Can We Make Friends with Unrighteous Wealth?

There are certain passages in the Bible that make us stop in our tracks. For me, one of them has always been the parable of the dishonest manager in Luke 16.

After squandering his master’s possessions and facing dismissal, the manager called in his master’s debtors and began reducing what they owed—fifty here, twenty there. By ordinary standards, what he did was clearly dishonest. Yet Jesus tells us that the manager was commended for acting shrewdly, and then says something even more puzzling: “Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth.”[1]

For a long time, I could not make sense of these words. How could something dishonest be called wise?

But as I continued to reflect on this passage, I began to see it from a very different angle.

The moment the manager’s wrongdoing was exposed, he found himself standing where every excuse had run out. He could no longer hide from what he had done. He had become, in the deepest sense, a debtor himself.

And strangely, when a person truly becomes aware of the depth of his own sin, his eyes begin to change. For the first time, he can hear the cries of others who are struggling beneath debts and failures of their own. Perhaps this is why, after encountering the grace of God, the apostle Paul could confess that he was the “foremost” of sinners.[2] Having received such mercy himself, Paul became a living testimony to the extraordinary patience of God toward others.[3] A person who has truly confronted his own sin does not condemn others so easily.

Standing at the edge of ruin, the manager began to look beyond his own desperate situation. He saw people who, like him, were burdened by debts they could not easily escape. And he reduced what they owed.

Scripture warns that we will not be released until the very last penny has been paid.[7] Under the uncompromising judgment of the law, we are all debtors—unable by our own strength to free ourselves from the burden and suffering of sin. Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.[4]

Could Jesus, in speaking of “unrighteous wealth,” also be drawing our attention to the terrible weight that sin places upon us? If so, the manager’s decision to reduce those debts by fifty here and twenty there was more than a matter of numbers. It was the act of someone who had discovered what it meant to be crushed beneath a debt of his own—and who could no longer simply stand by while others struggled beneath theirs.

It was, in this sense, an act of love: an attempt to help carry a burden too heavy for another person to bear alone. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”[6] This is what the manager did. He looked at the burden carried by another debtor and, in some sense, treated it as though it were his own.

There are times when loving another person means doing exactly that—remaining beside them, weeping with them, praying for them, and refusing to abandon them even when they seem unable to find their own way back. Above all, love covers a multitude of sins.[5] And through such persistent love, God may finally turn a soul back to Himself and extend the grace that breaks the chains of sin.

Imagine that person, finally released from those chains, looking back with tears and saying:

“Thank you. Truly, thank you. When I was bound by sin and suffering beneath its weight, you did not give up on me. You wept with me and prayed for me until I found my way back to God. Through your love and your tearful prayers for me, God finally softened my hardened heart. I came to recognize my sin, I repented, and I was finally released from the hellish suffering that had held me captive.”

Could this be what it means to make friends through unrighteous wealth—and then, when all earthly wealth has disappeared, to be welcomed into the eternal dwellings?

This way of reading the parable has changed the way I look at other people. Eyes that once rushed to condemn the sinner are slowly learning to weep beside him. Hands that once pointed out another person’s faults are slowly learning to reach out and help carry the weight. Mercy triumphs over judgment.[8]

And even today, the parable of the dishonest manager quietly turns the question back toward my own life: Whose burden am I helping to carry today? And for whom am I willing to labor in love until that person finds the way back to Jesus?

Notes

[1] Luke 16:8–9 [2] 1 Timothy 1:15 [3] 1 Timothy 1:16 [4] Romans 5:20 [5] 1 Peter 4:8 [6] Galatians 6:2 [7] Matthew 5:26; cf. Luke 12:59 [8] James 2:13