We’ve talked before about how the topic
Jesus teaches on the most—by far—is money, and here we go with another teaching
. . . but even by the standards of Jesus’ parables – which can be hard to
interpret – this is a doozy. The manager
– or steward as in some translations – is dismissed from his job and hatches a
scheme to get in good with the neighbors, and so he falsifies his master’s
records and reduces their debt . . . and the confounding thing is that he’s commended for it by the master – the
same person who dismissed him commends
him for acting shrewdly. Shrewdly? Well, I suppose that it’s shrewd, at least as
far as the steward’s concerned – he’s just secured himself some goodwill from
his master’s clients, but it’s at the his master’s expense, it’s by being a
dishonest manager – and note that it isn’t until the end that he’s called
that. Does Jesus really want us to
applaud this self-serving behavior?
Well, that’s why they call it a parable .
. . they’re not noted for easiness to comprehend . . . and the first thing to do when trying to
interpret one is figure out where it begins and ends. The beginning of this one is easy: “Then
Jesus said to the disciples ‘There was a rich man who had a manager.’” Pretty
cut-and-dried. But it’s the ending that
has given interpreters fits. Our reading
ends like this: “And I tell you, make
friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone,
they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
But that sounds more like an interpretation of the story, or a comment
on the story, not part of the story itself.
A similar thing can be said of the next-to-the-last phrase: “for the
children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than
are the children of light.” Like the
last sentence in our reading, it seems like a comment on the parable than the
parable itself. In fact, most scholars
think that the parable itself ends in the first part of verse eight: “And his
master commended the dishonest manager because he acted shrewdly.”
A question you might ask is: “Why does it
matter?” Well, it goes back to the way
the Gospels were written . . . at the time of the first writings – the time of
Mark – there were no lengthy, written records of Jesus’ teachings. There were oral traditions, snippets of
sayings and stories told by Jesus, passed down from early Christian to early
Christian . . . a woman in the market might say to another “Did you hear the
story the master told about the Good Samaritan” and she’d launch into that
parable as she’d heard it . . . or maybe a kitchen worker would tell his cohort
“Did you hear what Jesus said about plucking corn on the Sabbath, he said ‘the
Sabbath was made for humans, and not humans for the Sabbath . . .’” And what
the Gospel writers did was to put these stories and sayings together in an
arrangement that was meaningful to them . . . and so the parable of the
dishonest manager probably came to Luke as a “bare” story, most likely ending
with the steward’s commendation, and then Luke took some Jesus-sayings that
he’d heard or collected—there were a bunch of those floating around, just bare
sayings—Luke took some of those and stuck ‘em on the end of the parable as an
interpretation.
And the interpretation Luke gives it –
which were, remember, composed of Jesus’ own sayings – says something about
rewarding shrewdness. The children of
this age – that’s the worldly, non-Christians – are more shrewd in dealing with
their own generation – their fellow, worldly non-Christians – than are the
children of light. That’s Luke and his
church members, or these days, us. And
so the interpretation of this – which has been preached from pulpits from time
immemorial – is that we children of God ought to be a little more shrewd in how
we use the stuff we have, kind of like those children of the world. We’re supposed to make friends for ourselves
by means of this dishonest wealth – perhaps a better translation is “wealth of
unrighteousness” or “worldly wealth” – so that when it’s gone, we might be
welcomed into the eternal homes, where all the women are strong, all the men
good looking, and all the children above average.
And that’s not a bad interpretation, is
it? I mean, as Psalm 24 says, “The earth
is the Lord’s and all that is in it,” including the all “worldly wealth,”
whether unrighteous or not. Certainly we
Christians ought not to squander it, as the dishonest manager was accused of
doing at the beginning of the parable.
Certainly we are charged with using it prudently, even shrewdly, to
further the kingdom of God. After all,
didn’t Jesus say “Be wise” same word in Greek as shrewd – “Be shrewd as
serpents, and innocent as doves?”
Shrewdness – although we often view it in a negative light – has
positive connotations as well . . . if you’re shrewd you don’t get cheated, and
certainly one of our jobs here on earth is to keep God from getting cheated,
isn’t it?
Use what’s given to you wisely, this
interpretation says . . . don’t waste it like the dishonest manager . . . and
any preacher worth her salt could take that and spin it into a whole riff on
our spend-happy lives, where we think nothing of pouring money down an
automobile rat-hole, but groan every time we give to the church, or to the poor
. . . as a matter of fact, I think I have . ..
And yet . . . could Jesus really be
commending the guy for being dishonest?
Could he really be patting him on the back for thinking of himself, for
trickily using his position to secure for himself a soft landing, a golden
parachute when he doesn’t deserve one?
It still seems – to me, anyway – to make little sense. It seems to me that there’s something I don’t
know, something . . . missing. So I went
looking—on the internet, natch!—and found the missing piece of the puzzle. And like a lot of “missing pieces” from
scripture, it’s missing only to us here in the 20th Century. As we’ve mentioned before, first-century Palestine
was an honor-shame society. And in one of those, honor was more important
than wealth. It determined one’s social
status, one’s place in the community, and consequently one’s ability to do
business. Most importantly, honor and
power were directly related, and power was understood as the ability to exercise
control over the behavior of others. And
if a man couldn’t control his underlings, he had little honor, and therefore a
low standing, a low amount of power, within society.
