Metropolitan of Strumica Nahum: Unrighteous riches
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Children, you have heard today’s gospel reading: “And I say unto you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous riches (mammon), that when you are poor, they may receive you into everlasting home” (see Luke 16: 1-10).
Who is this unjust steward; what sort of unrighteous riches he manages and arranges; and why did the Lord praise him?
Each one of us is an unrighteous steward. If you do not understand now – continue to read.
Unrighteous riches is everything that God Has given us outside the Church, and even more unrighteous riches is everything given to us within the Church. Our very existence and our whole life is a gift of God, let alone the graceful opportunity that we receive in the Church for graceful existence (good being) now as well as for the eternal full-of grace existence. We freely arrange and manage all these natural and gracious gifts.
The Lord praised the unrighteous steward because, at the end of his management, it occurred to him that he was not dealing with his own wealth, but someone else’s, and therefore he could have more easily trade with the debtors; because, when you run someone else’s wealth, it comes to you as a bonus.
Thus, all of this is related to all of us (especially to those who are placed in high positions in any area of the life of the society), if we forgive and if we show mercy, with concrete help, to those who suffer mentally and physically, only from our surplus – from everything spiritually and materially, which God Has granted us, we will be praised by the Lord of our lives, that is, after we become extremely impoverished by life, we will be accepted into eternal dwellings.
Well, now, if we invest (spend) ourselves with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul and with all our strength in the work of God, and if we burn out (spend) ourselves in that giving, for the salvation of man and the world, then our Heavenly Father will be looking at us differently and He will address us with different words, that is, not as stewards, but as legal heirs and owners.
What and how then can a man say something about the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary? The unrighteous servant usually remembers at the end of his life that everything is vanity and nothingness before the inevitable and unspeakable meeting with the Living God, on the other hand little Mary at the beginning of Her life burned Herself out in the Holy of Holies, longing for a personal encounter with the One Who IS – the Ever-Essential One, so She may ever glow to us all forever, as a Lighthouse of the uncreated light, which leads and saves us through the stormy sea of this life, to the safe harbour of the Father’s embrace, through Christ in the Holy Spirit.
Most-Holy Theotokos, save us!
Metropolitan Nahum of Strumica
(03.12.2020)
http://www.mpc.org.mk/MPC/SE/vest.asp?id=7353
