This parable has for centuries caused confusion and consternation for Biblical commentators. The steward
has been wasting his master’s goods, and under threat of being fired goes scrambling around settling debts on the cheap. His motivation is rotten – he does it to ingratiate himself with the debtors so they will take him in after he loses his job. And for this he gets praised!
By A.N. Mironov, 2012
Jesus then proceeds to say that worldly men are wiser than enlightened, angelic ones, and advises us to embrace ill-gotten wealth – and then, in a seeming contradiction, tells us we cannot serve both God and mammon. Huh? Didn’t he just tell us to serve mammon?
Understood on an internal level – through Swedenborg – the story makes much more sense.
Let’s say your church decides to start a Sunday night Bible study. The pastor notes that this is part of the Sabbath, and there should be no excuses. He also encourages participants to buy a study guide which he wrote and the church is selling.
You find this troubling. You and your wife read and study the Bible together; you’ve taken part in some other Bible studies, but don’t like feeling coerced. What’s more, Sunday is the one day all your children are home, and you have a tradition of Sunday dinners that tend to evolve into long, rich conversations. You and your wife talk about it, and decide to keep your family tradition instead.
This leads to some pressure. The pastor keeps calling to remind you of the study nights, and you keep catching snide remarks from other members. Finally you tell the pastor that the reaction is hurtful and unwarranted, and you might decide to seek another church.
You tell this to a friend, and his reaction is unexpected. “I hear what you’re saying,” he says, “and I might be right with you someday. But for me, I’d never gone to a Bible study before. I always figured that I knew all the stories, and I was busy, I was tired, all that stuff. But I really couldn’t argue with the fact that it is the Sabbath. So I went, and you know, I’m seeing things in the Bible I never saw before. I mean, I knew all the stories, but now I’m seeing ways I can apply it to my life.”
That, in essence, is the parable of the unjust steward. In this example, “you” are the rich man, with a wealth of spiritual knowledge which you’ve confirmed in your life. The church is the steward, who represents external ideas about religion, based in truth but not necessarily filled with a desire for good. You can see that he is wasting your goods – the church’s ideas are hampering your ability to live the best life you can.
Your friend, meanwhile, is a debtor – someone with a collection of knowledge from others, but not confirmed as part of life. Pressured into the Bible study, he starts confirming some of the knowledge he has and applying it to life – akin to the debtors “writing” down lesser amounts, which represents confirming themselves in intermediate spiritual states.
This explains why the steward was praised. Despite his limits, he found a way to be useful – and in doing so made a move toward improving his own spiritual state.
That brings us to the mysterious line, “the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.” This, according to Swedenborg, means that if we are in external states (“this generation”) – which the steward was, and the debtors were – the most effective tool for us is going to be external thought and knowledge (“sons of this world”). That’s what the steward got from the debtors, and what the debtors got from the steward. They shared external things, to the benefit of both.
And what of “making friends with unrighteous mammon”? “Unrighteous mammon,” according to Swedenborg, is knowledge possessed by evil people. To “make friends” with it is to learn what these people know without embracing their evil. Which, again, is something the steward and the debtors did for each other.
So the Lord here is telling us that if we are in a worldly state and want to become more spiritual, we need to collect true ideas from the world around us – even an evil world – and make use of them.
But we do have to be careful. When we’re dealing with ideas that are infused with evil, it’s easy to embrace both instead of separating them. So we need to be aware of which master we’re really serving – do we love the truth and feel an aversion to the evil? Or do we justify the evil and regard the truth as unimportant? That will tell us whether we’re serving God or mammon.
Passages from Swedenborg:
Divine Providence 250 (Rogers)
Light a lamp and investigate how many people there are in the kingdoms of today aspiring to positions of advancement who are not personifications of loves of self and the world. Will you find fifty in a thousand who are lovers of God, and among them other than a few who aspire to positions of advancement? So, since those who are lovers of God are so few in number, and the lovers of self and the world so many, and since lovers of the latter are spurred by their fires to perform more useful services than lovers of God by theirs, how then can anyone confirm himself against Divine providence in consequence of seeing more evil people than good having prestige and wealth?
[5]�This, too, is corroborated by these words of the Lord:
The master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this age are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light. So I say to you, make for yourselves friends of unrighteous mammon, that when you fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. (Luke 16:8, 9)
The meaning of these words in the natural sense is apparent. In the spiritual sense, however, by unrighteous mammon are meant concepts of truth and good�-�concepts which the evil possess and which they use only to gain for themselves advancements and riches. It is these concepts which good people or the sons of light are to make friends of for themselves and which will receive them into everlasting habitations.
Arcana Coelestia (Elliott) n. 3875
[3] No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other or he will cling to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Matt. 6:24.
Here the celestial form of love is meant by 'loving', the spiritual form by 'clinging to'. Both of these expressions are used because those two forms of love are distinct and separate. Otherwise one expression would have been sufficient.
Arcana Coelestia (Elliott) n. 9093
It is similar when someone divides truth from good, or what amounts to the same thing, faith from charity; when anyone does this he destroys both. In short, all the things which ought to be a single whole perish if they are divided.
[2] This division is meant by the Lord's words in Luke,
No one can serve two masters; either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will prefer the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Luke 16:13.
That is, it is not possible to serve the Lord through belief in Him and at the same time serve the world by loving it, thus to acknowledge truth and at the same time to do evil. Anyone who behaves in this way has his mind divided, as a result of which it is destroyed.
Arcana Coelestia (Elliott) n. 9210
[3] All this shows what doing good for a selfish or a worldly reason is, what doing good for the Lord's or for the neighbour's sake is, and what is the difference between them. The difference is as great as that between two opposites, thus as great as that between heaven and hell. Furthermore those who do good for their neighbour's or for the Lord's sake are in heaven; but those who do it for a selfish or a worldly reason are in hell. For those who do good for their neighbour and the Lord's sake love the Lord above all things and their neighbour as themselves - commandments which are 'the first of all the commandments', Mark 12:28-31. But those who do everything for selfish and worldly reasons love themselves above all things, thus more than God; and they not only despise their neighbour but also hate him if he does not make common cause with them and align himself with them. This is the meaning of the Lord's teaching in Matthew,
No one can serve two lords, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will cling to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Matt. 6:24.
True Christian Religion (Rose) n. 437
People cannot stand between the Devil and the Lord with a flexible neck and pray at the same time to each of them. People like this are those whom the Lord meant when he said,
I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. It would have been better if you were cold or hot; but since you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot I am about to spew you out my mouth. (Revelation 3:15, 16)
Could anyone leading a troop of soldiers join a battle between two armies and fight on both sides at once? Can we focus on doing evil to our neighbors and also doing good to them? Would our evil not then lie hidden inside our good actions? Although evil that conceals itself does not appear in our actions, it is still obvious from many things when we reflect on it in the right way. The Lord says, "No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and Mammon" (Luke 16:13).
Apocalypse Explained (Tansley) n. 847
[3] That the nature of that faith is such in respect to falsities, will be seen in what presently follows. The reason why it is also such in respect to evils is, that when good works are set aside - as is the case when it is believed that they contribute nothing at all to justification and salvation - it follows that in their place there are evil works; for a man must be either in goods or in evils. He cannot be in both at the same time; this is meant by these words of the Lord:
"No one can serve two masters; either he will hate the one, and love the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. vi. 24).
Hence it is, that all evils in the aggregate follow from the faith which sets aside good works, which are the goods of life.