This parable in Luke 16:1-13 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!

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 the Writings of Emanuel 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.

The explains, then, 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 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 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 steward. They shared external things, to the benefit of both.

And what of “making friends with unrighteous mammon”? “Unrighteous mammon” is truth and knowledge possessed by evil people. To “make friends” with it is making a connection to the truth and knowledge without embracing the 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 seeking truth that is 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.

Here are some references:

Arcana Coelestia 3875[3],

Arcana Coelestia 9093, 9210[3];

Divine Providence 250;

The Apocalypse Explained 847[3];

True Christian Religion 437)

6827. And Moses was feeding the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. That this signifies that the law from the Divine was instructing those who were in the truth of simple good; and that “the priest of Midian” is the good of the church where such are, is evident from the representation of Moses, as being the Lord as to the law Divine (see n. 6752); and in the beginning as to the truth which is of the law from the Divine (n. 6771); but here as to the law from the Divine. So may we name the degrees of progression in the Lord, before, as to the Human, He was made the very law Divine. In the whole Word, in its inmost or supreme sense, the Lord alone and the glorification of His Human are treated of; but as the inmost or supreme sense transcends human understanding, it is allowable to unfold the Word as to its internal sense, in which are treated of the Lord’s kingdom and the church, and the setting up of the latter, and also the regeneration of the man of the church by the Lord. That these subjects are treated of in the internal sense, is because the regeneration of man is a representative image of the glorification of the the Lord, (n. 3138, 3212, 3245, 3246, 3296, 3490, 4402, 5688).

[2] From the signification of “to feed,” as being to instruct (n. 3795, 5201); from the signification of a “flock,” as being one who learns and is led by means of truth to the good of charity (n. 343), thus the “flock” in the general sense is the church (n. 3767, 3768), here the church where are those who are in the truth of simple good, who are signified by “Midian” (n. 3242, 4756); from the signification of “father-in-law,” as being the good from which, as from a father, comes forth that good which has been conjoined with truth, here with the truth which is of the law from the Divine, which is represented by Moses (see n. 6793), the quality of this good is “Jethro;” and from the signification of the “priest of Midian,” as being the good of the church where are they who are in the truth of simple good (n. 6775). From all this it is evident that by “Moses was feeding the flock of his father-in-law, the priest of Midian,” is signified that the law from the Divine was instructing those who were in the truth of simple good; and that the “priest of Midian” is the good of the church where such are.