When the manager realizes he is going to be fired, he begins to think about what to do next. During his thought process he says, “I’m not strong enough to dig.” Here he is contemplating one possible way of gaining financial capital after he loses his job: manual labor. We can call this physical capital, the amount of time and energy we have available to invest. The shrewd manager realized that he had very little of this capital to invest (“I’m not strong enough to dig”) and thus decided it wasn’t a great option for him.

After contemplating his situation for a bit, the manager says, “I know what I’ll do.” He comes up with a brilliant idea, one for which he is later praised by his master (which is why this is the parable of the shrewd manager). The manager’s shrewdness is actually another form of capital—intellectual capital. Intellectual capital refers to the ideas, knowledge, and creativity we have to invest. The manager used his capacity to think creatively (his intellectual capital) to come up with an idea for how to survive after he lost his job.

The manager reasoned that this would allow him to be welcomed into their homes after he lost his job. In reducing their debt, he was gaining what we might call relational capital with them! He leveraged his intellectual capital to come up with the idea of investing financial capital in order to grow relational capital.

The master recognizes the wisdom in this move (even though the manager was scheming with his money) because the manager invests financial, intellectual, and physical capital to gain relational capital. Jesus says this is a great investment. Jesus says it quite bluntly: “Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves.”

Many of us wrestle with this verse. Was Jesus really counseling us to buy friends? In fact, we think he was! Jesus is saying it is worth investing your financial capital to grow your relational capital, because relational capital is worth far more than financial capital. That’s the punch line of the parable! Jesus tells us to use our money to invest in people’s lives so that we get friendship out of it. In other words, recognize the relative value of each kind of capital and make a good investment.

Excerpt From: Mike Breen & Ben Sternke. “Oikonomics.”