
into the everlasting home of the devil.
So this parable is a warning: Do not take matters into your
own hands. Do not worry so much about the things in this life. Everything you
have belongs to God, and He will never let you down. Your Father secures that
promise by letting you use His things to obtain His heaven.
In that way, we are like the unjust steward. We take what is
not ours to begin with—the blood-washed robe of Christ’s righteousness—and we use
it to make friends with our Father. He looks at the robe He Himself has placed
on us in Holy Baptism, and He welcomes us and commends us as He does His own
Son. But that’s because He wants us to use His gifts. He wants us to wear that
robe. He wants us to feast on the body and blood of Jesus, so that He may
welcome us into His heavenly kingdom.
The unjust steward looked for ways to make himself look
better to his neighbors. But we fix our eyes on Jesus, and so we look beyond
whatever others think or say. We look to what our Father has in store for us. Our
goal is not to be praised by the world. Our goal is to be welcomed by the
Father, and then by the saints, the angels, and the whole heavenly host. And by
the gifts God Himself gives us, we know that our place is assured; our Father’s
arms are opened wide to receive us. In the name of the Father and of the Son
(†) and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The
peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in
Christ Jesus always. Amen.
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