Luke
16:1-13
I
honestly like my house. This may be the first home that Steven and I have lived
in that I really liked. It’s not the nicest house in the world, maybe not even
the nicest on my block, but I like it. We put down new floors this summer and I
really enjoy the laminate flooring we have.
I feel
settled, secure, safe, perhaps for the first time in my adult life. We live in
a nice neighborhood with kids about the same age as our kids running around. It’s
a quiet neighborhood, except when my neighbor has his band over practicing like
he did last night. I have wifi, cable TV, the roof doesn’t leak and the air
conditioner runs well enough. I like the security of my situation. I don’t have
everything anyone could want by any means. In fact, there are dozens of things
I can think of right off of the bat that I’d like, starting with a car big
enough for my family, but even with that I know that I am blessed and more than
that, fairly content.
And that
my friends, might be why I really don’t like our parable for this morning. It
is unsettling. It is disturbing. It is confusing. I don’t like it, and I am not
alone.
The most
common thing I read when studying this text, the thing almost all commentators
agreed upon was this: This is perhaps the hardest passage in the Gospel of
Luke, perhaps even in all of the Gospels.
The parable
of the dishonest manager is troubling at best and worrisome at the very least.
Why would Jesus tell this story? Why must it be so unsavory? Why must it be so
confusing? Why tell a story about money to begin with? After all money is a
touchy subject and when a church or preacher bring it up it makes people
uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that many, including me, try to avoid the topic
at all costs!
And why
tell this story about money, Jesus? Why tell us a story where the ending is so
unsatisfactory? Why tell a story where the bad guy wins?
There is
a strong taboo in our society against speaking of or preaching about, money.
But in Luke, and throughout scripture, God makes it very clear that money
matters. Why talk about it so much if it doesn’t? I think one of the main
reasons it gets brought up is that people in Jesus’ day, just like today,
struggled with money. How much is enough? How much do I need? How much do I
share? And while this parable doesn’t give clear answers it does “present us
with characters who also struggle with money, characters with mixed motives and
yet who change overtime in relationship to their circumstances. Characters,
perhaps, not unlike ourselves.”[i]
That is
the beauty of parables. They are stories connecting the ordinariness of our
life with the extraordinary nature of God. They give us a glimpse into the
present not yet kingdom of God. And while today’s is certainly difficult, its
goal is to illuminate a part of the kingdom that is hard for us to see.
What
happens in this parable is hard for us to understand. I think with our 21st
century understandings of the world, everything about this passage is wrong.
The steward or manager is told he is fired and so he goes and cheats his boss
out of a large percentage of profit and then he is commended by that same boss
for his shrewdness. To do this he goes and negotiates with these debtors with
no real authority to do so. This goes beyond bad business practice; this kind
of stuff will land you in jail. From the capitalist perspective he is guilty of
all charges.
But
perhaps some of what we see here is in our world view, most specifically our
economic world view. We forget that biblical times were not the same as today.
We forget that charging interest for loans was forbidden in Jesus’ day because it
exploited the most vulnerable. Exodus 22:25-27, Leviticus 25:36-38 and
Deuteronomy 23:19-20 all say do not charge interest.
Theologian
Barbara Rossing says “We pray in the Lord’s prayer ‘Forgive us our debts’ but
when we encounter a debt collector who actually reduces poor people’s debts by
20% to 50%- namely, reducing their debts to what was probably the original
amount borrowed, without hidden interest charges- our first instinct is to
judge him.”[ii]
Here we
have a man reducing debt and he seems like a bad guy. Why is that? Well
partially because he is seen as cheating his master out of potential gains. So
we get put off by these actions. But the master, he commends the man for these
actions. Not only that, but Jesus tells the crowd to make friends with
dishonest wealth so that you will have a place in the eternal homes. Clear as
mud right?
But maybe
we are looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps the economics of the situation
are clouding our vision. Let’s try something else. Perhaps if we look at this
parable through another modern day parable.
Biblical
Scholar Sarah Dylan Breuer tells this story:
When she was in her junior year
of high school she played a trick on a teacher based on this very scripture. This
was a VERY unpopular teacher. Students thought she was humorless and inflexible
as well as very, very odd. A lot of teachers occasionally let the class order
and chip in, one by one, for pizza to munch on during class, but not this one.
