He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?—St. Luke xvi. 10, 11.
There are no parables which appear so unlike each other as those which we call the parables of the Prodigal Son and of the Unjust Steward. Yet the Evangelist who reports them to us, evidently discovered some close relation between them. One would gather from his narrative that they were spoken at the same time. If you remember how the first of these parables arose out of our Lord’s discoveries of the moral diseases of the Jewish nation and its rulers, you will see more clearly how the story of the Steward and that of Dives and Lazarus carry on its lessons. I looked upon the parables in the last chapter as exhibiting, in the liveliest and fullest form, the contrast between the mind of the chosen people and of Him who had chosen them. He was a shepherd seeking after any one sheep which had wandered from His fold; He was as earnest to reclaim a human heart, as a woman to find a piece of money which she had lost; finally, He was a Father looking upon the outcast who had wandered furthest from his home as a child, rejoicing to welcome him back. And the Jewish people, as represented by their scribes, their priests, their most religious men, held it a crime to receive sinners and eat with them. Their godliness consisted in avoiding those whom God was regarding with tender affection, whom He was making the mightiest sacrifice to deliver and to regenerate.
No explanation of the parable of the Prodigal was more consistent with this view of its object than that which has been ordinarily adopted. If the younger son who took his portion of goods with him into a far country reminded us of the world beyond the Jewish pale, the elder son who heard the music and dancing at his brother’s return and refused to come in, showed exactly that temper of mind which our Lord had been detecting and exposing in the Jew himself. His privileges were not underrated. He had been admitted to know the will and purpose of God. All that his Father had was his. But if he believed his covenant, he believed that God’s will was to bless all the families of the earth. That was the revelation of God which had been made to Abraham and his descendants. That was the call of Abraham and his descendants to work as God’s ministers. They showed that they had no desire to see the families of the earth blessed. The blessing of others was an injury to them, a derogation from their rights. Their inheritance as the firstborn was put in peril.
I. What more natural than a transition from a story of this kind, to one which reminded the Jew that he was not a possessor of divine gifts at all, but merely a steward of them, that his honour as the elder brother was to assist in the distribution of his father’s treasures, that if he looked upon his position in any other light, the position would be taken from him, the treasures would cease to be his? Here we have what is at once the most obvious, and, I think also the deepest meaning of the parable of the Steward. Before we notice any particulars in it, let us fix our minds upon that name. For the Jew to believe that he was a steward—for us to believe that we are stewards—is the great necessity, the amazing difficulty. No other, we may depend upon it, is practically so serious, so profound, as that. Commentators have exercised their faculties laboriously upon one and another aspect of this story. They may have seen each others’ mistakes; one may have had a glimpse of our Lord’s meaning which was hidden from another. But if they forgot the subject of the parable, or did not bring that home to their readers, their ingenuity in handling special points can have been of little avail.
On the other hand, if we take firm hold of the thought that we are studying the acts, punishments, resources of a steward, many perplexities of detail in the story disappear, and many opposing notions of it are harmonized. What goods, we ask, are these which the steward was accused of wasting? Were they spiritual or material goods? Was it that knowledge of the Divine mind and purpose which had been imparted to the sons of Abraham; was it the gold and silver which they might share in and traffic with like the other nations? The passage I took for my text gives the answer. The same law applies to both. ‘He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.’ ‘The second clause defines more clearly the doctrine of the first. ’If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?’ The covetousness of the Pharisees extended from the lowest things to the highest; from the desire for present pelf to a calculation about the prizes after death which might be secured by a prudent investment of a certain amount of time and fortune here in religious duties and sacrifices. It could not be otherwise. The whole mind must be governed at last by the principle which has dominion over one part of it. This is what our Lord has affirmed so strongly elsewhere, and repeats in connection with the words I have just read to you. ‘No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ Mammon must be the lord of both worlds, if he is the lord of either. If we admit him to make our earth for us, he will also make our heaven. The spirit of covetousness will be content with no half service, no divided allegiance. And in like manner our Lord teaches that the Spirit of love will be content with no half service, no divided allegiance. He asks for the little and the much; He asks to be owned as giving us our stewardship both in the unrighteous mammon and in the true riches, in all tangible as well as in all unseen treasures. Do not, then, let us try to separate in Christ’s parables worlds which it is the very purpose of a parable to shew us must be joined together. The outward and visible is always the sign of the inward and spiritual, whether grace or ungraciousness. ‘The steward had wasted goods of both kinds; he had claimed them both as his own.’
