Daily Gospel Reflection
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November 8, 2019
Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’
“Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’
“So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’
“And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”
Like many of Jesus’ parables, the story of the unjust manager can be quite confusing at first. If we take the manager to be us as humans and the rich man to be God, it appears that God would reward us for cheating God. It seems as though Jesus is condoning the unethical behavior of the manager. However, I believe that the intended picture here is not about the wrongs the manager committed, nor his rationale behind decreasing the dues of his master’s debtors. Instead, the focus of the parable is the mercy that the manager showed to the debtors and the subsequent mercy that the master shows to him.
I have prayed the Our Father every day of my life for as long as I can remember. One day my dad asked me if I prayed the Lord’s Prayer and if I truly believed in it. I, of course, responded adamantly that I did. Then he asked if I had asked for forgiveness from God for anything I had done. I responded that I had, although a little more sheepishly. Then he asked whether I had really forgiven everyone or if I held any grudges at all. I was stumped. Who among us hasn’t held a grudge for a while when someone wrongs us? He made me realize that the prayer that I prayed every day, the prayer that Jesus gave us as the model to pray, was really one of the most difficult prayers of them all because of this line: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” If God were to only forgive us the same way that we as humans forgive those who wrong us, there wouldn’t be much forgiveness for us. When we forgive others, the way that the manager forgave the debtors, then God forgives us, the way that the rich man forgave the manager.
Prayer
Merciful God, you know that we fall short of our desire to follow you. Help us to see the ways that we, too, suffer from a lack of strength and an excess of shame that we may more readily confess, repent, and continue to serve you. Help us to depend more on those we love than on our own material resources, for it is in encountering others that we truly learn to serve and to love and therefore to follow you as we desire. Amen.
Saint of the Day
The Four Crowned Martyrs are a group of four sculptors who lived around the year 300—their names were Claudius, Castorius, Simpronian, and Nicostratus. They refused to carve a sculpture to honor the pagan gods of the empire. The Roman Emperor had them placed in lead coffins and thrown into the river.
A statue in Florence fittingly depicts the four martyrs in stone. They are patrons of masons and sculptors and their relics rest in the reliquary chapel in the Basilica.
Four Crowned Martyrs, who chose to glorify God in martyrdom rather than to honor pagan gods—pray for us!
Image Credit: Our featured image of the Four Crowned Martyrs is available for use under CC BY-SA 3.0. Last accessed November 15, 2024 on Wikimedia Commons.
