Text: Luke 16:1-13 (the parable of the shrewd manager)
The Epiphany, Gipton, 21 September 2025
Let’s take a show of hands: Who has ever played Monopoly? A favourite game for generations of families. You can now even get a Leeds version of it, with Burmantofts instead of the Old Kent Road as the cheapest place to own property, and Park Row rather than Mayfair as the most expensive.
It’s said that the inventor of the game, Elizabeth Magie, set out to demonstrate in a game what is true in life: that life is not fair, that the rich tend to get richer and the poor tend to get into debt.[i] Those first few rolls of the dice are all important: do you get a Community Chest card giving you more money, and be the first to buy a property? Or do you have to pay tax before you have even had a pay packet, and maybe even get sent to jail for some unspecified offence?
Life is like that, isn’t it? Who your parents were, where you live as a child, which school you attend, your health… all are big factors whether you spend the rest of your life comfortably off or always struggling for money. And then there is the unexpected. When I play Monopoly, the card I dread getting is ‘Property repairs’ – suddenly having to shell out thousands of pounds that you might not have in cash. A couple of years ago we found ourselves in exactly that position: I had been out of work for a short while, and just after starting a new job, found that our roof needed re-tiling at a cost of several thousand pounds. Fortunately we did have enough in savings to cover it, but not everyone does.
In short, money matters. And Jesus knew that. It has often been said that there are more teachings of Jesus in the Gospels about money than about politics or sex. Because it was no different in his day, as this parable shows: rich landowners, with Jewish servants and gentile slaves, and people struggling with their finances. The ‘manager’ in this story suddenly lost his job because someone blew the whistle on him for fiddling the accounts. We are not told whether or not the rumours were true, but whatever the truth, he faced financial ruin.
And what did the manager do when this happened? He realised that in life, having friends is really important. If he could get people on his side, do them a favour so that they would owe him one, then he would have the support he needed. That is what Jesus commends him for: for taking a practical approach, doing whatever was necessary so that he would have somewhere to live and something to eat.
When Jesus explains the meaning of the parable, he gives two memorable sayings. Let’s take them in turn.
The first saying in verse 9 is, ‘make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes’. That term ‘dishonest wealth’ is difficult to translate from his original Aramaic, so we get various English words in different Bible translations: ‘worldly wealth’, ‘material possessions’, ‘the wealth of this life’, ‘money, tainted as it is’.[ii] Jesus, it seems, didn’t reckon money as important in itself, what mattered much more to him was how it is used.
The reference to being welcomed into eternal homes when wealth is gone is obviously a reference to heaven, where money is meaningless. As an old saying puts it, ‘there are no pockets in a shroud.’ Perhaps we can put it like this: ‘money has no value in itself, but whatever money you have, use it well, because what happens to you after this life depends on how you have used money in this life.’
The second memorable saying is in verse 13: ‘You cannot serve God and Wealth’. In some older translations, instead of ‘wealth’ it says ’Mammon’. Mammon is the idea of wealth, or rather the obsession with becoming rich or having more and bigger possessions, being a sort of evil spirit that leads people astray into sin. What Jesus is saying is that if we are serious about worshipping God and having no other gods before him, then our money and possessions must not be more important to us than our relationship with God.
The Christian writer Richard Foster talks of the ‘dark and light sides’ of money. The light side, when we are serving God, is where it is being used to improve other people’s lives; the dark side, when we are serving Mammon, is where it is used to control other people or become rich and powerful.[iii]
All this is challenging, and it’s meant to be. This is one of the most difficult passages in the Gospels. But what does it mean in practice? The answer will be different according to how much we actually have. Let’s think first about people who have little or no money.
Money matters, if you have little, because without any money you can do nothing. The challenge if money is tight is to be sensible with what little we have. Not to waste it on drink or gambling, or getting into debt by buying on credit what we don’t really need and can’t afford. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ can all too easily lead people into debt. To use another old-fashioned word, be thrifty: eat simple food, enjoy simple pleasures, mend old things rather than buying new ones.