But the owner was not so far off as the steward supposed. He demanded an account of the goods. The steward knew that he was about to be dismissed. What was he to do? Could he become an independent man? Was he capable of standing on his own ground without any master? He knows that he was not. He cannot dig. Should he then tell his master that he had failed? Should he make a full confession? No! to beg he is ashamed.” But there was another course open. Hitherto he had made no friends among his master’s tenants. He had stood aloof from them; he had assumed the airs of one in his lord’s confidence, having interests altogether apart from theirs. Now he felt the need of their help. When he had quarrelled with his employer, they might receive him into their houses. The method looks simple when it is once devised. He could earn their favour by reducing their debts. He could set them comparatively at ease. ‘How much owest thou unto my lord? And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, An hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and write fourscore.’
This was exactly what the Jewish nation did for the nations of the earth when it had lost its sense of a heavenly calling, when it ceased to feel itself a steward for mankind, Jews won themselves friends among heathen men who were weary of their own confusions, who were asking for some clearer light. But it was not by scattering the confusions, by pointing them to the light that lighteth every man. It was by lowering the standard which they had already; it was by substituting an easy atheism for a restless idolatry. For the hundred measures of oil they wrote fifty, for the hundred measures of wheat fourscore. It was the way to get friends; not an unsuccessful way, in that time or any other.
But this instinct of seeking friends our Lord says is a right instinct. He would cultivate it in His disciples. He would use the steward’s example to show how the blessing is to be won. The steward had done wisely. Having given himself to mammon he had served mammon thoroughly. Having set before himself the object of winning men’s favour, he had given himself up, soul and body, to that object. Could not they do the like? Might not they surrender themselves as heartily to the Spirit of love, as he had surrendered himself to the rival spirit? Could they not buy an everlasting home in men’s hearts by shewing them the truth, by delivering them from lies, as he had won a temporary home in their houses by disguising from them the truth, by encouraging them in lies? Might they not compel the god whom he worshipped, the unrighteous mammon, to be an instrument in their service?
There is, as I said in speaking of the Prodigal Son, a prevalent jealousy of all interpretations which give the parables a national sense, lest we should lose the personal sense which we are sure must be in them. I justified that feeling in the instance to which I referred then. I justify it in this instance. The same observation applies to both. This parable did not speak less livingly, less tremendously, to any individual Jew, because it described the condition of his people. Every individual Jew had a stewardship for which he must give an account. So neither does its fulfilment to them in the least weaken its force for us. Is the Church Catholic less a steward than the posterity of Abraham? Is the English nation less a steward than the Jewish nation? Is any of us in his vocation less a steward than any one of them? Are we less prone than they were to use our Master’s goods as if they were our own? Are we less prone in our daily intercourse with each other, in our intercourse with the tribes of the earth, to lower the standard of justice, goodness, truth, which God has established in their consciences,—to put the fifty measures of oil, the fourscore of wheat, for the hundred? Might we not, if we would, be making friends of the other pattern, according to the opposite maxim, both among Christian men and among the men who have never heard of Christ or who disbelieve Him, by awakening them to nobler hopes, by setting before them a nobler life?
