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Prepare a full account of your stewardship,
because you can no longer be my steward.'
Someday the term of our stewardship will end and we too will be required to prepare a full account of what we have done with this life God has given us, which we have from him on loan, as stewards. What shall we do or say on that day? Once God reclaims what is rightly his we will no longer have any means by which to merit an eternal dwelling. Without his grace neither strength nor begging will suffice.
The dishonest steward recognized the urgency of his predicament. Had he been planning to maintain the stewardship forever, and acted with that as his goal, he would not have taken the steps he did, specifically, reducing the dependency of his master's debtors on the master, much less leaving the master without what was rightly his. But he understood that he needed to do everything possible in order to provide for his life after stewardship. Jesus does not recommend to us the fact that he was dishonest. But he does commend him for thinking clearly enough to take action for the sake of a future that was in peril.
The children of this world are often prudent enough to recognize when they are in danger and do whatever is necessary to provide a future for themselves. But the children of the Kingdom are often naive, content to leave lives as mediocre stewards. We don't often apply prudence to our decisions such that our actions in the short term are ordered to our long term purpose and goals.
We want to be welcomed into eternal dwellings one day. And we know we can never dig enough to buy our way in, nor plead our case if we have spent our lives focused on ourselves and not the one with whom we claim to hope to spend eternity. Our words then will ring hollow, as they will be inconsistent with our lives to that point. We may imagine that we will want to be finally sincere then, when all is clear and everything is on the line. But it will be hard to be sincere after all the years of squandered life.
He called in his master's debtors one by one.
To the first he said,
'How much do you owe my master?'
He replied, 'One hundred measures of olive oil.'
We can do what the steward did, but without dishonesty. This is because all that appears to be our own is actually not ours, but our master's. This wealth is meant to be used to do what our master wants, which is actually to set debtors at liberty. In a way, all of the wealth we have beyond what we need for life and a modicum of comfort already belongs to the poor. It is true that there are limits to how much we can give of material things. But with the Gospel there are no such limits, and we are not made poorer by giving it away, but rather are enriched by doing so. Making the Gospel known by word and example helps to set people free from the truly pernicious debt of sin. This is what our master truly desires above all, that everyone "be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth". Jesus is the one mediator who truly unites man to God and enables them to reconcile this debt before they face the judge (see Matthew 5:25). But we too act as mediators when we help people to know and avail themselves of the freedom found in Jesus.
I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth,
so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.
In the final analysis it is only God himself who can welcome us into eternal dwellings, into the mansions Jesus himself went to prepare for us (see John 14:12). But it seems that those for whom we act as mediators for the grace of God during this life may also intercede as mediators on our behalf on the day of judgment. What better can we do with all that we have and all that we are than to make such friends? Then we and they together can hope to live together with God, and his mediator, our ransom, Christ Jesus.
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