To explain what a 'proper use' is, Jesus actually told another story. It's quite an amusing one. It tells of a manager of a company who is dismissed by the owner of the company for wasting resources. Having been given his notice, the manager decides that with unemployment looming on the horizon he could do with a few friends. So he writes around to all the people who owe money to the company and tells them that he will settle their bills for half what they owe. When the owner discovered what he had done, Jesus says he had the good humour to congratulate the manager—not of course for his dishonesty, but for his shrewdness. Jesus draws this lesson:
Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed [or they will welcome you] into eternal dwellings (Luke 16:9).
Jesus' point seems to be that the manager had used the influence he had in regard to material things to bring blessing to other people, so that when that influence had gone, he had plenty of friends to speak for him and look after him. In the same way, says Jesus, make friends for yourself by the way you use your money, so that when material things fail, those friends will welcome you into heaven. Jesus isn't arguing for distributive justice of the Marxist kind, then. He's arguing for a concept of wealth which is largely ignored today—the concept of stewardship. Wealth, Jesus teaches, is a trust from God to be used not for yourself, but for the benefit of other people. If you want to invest in eternity, the only thing you can invest in is people. For people last, but money does not.
Luke tells us there were some Pharisees listening in to this story of the shrewd manager. They did not like what Jesus was saying, and for obvious reasons. They loved money. And Jesus' response is to launch one of his Stealth