II. The sentences which connect this Parable of the Steward with the one of Dives and Lazarus are intelligible enough if they are viewed in this light, and are as much a comment upon one as an introduction to the other; otherwise they look like sentences thrown in by accident, not in the order’ which St. Luke promised to observe. That we should be reminded just in this place of the covetousness of the Pharisees, and that that covetousness should be given as the reason for their deriding our Lord’s words about the steward, is surely just what one might have expected, if the whole story turns upon a selfish attempt to appropriate blessings which were meant to be dispensed. That Christ should say to them, ‘Ye are they which justify yourselves before men: but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God,’ was consistent with the discovery He had just been making of a scheme of religion which was grounded upon self-seeking and ended in self-seeking, while the God whom the cultivators of that religion professed to worship was sending His own Son to seek after His creatures.
And the words which follow these, were not less directly addressed to their consciences and need not miss any of their force for ours. The Law and the Prophets had been sounding in the ears of the Jewish people; they boasted of the Law which their fathers transgressed; they gloried in the prophets whom their fathers killed. Then John came preaching, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Since then there had been an eager crying for a kingdom of heaven. Numbers were pressing into it, dreaming that they should find in it some relaxation of the standard which Law and Prophets had set forth. But no! Heaven and earth would pass away before one tittle of the eternal law which bound heaven and earth together could fail. Jesus had come not to destroy the Law but to fulfil. For one example, which went very directly home to the Pharisee. He had come to make the bond which bound husband to wife more close and sacred. Those who worshipped the mere name of the Law, finding that it permitted—wisely permitted—letters of divorcement, were continually breaking loose from the obligations of wedlock, all the time pleading the authority of Moses, and fancying that they were obeying the Divine command. He who came to establish an inward righteousness which the Law could not establish, and so to fulfil the intent of the Law, could proclaim that there was a real moral adultery in such separations; that marriage was not dissolved except by a moral crime; that the man who sought the letter of divorce on any ground but that was making an adulteress of the woman whom he put away. This was an instance, a typical instance, of the way in which the Jewish rulers were using the Divine statutes to undermine the principle which they were created to enforce; an instance of the way in which they were using their knowledge of Scripture to weaken the conscience in their own people and in the people of other lands. Frequent as divorces were at this time in Rome, we have the testimony of the Jewish historian that they were at least as frequent in Jerusalem, and that the crime which our Lord said that they would foster did continually disturb the peace of families and the order of the State. It is our Lord who traces this result to the Pharisaical denial of any morality which was not legal and external, to that Pharisaical selfishness with which wedded love is incompatible.
III. All readers speak naturally of the parable’ of Dives and Lazarus; all nevertheless seem inclined to regard it as an actual narrative of a rich and a poor man. We may now perhaps perceive why it is not safe to reject either of these convictions, why the parable must contain more than a mere story that it may vindicate its claim to be a story. In speaking to you on the Parable of the Sower, I maintained that it was an education—a divine education—for poor men or rich men if their minds were only awakened to the most obvious facts of nature. They knew the worth of that education when they began to connect nature with themselves, to regard the same Divine government as exercised in analogous methods over both. So here. I accept this story in its most literal sense as an example of facts which are occurring continually in this world, and as a revelation of what passes in the world after death. I cannot value it too highly in that character. But if it were only this, it would seem to me a loose fragment occurring in the midst of a continuous discourse. It would have no reference to the main subject of that discourse. I hold that it has a direct reference to that subject. The more carefully we examine it in all its details, the more shall we find that it concerns the steward of whom we have just been hearing, the elder son of whom we heard last Sunday.
(1.) ‘There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: and there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.’ Any rich man might certainly be clothed in purple and fine linen. But for the purposes of a parable, there would be a peculiar fitness in such vestures for a nation which is described in the Scriptures as one of kings and priests. The sumptuous fare may represent the luxury of any individual man. But these words occur in a song, which every Israelite knew by heart, which confessedly referred to the blessings of the race, which gave the form to the thoughts and language of a number of Psalms. ‘He made him ride on the high places of the earth, that he might eat the increase of the fields; and he made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock; butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and fatlings of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat: and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape.’ Evidently whatever sense we give to the words of this song, the same we may reasonably give to the sumptuous fare’ of the parable, the only difference being that as our Lord spoke at a time when the nation had lost its civil freedom, the treasures which it possessed must be those which St. Paul enumerated when he said, ‘Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever.’
(2.) And if the people who were chosen to know the one God of all the families of the earth, the God who executeth justice and righteousness on the earth, the God who is a Creator and a Redeemer, are represented by the rich man—the beggar at the gate must be the image of those tribes that were bowing to gods who disliked some families of the earth, to gods who were not just and righteous but spiteful and malicious, to gods some of whom desired to enslave and kill, some of whom were more gracious and merciful, but were controlled by a power higher than all, which seemed at times merely absorbed in its own happiness, at times to be the envious beholder and the destined destroyer of what men loved, of all their momentary gratifications, of all their distant hopes. No mythology, no philosophy had ever been able to cure these speculations, for they came from sores in the conscience, from a sense of inward war, from a prophecy that there must be a Righteous Being, One who desired that men should be righteous,—if haply they could feel after Him and find Him. But Lazarus had never been so full of sores—at least the sores had never been so obvious and so painful—as in that age of unbelief, of moral corruption, of eager craving for signs and enchantments, of hopeless slavery, upon which the world, ruled by the Cesars, had now entered. There was, indeed, in that time, a longing for any crumbs of consolation or information which might be found anywhere. We have proofs enough that the Roman masters, much as they may have despised the Jews, did ask for those crumbs at their hands, did try to understand their lore, did listen to the false prophets who abused that lore and traded with the wisdom which it gave them. ‘Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.’ The animals and outward nature whispered to him the news which those who were trusted with it did not tell. ‘He who made these creatures and thee,’ does not forget them and will not forget thee.
(3.) ‘And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.’ The beggar lies at the gate of the rich man no more. The blessing to Abraham becomes his blessing. He is carried into the very heart of that divine covenant which was given to one family for the sake of all the families of the earth. Is not this a faithful exhibition of the facts? Heathen nations have believed the God of Abraham to be their God; have confessed Jesus the seed of Abraham to be their Lord and King; have said that He came to adopt them into His Father’s family, to make them sons of God in Him. The language is at least consistent with the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, as the Apostles proclaimed it to the world.
(4.) Does the account of the death and burial of the rich man answer less the facts of history? Does it answer less to the previous passages of St. Luke’s narrative? Is not that narrative (or rather the discourses which it records) declaring to us the symptoms of an expiring nation, the nature and source of the diseases which must at last extinguish it? When the sentence went forth against it, what was it but putting into a grave that which had become putrid and was infecting the air?
(5.) But life is not extinct when this burial has taken place. There is a life in death. The torment which the beggar endured has become the rich man’s. He has the frightful sores of conscience. He has the sense of being without God, of not knowing what His purposes are; whether He is not an enemy, whether He does not desire the misery of His creatures, whether Jehovah the Redeemer, or Mammon the Enslaver, is indeed the Lord of all. He has the feeling that a strange reverse has taken place in his condition; that he has fallen by some dire destiny; that others who were in an immeasurably lower state than his have ascended into a higher.
(6.) Recollection of the past has not departed. At first it seems only to aggravate the misery of the loss.
‘And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence.’
This craving for something to cool the tongue, if it were only a slight taste of outward civil rights, has characterised the Jewish race during ages of ignominy and cruel persecution at Christian hands. And all the while there has been a wish—I count it a noble wish—to receive the blessing from father Abraham—I mean to claim it as due to a people having a grand ancestry and glorious traditions, rather than to take it from the mercy of the Gentiles even if it must come through their hands. But Abraham can only answer by pointing to the advantages which they had and which they have lost—can only speak of the wide and impassable gulf which separates the present from the past. Till they can look beyond their ancestry to the Ancient of Days—till they can invoke not Abraham, but the God of Abraham, that sad answer is the only one which can reach them.
But there is another scene in the drama.
