PENTECOST 16

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: PENTECOST 16
PROPER: 20C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 23, 2001

TEXT: Luke 16:1-13 – Parable of the Dishonest Manager – “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”


ISSUE: The Parable of the Dishonest Manager is one the Lord’s more embarrassing ones. A dishonest employee gets commended for his shrewd, if not questionable management of accounts. Yet, it tells of all who are dishonest and how God is merciful and yearns for our shrewdness to be redirected in doing what is right and just, and having compassion and mercy, and developing friendship with both God and our neighbors.
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It is curious how God is depicted as doing some very strange things in the stories of Holy Scripture. Sometimes it is downright embarrassing. For instance, Cain kills Abel, and God gives to Cain a mark of protection. Abraham has two sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob cheats his brother Esau out of his heritage, and receives his father’s blessing, leaving Esau out in the cold. God selects David the Shepherd boy to be the King over all of Israel, and assures him that his lineage shall last forever, and David’s escapades with Bath-sheba made him the Bill Clinton of his time. In the parable that Jesus tells today in the Gospel account of Luke, we have a Boss commending one of his managers who is a crook for his shrewdness. Clever crooks should be condemned, hardly commended. What’s going on here? Even Luke doesn’t seem to be sure. Luke tells Jesus’ parable and then tries tacking on a list of moral points that try to justify the parable: “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? . . No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” What has all these morals, true as they may be, to do with the story is a real stretch. Luke is embarrassed by the parable too.
Let’s look at the story first in the context of the time rather than as 21st Century capitalists and moralists. There is a rich man, a boss, who has considerable property with peasants working his land. One of his stewards or managers is accused of squandering the boss’s property. “Squandering the wealth” sounds something like the Prodigal Son who was squandering away his inheritance. So we get the picture that this steward is something of a philanderer, a poor manager, and maybe even dishonest or taking more than his share of the profits. He’s going to get fired and he knows it, when the boss calls him in for an accounting.
“What shall I do?” he asks himself, again sounding just like the Prodigal Son. He sure isn’t comfortable with digging ditches, and begging is hardly honorable. He thinks and decides to himself, “I know what I’ll do.” His shrewdness goes into action. He calls in the people who owe the boss. They didn’t owe money; they owed produce. They were probably under contract for a fixed amount of produce per year. They kept some of the produce for themselves and gave a percentage to the landowner. The manager also got a cut or percentage of the produce. So the manger calls in the peasants and says to them what do you owe? The first says he owes 100 jugs of olive oil. The manager tells him okay, we’re feeling really benevolent today so just make it 50 jugs instead of 100. Good deal the peasant thinks; what generosity! The next peasant comes in and tells the manager that he owes 100 containers of wheat. So the manger tell him okay, we’re feeling really benevolent today, so just make it 80 containers of wheat. Good deal. And so it goes. The manager is really making a lot of friends here for himself. He may have been cutting his own percentage of the take, but in return he’s making friends. What’s more, he is also making friends for the boss. He’s making the peasant community hold him and the boss in high esteem for their great and honorable generosity.
You see, the boss could legally incarcerate the manager and go back to the peasants and refuse to give them the discount, if he dared. But the manager has cleverly brought great honor to his boss, and in fact to himself. Even if he is fired, he’ll have friends and honor. So will the boss-landowner. Honor was by far the great value at this time than money or possessions.
What you have in this parable is the boss who is very merciful, forgiving, and compassionate, like the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son. You also have a clever, shrewd, if not despicable character, who comes to his senses and realizes he must honor the boss, develop friendships for himself, and make a big change in this life, if he’s going to make it.
I cannot help but feel that this Parable of the Dishonest Manager that teaches the simple and profound truth that we need to love God and honor God with all of our being, and to love one another. The crook in the Parable finally figures it out. We may well be embarrassed by this story because we approach it from the standpoint that we are righteous and we think that bad people should all be condemned. But the fact of the matter is that we are like the dishonest steward. We are all sinners. We all have our imperfections and distortions. We too are often shrewd in our dealing with others in so many of our self-serving ways. Face it. The proverbial call to repentance is little more than the call to make changes in our lives. It is a call to respond to the grace and forgiveness of God, and to use the shrewdness, the cleverness of our lives for more positive honorable ends. There is more to life than possessions and money. If the Stock Market plunges, is life really over? If we are the people of God with friends we honor and love, then surely life is not over.
This parable calls us away from the belief that we are good, and there are other bad people. How dare God commend them and forgive them. We all share by virtue of our humanness in sinfulness, but by the grace of God who sends Jesus Christ to us we are justified sinners baptized or immersed into mercy and love. We are made righteous. God takes those who are bad and scandalous and uses them to proclaim the faith of the loving, forgiving, honorable God.
Right now we are living in a terribly confused world. We can spend our time feeling victimized and hurt, indignant and righteous. How could such terrible a terrible attack as occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, be allowed to happen to us. On the other hand we can realize that we share in the human condition, and that in spite of our own short comings, we are loved and in a rather crass way are directed to be shrewd in the world, shrewd in ways that reveal the honor of God who is a loving, giving, and forgiving God. Perhaps we need to be shrewd enough to realize that self-service reveling in our own troubles is not in our best interest, but using our cleverness to make friends, to love other people, to spend ourselves on human needs that surround us, and pay homage to the God that loves us. That’s the stuff of which our humanity is made.
From another perspective, the crooked manager might be seen as the Christ-figure. The religious world in which Jesus lived, and especially the Pharisees demanded respectability and righteousness, and the close keeping of the letter of the law. One of the sad aspects of all that has recently happened is that a group of religious righteous fanatics have become so rigid in their own ways and thinking, that they become vicious and hostile, impatient, and cruel, judgmental in such a way as to bring death, fear, destruction. But Jesus mentioned in Scripture to be thought of as a drunkard and squanderer. He did not follow the letter of the law. He broke the Sabbath. He associated with tax collectors, prostitutes and crooks. He died like a criminal on a cross. He entered fully into the human condition, that it might know his love. The world becomes aware, that he lived and died for all. He is the very personification of grace. It ends happily ever after for everyone. The peasants win and the boss wins. Isn’t it interesting how God uses scoundrels over the pious righteous to proclaim the Good News of his love. (See Parables of Grace, Robert Capon.) May God help us all to be shrewd in finding ways to bring the Good News of God’s love to the brokenness of the world.