12 November 2010
Psalm 88; Joel 2.28-3.8; James 1.16-27; Luke 16.1-9

Could anyone have understood the first part of this passage from Joel or believed it to be literally true? Pentecost was a complete game-changer for everyone and no one had ever seen anything like it before. In Numbers 7 God gives His Spirit to a group of seventy elders but that is the only time we see a mass outpouring of the Spirit in the Old Testament. No one could have been prepared for Pentecost or what followed. Why do we not look for the same now? We have accepted a “normal” Christianity that seems tame compared to what we read in the Acts of the Apostles and what is promised here. What is God saying to you isn’t something we ask very often.

This is one of the most difficult teachings in the New Testament to sort out. What do we do with the commendation of the steward for marking down the amounts owed to the master? Who is the master? However we determine those things the interpretation of the parable remains a subject of contention among scholars. We have to conclude some things about the character of the master from start to finish that need to be consistent. It seems likely that the master represents God and if we begin there we know something of the character presumed upon this person in the parable. What is then at stake? The steward or manager is to be fired from his job as agent for wasting the possessions of the owner and then is commended for what looks like further wasting of the possessions. If we understand that an agent represents completely his employer, the honor of the owner is at stake. We have to assume that the debtors do not know that the steward is to be fired or they have participated in defrauding the owner but that until he turns in the books the steward continues to act as agent. The changes reflect on the largesse of the owner and redound to his credit in the area. Most commentators end the parable at verse 8 and avoid the inclusion of “eternal dwellings” but it is not necessary to do so as the owner is the one whose possessions are used, not the agent’s, and if the master does not reverse the transactions, he is the one who has made friends, not the manager.

We are not to be simply mental learners. In school I frequently “crammed” knowledge into my head on a temporary basis in order to do well on a test. Like a computer, this knowledge was saved into a “temp” folder and when I shut down the next day, most of that information was lost to me. Much of what I learned in school is now somewhere in unretrievable files in my brain because it was of use to me only for a day or at most a semester. We are to be doers of the word as well as hearers. If knowledge is to become more than information we have to make that distinction. Christianity isn’t a Bible study and the judgment of God for believers isn’t a quiz on information, it is based on what we did with what we knew. Do our lives reveal that we truly believe or that we simply have some information?

O LORD, God of my salvation;
I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry!