Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Luke (16: 1-8), in which Jesus tells the parable of the shrewd manager, who is asked to give an account of his management of the master’s resources.

This parable can be deeply disturbing if we think that God is praising the steward for his fraud!

The point of the story is simply the steward’s energy and inventiveness, his shrewdness as a ‘child of this world’. The steward puts a lot more thought into how to make money than into how to spend it to the best advantage of others! The danger of wealth here is that we can think like the steward does that it can be used it to win friends in heaven and on earth.

In closing Fr Paul says, Perhaps another lesson to be learnt from this story is that God is not interested in what human beings consider ‘fairness’. Remember the payments made to the Workers in the Vineyard! All God wants is commitment.