(7.) ‘Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’
I can find no key to the meaning of this sentence like that which is supplied by some grand lessons which St. Paul addresses to the Gentiles at Rome, in a passage from which I have quoted on a former occasion.
‘Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee. Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be graffed in. Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not high-minded, but fear: for if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again.’
The nations have been carried into Abraham’s bosom. They have become the fortunate brethren of the rich man; the successors to the stewardship which he has forfeited. May not they fall from that honour as he has fallen? Will they not take warning from his fall? Abraham makes answer, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets, let them hear them.’ Moses and the Prophets will tell them what comes of exulting in great privileges; that men who had the revelation of the righteous God might turn to the vilest idols. Moses and the Prophets will tell them that they can only live by faith in God; that if they once begin to trust in themselves they must perish. He who had Moses and the Prophets, and did not hear them, replies, ‘Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.’ The news of Resurrection; the voice of one who had risen, that must prevail! Is there no conscience in us—in the beggars who have become princes—in the countries of idolaters which now form a Christendom—that responds to the fearful sentence, ‘If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead?’
(8.) I have endeavoured to follow our Lord’s words step by step, and, instead of inventing a sense for them, to take that which is suggested by the context, that which associates them at once with the history of the time and with the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven. But, as I said before, no interpretation of this kind, however much justified by evidence internal and collateral, can warrant us in throwing aside the most palpable, most individual, meaning which has been ever found for the parable. If I thought I was weakening one application of it which has been made to any rich man clothed with purple and fine linen, to any beggar at his gate, I should distrust my apprehension of it altogether. But as I have shown in former cases, there can be no fear that a law which strikes at selfishness in spiritual treasures will not strike at selfishness in the case of material treasures. For men’s unfaithfulness in little things corresponds to their unfaithfulness in great. And God’s government is orderly and uniform. His dealings with nations must, as the Bible teaches us they do, proceed on the same principles and point to the same objects as His dealing with every human soul.
The relation between the past and future of the Jewish nation may be most fittingly set forth in the past and future of a man, by his condition here, and his condition after death. I assume that that is the most fit illustration of it, because it is our Lord’s. And I assume that as He tells us of facts just as they are here, so He tells us of facts just as they are there. If He represents the selfish man as feeling the torment when he passes out of the world which was concealed from him in a great measure here, I take it for granted that it is even so. If He says that an utterly selfish man, who only cared for himself here, who at first only cares for the flames which are tormenting himself there, may be brought, through this discipline, to think of his brethren and care for them, I cannot reject the assurance of so mighty a moral change, merely because, without such an authority, I could not have conceived it. If I take our Lord Jesus Christ as my guide through mysteries which I cannot penetrate, if I suppose that He knows more than we know, I must conclude that a man who has been proof against all loving influences here, who had appeared to grow harder and more cruel under those very influences, may yet find the fatherly chastisement which will break his stubbornness and lead him to contrition. He who began to cry earnestly that those whom he had left behind him might not come into that place of torment, might have still a gulf separating him from Abraham. But that gulf must have been beginning to close up; he was nearer in heart and mind to Abraham than he had ever been in the days when he was receiving his good things.
It is not, my friends, by quenching this hope for any individual man, or for any fallen nation, that we shall make ourselves purer, or shall deepen the awe of our minds. We may believe, we ought to believe, that punishment is inseparable from evil, that God will never withhold His punishments while evil lasts. Israel cannot be saved till it is saved from its distrust and hatred of God. When St. Paul says ‘All Israel shall be saved,’ he expresses his conviction that it will one day be brought to own that the perfect friend of man is the true image of God. The assurance that its disobedience will be at last overcome, cannot make it safe for the Christian Church to imitate the sin of Israel, and so to come into its torments. The trust that no sin, no selfishness, shall at last be found stronger than the divine love, cannot lead any man to cultivate that which is to be vanquished, or defy that which must prevail. Despair is the devil’s instrument, not God’s. He is the God of Hope.