The story begins when charges are brought to the rich man that the steward was squandering the rich man’s property.  Similar to the rich fool (12:17), the steward begins an internal dialogue: “What shall I do?” (See the “Note” on Luke 16:1 below) Clearly the steward does not like his options: I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg” (v.3).  He thus concocts a plan to be welcomed into another rich man’s home once he has been dismissed from his current position. As the parable unfolds we see that the steward quickly decides and acts and goes about reducing an established debt owed to his current employers.  The first debtor owes 900 gallons of oil; the second owes a huge amount of grain. These are well beyond household quantities and reflect a commercial operation.

Since the steward is technically still the rich man’s agent, the rich man is bound and will not be able to reverse the steward’s actions without a loss of face with the debtors.  Meanwhile the steward will have acquired a debt of honor and gratitude that hopefully will ensure goodwill toward the steward in the future.

That is the “who” and “what” of the story.  The difficulties about the “why” begin to come to the fore when the parable continues: “And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently” (v.8).  We’ll begin to explore that tomorrow – but in the meantime how many different interpretations of this parable can you imagine?

Parable of the Unjust Steward | A.N. Mironov | Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 4.0