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The deliberations with their result:
v. 3. Then the steward said within himself, What shall I do? For my lord taketh away from me the stewardship; I cannot dig; to beg I am ashamed.
v. 4. I am resolved what to do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.
v. 5. So he called every one of his lord's debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much owest thou unto my lord?
v. 6. And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty.
v. 7. Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, An hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill and write fourscore.
v. 8. And the lord commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely; for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.
The unfaithful steward found himself in a very unpleasant situation, out of which only his wit could extricate him. Jesus reproduces the resulting monolog with realistic faithfulness. The steward was in a quandary, he was racking his brains for some way out of the difficulty. Dismissal under the circumstances meant degradation; no other master would give him a clerical position. He must be content, if he finds work at all, with such as involves little responsibility. His thoughts turn to farming, since his work had brought him into contact with agricultural labor; but he is physically not strong enough to dig, he could never stand that. The other alternative seems to be begging, and to do that he is ashamed. But finally he hits upon a scheme that ought to work. By means of it he hopes, even now yet, either to avert the threatened blow, or, in case he should not succeed in doing this, to provide for himself a comfortable old age. Should he lose his position and be degraded, the people whom he has in mind would be under obligations to take him into their houses. He carries his plan into execution at once. One after the other of his lord's debtors he summons to the office. Since he still had charge of the whole business, he could easily do this. "These debtors might be farmers, who paid their rents in kind, or persons that had gotten supplies of goods from the master's stores. " In each case, as he speaks to the individual debtor, he follows the same plan, although only two examples are given. At his direction, they changed or rewrote their bills of indebtedness, putting down a smaller amount than that which had been stipulated or which was due to the owner. One man owed a hundred measures, about seven hundred and fifty gallons, of oil. The amount was changed to read only one-half as much. Another owed one hundred measures, between seven and eight hundred bushels, of wheat. The amount was reduced to eighty. The object of the steward was to meet either contingency. If this scheme would prove successful, the shortage would no longer exist, for the income would appear to have been much smaller than the lord thought. Should the plan be found out, the bills of indebtedness would legally stand, and the debtors would show their gratitude by providing for him. It has even been suggested that the steward had falsified the amounts in the bills of indebtedness originally and pocketed the surplus, and was now returning to the original correct figures. At any rate, it was a clever scheme. Even the master, when he received information concerning this latest trick of the steward, could not withhold a certain commendation. He praised him, not on account of his unfaithfulness and his fraud, but on account of the cleverness in handling the situation and extricating himself out of an unpleasant predicament.