Luke 16 Commentary

Jesus tells His disciples the Parable of the Unrighteous Steward. It is about a manager of a rich man’s estate who is fired for bad stewardship. Unsure of how he’ll live, he comes up with a shrewd plan. He summons his former employer’s debtors and ingratiates himself to them by greatly reducing their debts. Because they will have a social obligation to repay him, his future is secure. The master commends him for the way he cleverly used the master’s wealth to benefit himself. This ends the parable, highlighting that the point is to "be shrewd". Jesus then makes the observation that the sons of this age are more shrewd in using reciprocity to advance their temporal ambitions than the sons of light are in regard to their eternal ambitions. He exhorts the disciples to be shrewd by using their stewardship of earthly assets to make eternal friends.

Jesus continues His teaching about money. He tells His disciple the faithfulness principle. He who is faithful in a very little thing will be faithful in much greater things. And He who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous in much. Jesus infers this principle to our earthly opportunities to be faithful or unrighteous in very little things now and the consequences this will have for the much greater responsibilities given or denied us in the life to come. Jesus also reminds His disciples that they cannot serve both God and Money.

Jesus reminds His disciples that they can only have one master; it is impossible to serve two. He applies this truth to God and Money, again warning them that they cannot serve both. They will have to choose.

Luke informs the readers that the Pharisees who had been listening to Jesus teach about money were scoffing at what He said. Luke describes the Pharisees as "lovers of money." Jesus rebukes them as self-justifiers who seek to appear righteous before men and reminds them that God sees the reality of their wicked hearts. He also says that men are terrible judges of what is truly good.

Jesus affirms the endurability of God’s Law. He says that even though the Age of the Law and Prophets have passed, and the Age of the Gospel of the Kingdom has come, it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one part of the Law to fail. In the middle of saying these things, Jesus offers an enigmatic line that everyone is forcing his way into the kingdom of God. 

Jesus continues to teach about the goodness of God’s law and against the self-justified perversions of it by the scoffing Pharisees. He offers a prime example of their detestable manipulation of the law by pointing out how they exploit a manufactured loophole in the marriage laws of Moses.

Jesus tells the Pharisees "The Parable of the Rich Man and Poor Lazarus." It is a story about a rich and a poor man who die. Both go to Hades—the place of the dead. The poor man is brought to paradise/Abraham’s bosom and lives on in a state of comfort. The rich man whose master was money (rather than God) is in a place of agony where his riches offer no aid. The formerly rich man calls across a gulf to Abraham with two requests—both of which Abraham denies. The first request is to send Lazarus to him with a drop of water to cool his tongue from the flames. The second request is for Abraham to send Lazarus to his five godless brothers to warn them to repent and avoid the suffering. Abraham tells him it would do no good, because if they do not listen to what God has already spoken through the scriptures, they will not listen to what someone says who has returned from the dead