The Unjust Steward
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The Unjust Steward was a parable given by Jesus in the New Testament Gospel of Luke.
From Luke 16:1-9 (NIV)
- Jesus told his disciples: "There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2So he called him in and asked him, 'What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.' The manager said to himself, 'What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I'm not strong enough to dig, and I'm ashamed to beg— I know what I'll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.'
- "So he called in each one of his master's debtors. He asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?'
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- " 'Eight hundred gallons[a] of olive oil,' he replied. The manager told him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.'
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- "Then he asked the second, 'And how much do you owe?' 'A thousand bushels of wheat,' he replied. He told him, 'Take your bill and make it eight hundred.'
- "The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own?
This parable is one of the more difficult to interpret, since on the face of it Jesus appears to be commending dishonest behaviour. At one level the meaning is straightforward enough, and is provided by Jesus himself - "use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves", with the additional application of using advantages in this world to gain for yourself favour in the next.
The seeming commendation of dishonesty is usually explained in one of two ways. It is either pointed out that Jesus 'commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness, not the shrewd manager for his dishonesty' - i.e. the manager's principle is the right one, even if he goes about it in the wrong way. It has also been asserted that records of a loan were sometimes inflated in order to get round the prohibition again usury; thus a loan of four hundred gallons of oil mightbe written up as eight hundred, so that the loan would appear to be without interest. The manager thus might be reducing the loans to their original amount - entirely honestly but no more pleasingly to his master.
The editors of the New Jerusalem Bible, in their commentary on this parable, state that "It was the custom for a steward, or responsible servant, to take commission on all sales of his master's goods; this was his only means of making a salary. In the present case the original loan was presumably fifty measures (400 gallons in the translation above) of oil and eighty measures (800 bushels in the translation above) of wheat. In reducing the debtors' bills, he is not depriving his master of anything, but only sacrificing his own immediate interests by forgoing his legitimate commission. It is for this that he is praised as 'astute.'"
The Jesus Seminar rates this as one of its 15 red sayings of Jesus.
