Homily for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Sept. 21, 2025. Gospel of Luke 16:1-13. Theme: Are You Investing in Heavenly Treasure?
The Parable of the Shrewd Manager in today’s Gospel is not meant to give us a lesson in clever business management. So, no need to get caught up in the details of the steward cutting his employer’s profits nor in wondering why the story seems to approve the end justifying the means. These things are just embellishments that Jesus used to hold his listeners attention so that he could convey his teachings on the proper use of wealth and the importance of having a long-term perspective when it comes to our future security.
When Jesus tells us to be wise with our money (which the Bible calls “mammon”) he means that we need to have in mind the bigger picture of our existence. He doesn’t want us to be a short-sighted instant-gratification kind of people who think only about the limited span of life we have on planet Earth. He is directing us to plan ahead and make long-term investments that will yield for us amazing dividends in eternal life. In other words, like the clever steward of the parable, Jesus wants us to be purpose-driven but in the right direction. And that direction is towards Heaven! He is reminding us that the ultimate purpose for which each one of us was created is to know, love and serve God in this world so as to be happy with him forever in the next.
By both his words and his example, Jesus taught us the proper place that wealth and material things should occupy in our lives. You see, as God-come-in-the-flesh he could have pre-arranged for himself a life in a luxurious palace with royal parents and a multitude of servants. But instead, he freely chose to be born among animals in a stable. His years as an infant and a toddler, which should be filled with happy times and joyful experiences, were spent as a foreigner and refugee in Egypt, the land in which his human ancestors had been enslaved and mistreated. Returning back to Palestine, he grew up as the son of a poor working class family living in the backwoods village of Nazareth, which made him what some Americans would call “a hick from the sticks”. He then spent most of his life working in construction and the trades as a day laborer from sunrise to sunset. When he was around 30 years old, he became a traveling rabbi or Jewish teacher, who in his poverty had “nowhere to lay his head” as he himself described it.
So, you see, Jesus didn’t just talk the talk, but he walked the walk when it came to embracing a simple uncluttered life that puts material possessions in their proper place. He knew that the danger of wealth is not at all in the money itself but that we too easily run the risk of becoming possessed by it. And so because he loves us and wants us to know true happiness both there and hereafter, he warns us that we can too easily become consumed with an unhealthy desire for more and more – what we call greed. Almost without realizing it, we can allow our desires for wealth and possessions to become a driving force, a central motivation in our lives. For many, money can even become an idol, a false god that they worship seven days a week with all of their decisions revolving around it.
Jesus is teaching us that greed is such an ugly thing that can deceive even the best of us. It can blur our vision, making us see others as potential profits or debits instead of recognizing their innate dignity as persons. Greed tells us to use our wealth primarily for ourselves and our personal enjoyment. It can tempt us to dismiss the poor and needy as a drain on society or even to write them off completely as just being lazy. It motivates societies to sentence criminals to death rather than having to pay for their lifelong imprisonment. It fractures families of the deceased by leading them into fierce arguments over inheritances, destroying their bonds of relationship.
Jesus has taught in so many ways that an excessive preoccupation with money will ultimately ruin us and work against us in the eternal long-run. The only thing it will accumulate for the greedy is an investment with dividends awaiting them in Hell. Ultimately, what Jesus is telling us in today’s gospel is that from God’s point of view the amount of money we have is irrelevant to him. It’s our attitude towards whatever wealth we have and what we do with it that makes all the difference in this life and in the next.
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