Jesus says in Luke 16, “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. 9 I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” Richard Caemmerer writes,
One of the reproaches leveled against this pericope (reading) is that it seems to set almsgiving and investment before us in prudential terms. Take care of people now, and you will get an eternal return. This seems to be the opposite of Jesus’ definition of love in Matt. 5 :46, 47. And yet quite the opposite is true. Jesus says that we are to invest our cash and property in such a way that a relation to the brethren which has everlasting quality be assured. Safeguarding the place of our brethren in God’s dimension of life is indeed an act of love, in its highest meaning. Jesus depicts His people at Judgment as those who used their resources on
earth in order to sustain one another (Matt.25:31-46). In this parable the objective of the investment is not simply to get a future return in general that is the impulse of the man of “this world” -but to establish people in a situation in which they exert God’s own kind of “receiving,” in which they love with God’s kind of love.
Here Jesus counsels to that exercise of love which nurtures love in others. Particularly where the “everlasting habitation” is realized to exist not only beyond the grave but already here, in the families and parishes and businesses and communities where Christians live and where they spend their money so that others are sustained to live and love in God’s sphere of life, there the counsel to nurture and not to self-interest becomes apparent. Matt. 19: 16-30 shows Jesus busy bringing immediate control of wealth and advantage into consciousness as a test of whether the heart is alive toward God.
