Homily for the twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time (C).
In 1920, Charles Ponzi devised a scheme to buy international postal coupons in Europe and sell them for a profit in the United States. So many people invested in Ponzi’s plan that he couldn’t keep up with demand, so he used the money from new investors to pay off old investors, which worked as long as there were more new investors. And, then, when there weren’t, the whole scheme went kaput. For a while, Mr. Ponzi made a lot of money using a financial trick without actually producing anything real. Today similar scams are known as “Ponzi schemes.”
The parable of the dishonest steward, which Jesus tells in the Gospel, is rather like a first century Ponzi scheme. The steward, learning that he is about to be fired, retires debts to his master at a steep discount. Doing so doesn’t cost him anything but comes at his master’s expense. His master’s debtors will now owe him for their savings, so he’ll have many grateful new friends when he becomes unemployed. What is surprising about the parable is that the master does not condemn his conniving steward but seems to think his trick is rather clever.
The explanation Jesus gives of the parable also surprises us because you’d expect the Lord to condemn obvious fraudulent behavior. But, instead, Jesus uses the story to make a different—very ironic—point. Jesus’ point is that people—like the steward—put so much cleverness and effort into making money that when it comes to what really matters—their relationship with God—they’re rather careless. So, he says, “Go ahead, make friends with dishonest wealth. Invest in the Ponzi scheme. Then, when it fails, and you see how clever you really were, maybe, then, you’ll start thinking about your eternal dwelling.” After all, if the steward had worked half as hard for his master as he did to save his own skin, he wouldn’t have been fired to begin with.
If you don’t pick up the irony, you might miss Jesus’ point. But just so that we’re clear, Jesus is not advocating financial fraud, tax evasion, insider trading, embezzlement, money-laundering, or theft—all of which are sins. In fact, the first reading from the prophet Amos condemns financial fraud. Amos condemns those who “diminish the ephah.” If you want a modern translation of what “diminishing the ephah” means, you might say, “Ripping people off.” An ephah was a unit of measurement, like a weight, that would be put in a scale. And if you shaved a little bit off the bottom or the sides of your ephah and it weighed a little less, then you could give your customers a little less grain—or whatever it was you were selling.
Amos implies that these small acts of financial dishonesty—tampering with the scales to increase profits—can add up to serious exploitation. He accuses the dishonest merchants he criticizes of buying the poor for silver or even the cost of a pair of sandals—in other words, of ruining people’s lives for a trivial profit. You got another pair of shoes in your closet, he accuses, but you’ve done so by reducing other people to the condition of slaves. In the United States, with the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, one of the most obvious and wicked forms of slavery was abolished, but Amos might warn us that more subtle forms of exploitation still exist. Human trafficking is one very obvious example of treating people like property. Some people work to produce cheap consumer goods in conditions and for such low wages that their lives are not much better slaves’. Human beings can never be treated as a consumer product. This is one of the reasons that in vitro fertilization and surrogate pregnancy, for example, are sins; because they treat human beings as products to be manufactured to meet demand and to be discarded when they don’t fill that demand anymore.
Thinking about the more subtle ways in which people are exploited might make us uncomfortable. This is not a parable in which Jesus is trying to make friends. There is a harsh edge to his message. We spend a lot of time and a lot of effort on worldly concerns. If my frequent flyer miles aren’t credited to my account after my flight back to Italy, you better believe that I will be on the phone with Delta until they are. And Jesus might say to me, “How very clever! Do you care as much if you miss morning prayer? Will you be as upset then? Are you as prudent with your travel arrangements to the Kingdom of Heaven? Or have you tried to squeeze too many material things into your luggage and ended up late for your flight?”
The good thing about Jesus’ unsettling parables is that they are intended as warnings—like an announcement at the airport that your flight is departing and you better hightail it to the gate. This parable also shows us a pathway to the gate. A person who is trustworthy in small matters, Jesus says, will be trustworthy in great matters. On one level, Jesus wants us to ask ourselves what is a small matter and what is a great matter. The whole point of the discussion of dishonest wealth is that we sometimes think of gaining a few extra dollars as a great matter and ignore or take for granted our eternal salvation—the greatest matter of all. Or think of all the time and attention we pay to fads or the latest media scandal. We get so wrapped up in such trivial and passing matters that we neglect the people right in front of us, our duties to God, our parish, or our community. We’d be better off ignoring the latest controversy—which no one will remember next week—and dedicating our energy to those around us. Because perhaps those small matters are really part of the truly great matter of our salvation. Jesus, I think, is giving us one key to changing our way of thinking from that of children of the world to children of light: making small, daily investments in the Kingdom of Heaven. That’s the only investment, after all, that will truly last.
Before Charles Ponzi’s scheme collapsed and he went to federal prison, millions of dollars—hundreds of millions in today’s dollars—had changed hands. Nothing was left because nothing was really there to begin with. If we invest our time, our money, our thoughts, our energy, ourselves in anything less than the Kingdom of Heaven—buyer beware!—we just might be falling for a Ponzi scheme.
Readings: Amos 8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-8; Luke 16:1-13
September 21, 2025
St. Isaac Jogues Parish
Rapid City, SD
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 