First Friday Holy Hour - November - Eucharistic Lessons from the Dishonest Steward

 As you know, for our first Friday Holy Hours, I like to draw some sort of Eucharist Lesson or insight from the readings or saint of the day. As, I mentioned this morning at Mass, today’s Gospel is very strange.

The Lord tells this parable about a dishonest steward who had been embezzling from his master’s business. The steward goes to the master’s debtors, who had been delinquent in paying their rent to the master, because the master, was an absentee landlord. The steward then falsifies entries in the books of accounts so that the debtors would be grateful to him, but also complicit in his fraud. Perhaps he would blackmail them later. And when the master discovers all this underhanded business, he’s actually impressed and praises the criminal mastermind for his shrewdness.

What Eucharistic lesson could we possible derive from this?

On one hand the lesson of the parables seems to be that Jesus wants his followers, like the steward in the parable, to employ cleverness, creativity, gumption, cunning, and ingenuity in and fulfilling our Gospel mandate.

On the other hand, Christians are not likely to be as cunning and shrewd as the “children of the world” as the Lord calls them, in dealing with worldly matters. We will not likely be as proficient with computers as criminal computer hackers or as sly and cutthroat as a corrupt politician. And that’s okay. We have other matters to do attend to: heavenly matters, spiritual matters. 

And that’s why we are hear tonight. We give up a Friday tonight, to pray, to kneel before the Lord, recognizing the priority of faith, strengthening and exercising faith, over all other earthly matters. We come to the Lord to be strengthened in what matters most, so that we can make inroads into the world, so that we can reach the minds and the hearts of the children of the world in bringing them to Christ.

We come here so that we can go out into the world in order to reach the criminal computer hacker, the corrupt politician, the drug addict, the pimp, and lead them to Christ. These people are not our enemy, they are our mission. 

And we kneel in front of the Lord recognizing our weakness, our lack of cleverness and capability, and facility with speaking, and timidity, and ask him to bless us, strengthen us, and embolden us to do the work he has for us, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.