Now, there are plenty of people who do all this, and still don’t have enough, for all sorts of good reasons. I know that here at the Epiphany, you host a Trussell foodbank on a Tuesday, where people on the edge can come and get food, and also advice on how to maximise their income. You point people to others who can help if they have already got problems with addictions, for example, or any other issues in their life – ‘signposting’. Linda and I are also involved with the Trussell foodbanks in West Leeds: Linda is a signposter at the Bramley foodbank on a Tuesday, and I am employed in the warehouse. So we know all about the good work the foodbanks are doing, and the needs of those who come to us. To use the language of Monopoly, we are the ‘Community Chest’ that provides that bit extra when you need it.
The challenges for those who have enough money, and some to spare, are different. Money matters, if you have much, because what we do with it not only reflects our character but sets our priorities. At the extreme end of the scale are the likes of Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates, who became hugely wealthy by running successful businesses, but came to the conclusion later in life that they really needed to give most of that wealth away to improve the lives of ordinary people around the world. Philanthropists, we call them, literally ‘people-lovers’. For if money matters, people matter more.
The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, understood this principle too. He grew up in a poor family in rural Lincolnshire, but did well for himself. It is said that while teaching at Oxford University, he was comfortably off on £30 a year, gave away a tenth of it and lived on £27. But when he was rich and famous, earning over a thousand pounds a year – a fortune in those days - he still lived on no more than thirty, saved no more than a hundred, and gave away all the rest to the poor.
I am assuming that none of us here are millionaires. But some of us are lucky enough to have more than the essentials for food, shelter and warmth. The challenge for us is to use that surplus wisely. That may well include saving for a rainy day, having a pension fund, enjoying a hobby, leaving something to our children in a will. There’s nothing wrong with any of those in themselves. But are we open handed enough to offer some of our savings to the church when there’s an appeal for urgent building work? Or to a charity when there’s a major disaster appeal? Or to a neighbour who suddenly finds themselves struggling? When we have something we no longer need but still usable, do we try and sell it to make money, or pass it on for free to someone who can make better use of it? As Jesus put it, “whoever is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much”.
It's important to remember that in God’s economy, quality is more important than quantity. There was the time that he watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. “Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins… Jesus said, “this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”[iv] It was her motive for giving that mattered, not how much. She saw her money as being for the benefit of other people, not for herself. And it’s that attitude, challenging as it is, that we need to cultivate, with God’s help.
All this is important, serious, and as I have said, challenging. But let’s be more positive. In Monopoly, the rules can be changed. When we played as children, if someone was running out of money my nana would give them £500 from the bank. But to be fair, everyone else got £500 too. It’s just that it made a lot more difference to the person falling into debt. Sometimes we would agree to ‘play soft’, giving another player more chances to make money before insisting on collecting their debt.
Real life is not quite like that. We cannot just magic up £500 when we’re short, and if we break the rules, we may risk being ‘sent to jail without collecting £200’. But what we can do is to use the rules, the laws we have to live by, to bring fairness. We can challenge the rules, and ultimately seek to change them.
That is what Trussell foodbanks are doing: not only accepting donations from those who have money to spare to feed those who do not, but also challenging the rules, holding the powers that be to account and campaigning for a fairer society. One where no-one has the monopoly but all can share in the Community Chest. And that was actually Elizabeth Magie’s intention. Her original version of the game had two sets of rules: the unfair ones we all know, and an alternative set of rules by which the wealth was shared more equally.
So, to sum all this up: Money matters. It matters if you don’t have enough, and have to rely on a foodbank to live. It matters if you have just enough, because how you use it will determine your attitude to life. It matters if you have been given the privilege of being well off, and the responsibility to share that with those who have less. Do you want to be the player who has all the money while others have none, or would you rather play by a set of rules where everyone has enough? Do you serve Mammon – dishonest wealth – or do you serve God?
[i] Kate Raworth, article for BBC online 28 July 2017, accessed 18 September 2025.
[ii] Respectively, New International Version (also GNB); William Barclay; The Bible in Basic English; Jerusalem Bible.
[iii] Foster, Richard: ‘Money, Sex and Power: the Spiritual Disciplines of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience’, Hodder & Stoughton, 1987.
[iv] Mark 12:42-43, NIV