Now.
Let’s read the parable of the dishonest manager with this in mind. A land-owner hears that his steward has been
misappropriating – Luke says “squandering” or wasting – his property. His honor and community status are threatened
by all the talk, all the whispering going on: “Did you hear how his underling
took him to the cleaners? He can’t even
control his employees, for Pete’s sake . . . how can he expect us to do
business with him?” So to save face, the
master does the only thing he can, and he tells the steward to hit the road.
Meanwhile, the steward’s in a panic. He now has a reputation for dishonoring his
master, so nobody in his right mind will hire him . . . if he loses his
position as steward, he’ll likely end up a common field hand, or worse yet, a
penniless beggar by the side of the road . . . he says “I’m too weak to dig and
too ashamed to beg” and it’s literally a matter of his own life, which would be
brutal and short as either a field hand or
a beggar. So he hatches a plot to
restore his master’s honor, and at the same time save his reputation as an
honest steward. “I’ve decided what to
do,” he says, “so that when I’m dismissed as manager, I’ll be welcomed into the
households of other employers.” He
forgives a portion of the amount owed by his master's debtors. Word gets out,
and people assume the steward is acting on the master's orders—note that
there’s no indication they know he’s been fired—so it makes the master look
generous and charitable in their eyes. The prestige and honor gained by such
benevolence far outweigh the monetary loss to the master.
The master hears about it, commends the
manager for his shrewdness, and everyone lives happily ever after . . . the
master’s honor has been restored and the manager will likely keep his job, but
even if he doesn’t, his honor has
been restored, and he can get a job somewhere else.
In this reading, at least the master is
not commending the steward for his dishonesty, but why does Jesus tell this
story in the first place? For what
reason does he tell his disciples a story about honor lost and restored? Is shrewdness really what he’s talking
about? If it is, it is just about the
only place in the Gospels that he does (except for that wise as snakes,
innocent as doves thing, that is). To
put it another way, just what is it that Jesus sees as commendable about the
servant’s actions? Well, maybe we should
stop concentrating on the method of what the manager did – a “dishonest”
adjusting of the books – and look at its content: what he did was to forgive a
debt. What he did was an act of
compassion. And God is all about
forgiveness, all about compassion.
This makes even more sense if we look at
our story’s context, specifically what comes immediately before it in Luke: the
Parable of the Prodigal Son or, as it’s more accurately called, the Parable of
the Forgiving Father. A son squanders
his inheritance (note the same word, “squander,” in our parable), and he – like
the manager – comes up with a plan to get back into his father’s good graces:
he’ll throw himself on his father’s mercy and say that he’s unworthy to be his
son, but before he can do it, when his father sees him from afar, he has
compassion for his son and runs up to him, hugs his neck, and forgives him on
the spot. Jesus – and it’s especially
true in Luke’s Gospel – places a high regard on compassion and forgiveness, and
in fact we might say that it’s a defining trait of God’s who is, after all,
love.
And in our parable, it’s not the
father-figure, it’s not the master, who forgives, but the servant . . . and if
you treat it allegorically, God the master commends God’s servants, God’s
stewards, the managers of God’s wealth on earth—that’s us—for showing
forgiveness, for showing compassion. And
there seems to be a clear progression from the Parable of the Prodigal Son,
where the master (the stand-in for God, remember) forgives, to the Parable of
the Dishonest Steward, where the stand-in for us does the same. Just as
God the master, God the Lord, God the eternal parent forgives us, just as God
shows compassion and love for us, we as God’s children, as the stewards of
God’s manifold grace, are called to show forgiveness and compassion in our dealings
with others.
The Lord’s prayer says the same thing,
only a lot more compactly: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin
against us. We ask God to forgive our
sins just like we forgive others. One
makes no sense without the other . . . Our forgiveness is conditioned on God’s
forgiveness, it’s imbedded in it . . . without God’s forgiveness, we can no
more forgive others than we can walk to the moon on our own two little
feet. And by modeling this forgiveness,
by showing it to the world, we demonstrate Gods to everyone we meet. In a real sense, we “restore” our master’s
honor, we reveal God’s true nature – as a God of compassion, as a God of
forgiveness, as a God of love – to ourselves, and to our friends and neighbors
outside the church.
Forgiveness is a defining characteristic
of God, and so it should be a defining
characteristic of us, as God’s children.
And the good news, friends, is that it is as good for us as it is for the person we have
forgiven. Maybe even more so: anger can build up inside us so that we
corrode on the inside like a derelict ship, rotting away at anchor. It is well known that forgiving our neighbor,
our friends, even our enemies, releases us, renews us, and un-twists our insides.
And there’s more good news . . . it’s in
the compassion of the manager, the compassion that he shows to debtors like you
and me. We are servants of that master,
servants of God, and at the same time debtors, creatures who owe a tremendous
amount to our creator. And just as we
have been forgiven, just as we have been showed compassion, we too are called
to forgive, in the sure and complete knowledge that we are first forgiven,
wholly and completely, by God, our savior.
Amen.
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