A few friends and Sarah decided to see what this teacher was really made of.
They
collected money from peers, sworn to secrecy, to buy pizzas for the whole
class.
Sarah
ordered the pizzas in the teacher’s name, but had the cash on hand to pay for it.
The pizzas
arrived, with the deliverer proclaiming that "Mrs. ____" (the
teacher) had ordered them. The teacher looked flummoxed and panicked.
But within a
second, Sarah sprang to her feet and said, "Mrs. _____, it's SO generous
of you to buy pizza for the whole class. But I can't do that. Some friends
already pooled some money for lunch, and we'll spring for it."
Her teacher
had a choice to make in that moment. The whole class was applauding her for
ordering pizza for all -- which she hadn't done. She looked at Sarah with a
raised eyebrow, accepted delivery, and then paid for the pizza.
She could
have let the class eat pizza but let the class pay for it, but Sarah thinks the
teacher is a good person, and she decided that since everything was disrupted
anyway, she might as well accept the acclaim of the class for her generosity,
even if it wasn't her idea.
She had an
in-between choice not available to the landlord of the "Unjust
Steward" parable: she could have accepted the applause of relaxing class
discipline, but refused the cost of the pizza.
But things
were already upset. She did what I probably would have done in her shoes, and
took the applause and affection of the crowd. She was a little different from
then on; Sarah thought she saw a glint of mischief in her eye after that, and
Sarah likes to think it was a glint that was always there, but was before
suppressed. I suspect she wasn't so married to the order of a traditional
"orderly classroom" as they all thought, and she welcomed the freedom
to do things differently.
Maybe the
landlord in the parable felt the same. Maybe he felt freed to function in ways
that would make him a "Bad Landlord," but a better human being.
The Steward in this story doesn’t
tell the farmers that he has been fired, that he has no real authority to make
these changes, any more than he tells them that the landowner didn’t authorize
this generosity.
“The result is that the farmers
believe that the landowner is more generous than just about anyone else in his
position would be. The landowner is now a hero in the farmer’s eyes- and the
steward is also, by extension.
Dishonest this manager may indeed
be, but he understood how to use what was entrusted to him for a greater good.
We should take note of that Jesus says. How much more must the children of God
do with the riches entrusted to our care?
What, precisely, is
it that the steward does, albeit without authorization and with deception?
The steward forgives
debts.
“The steward
forgives. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for
all the wrong reasons, for personal gain and to compensate for past misconduct.
But that's the decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself from a
position from which it seem he couldn't be reconciled, to the landowner any
more than to the farmers.”[iii]
Forgive. Forgive
everything. Forgive it for whatever good or bad reason you may have, or for no
reason at all. Forgive for every reason in the world.
Forgive because you
were forgiven. In the realm of God, debts are forgiven and slaves are set free.
This is so radical to
us because somewhere along the way being in debt became normal to us. Owing
someone something, whether it be money, favor, power or pride, became an
everyday occurrence. Somewhere along the way we lost the freedom in God’s
vision for God’s people. We stopped hearing the joy of God’s voice telling us
that we are all beloved children of God, just as we are. Somewhere along the
way we buried our treasures and are not sure where to find them.
What is important is
not how much we have, how much we accumulate, how much we are owed. What
matters is how we use what resources we have in light of our relationship to
God and to those God loves. We, my friends, you and me, we have been entrusted
with the resources of God’s kingdom. Will we act on behalf of God’s kingdom
with the same sense of urgency and creativity as if our own personal well-being
depended upon it?
You cannot serve two
masters. It’s there in black and white, or red and white if you have a red
letter bible. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can have two separate lives,
one Sunday mornings and another the rest of the week. We cannot bounce back and
forth between serving two masters when it is convenient.
“When faced with the
pronouncement that we cannot serve God and Mammon we might do well to remember
that whereas the Lord’s attention, care, and providence are constant; Mammon
proves to be a pretty fickle and ultimately untrustworthy master.”[iv]
In the end my
friends, this parable is like so many of Jesus’ parables. It expands our
knowledge of the kingdom by pushing us to look outside of what is comfortable
and into what, through Christ alone, is possible.
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