Proper 20: Amos 8: 4 – 12; Psalm 138; I Timothy 2: 1 – 8; Luke 16: 1 – 13
Given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, IL
“Couldn’t we just skip this one (today’s Gospel reading, that is)?”
Doesn’t today’s Gospel reading, the “Parable of the Shrewd Manager” (as it’s often called), puzzle you?
The more we read it, the more we might want to scratch our heads….What does Our Lord mean, “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.”?
As we try to figure out what Jesus might have meant for us, as His disciples today, to understand about the life we have in God, we might approach this particular text with two things in view: a systematic way of reading Holy Scripture, called the lectionary; and the open-ended character of Scripture itself. So, the following comments come to mind about each:
- The lectionary: granted that, even though there is no perfect system of reading Scripture, yet a systematic way of working our way through a Gospel[1] or a book has great merit….because it forces our eyes to fix on a passage that otherwise might offend or puzzle us. The lectionary prevents us from dwelling on a few certain passages. It also prevents the pastor from preaching on a list of easy or favorite texts.[2]
- The open-ended nature of Holy Scripture: “There’s a world inside every verse in the New Testament”, one of my New Testament professors said in seminary. As I reflect more and more on that statement, I believe it’s true….One way we can test Scripture to see if it really is the Word of God is to delve into its depths, discovering as we go that it has enduring applicability to the saints over time.
Returning to the question we began with, “Couldn’t we just skip this one?”, the lectionary and the open-ended nature of Scripture tell us, “We can’t”, not, at least, at the peril of our spiritual welfare. In other words, we would do well to stop and spend some time, gazing into the mysterious words of Jesus that glare back at us from the page.
And, as we gaze at these words, maybe the Lord’s words will burn their way into our hearts and minds….For that is the ultimate purpose of Holy Scripture: to make a change in us at our deepest level (more on that issue in a minute).
To the text we now turn….
As always, we need to begin by looking at the context of today’s parable….We need to hold in view the fact that Jesus is making His way from Galilee down to the Holy City, Jerusalem, where He will be rejected by the ruling elite of His day, and will suffer, die, and be raised again from the dead on the third day. So all of what we have been reading for the past few months, and all of what we will read until early November, forms a sort of last will and testament, Jesus’ own instructions for those followers of His who will come after Him to form the community He established, that is, the Church.
As Jesus walks the road toward His passion, death and resurrection, a series of encounters take place….some of them are with the crowd that has been making its way south with Him, and some are disputations with the Pharisees and the Scribes, the ruling religious elite of 2,000 years ago. Punctuating these encounters are specific teachings of Our Lord, framed as parables, that are aimed directly at the disciples (and us). Today’s reading is aimed directly at the inner circle, the Disciples (big “D”) and the disciples (small “D”) of every age since they were spoken way back then.
The next thing we notice is that some of the markers of Luke’s writing are present in today’s passage, including:
- Role reversal: the manager, called to account, suddenly finds himself out of a job.
- Interior dialogue: Jesus allows us to “read the thoughts” of the manager, much in the same way that we were allowed to observe the thoughts of the rich man who decided to pull down his barns and build bigger ones.[3]
And now, we turn to a central feature of today’s teaching: the nature of the dishonest manager’s transgression…..Scholars have posited three scenarios to describe what the manager was actually guilty of:
- The manager was stealing money that belonged to the master: In other words, the manager, already accused of mishandling the accounts, simply goes ahead and really “breaks the bank”, in one case giving himself a 50% cut of the total amount due.
- The manager was taking his commission: Jesus does not explain, and we do not know for certain from today’s parable, if the manager was due a commission for his management, or not. If so, then the manager was simply taking what was his by right and custom.
- The manager was complicit with the master in evading the dictates of the Law of Moses: This option needs a little explaining: apparently, in Jesus’ time, it was common for a person who loaned money, or who had debtors, to “pad” the amount due, so as to avoid charging interest on the debt. Essentially, this was a way of avoiding the Law’s prohibitions against charging interest.[4] It worked this way: instead of holding a debt of, say 80 denarii,[5] and charging interest of 1%/month, the debt holder would mark down a total debt of 100 denarii. Thus, legally, the debt carried no interest, and so the legal requirements of the law had been observed.
Since we do not know exactly from Our Lord’s teaching what the nature of the financial arrangements are, it’s difficult to know if the manager was actually stealing from the master, or if he was taking what was his due anyway, or if he was complicit in a basic dishonesty which was a common practice of the time.
Jesus’ story could lead us to conclusions in support of options one and three:
- The manager was stealing: Jesus refers to the manager’s actions as “and if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another…” (italics mine).[6]
- The manager was complicit in dishonesty: Jesus says that the master “commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly…” (italics mine).[7]
But, regardless of the nature of the relationship between the master and the manager, and the nature of the financial dealings that Jesus has in view, one incontrovertible fact stands out from today’s story: The manager took immediate steps to care for his future wellbeing.
Caring for our future (spiritual) wellbeing seems to be the central teaching that Jesus wants us to learn…..consistent with His teachings about the nature of the Kingdom of God that we have been hearing as Jesus makes His way down the road toward Jerusalem, today’s teaching forces our eyes to gaze on the nature of our spiritual wellbeing.
Maybe Luke, writing toward the end of the first century, was addressing a Church whose members were getting slack about their life in God.
Maybe they didn’t sense the urgency that the life of faith requires.
Maybe Jesus’ teaching was meant to hit them squarely between the eyes, forcing their vision to be clarified so that they could see the need to address their own spiritual future, a future that would endure, unlike the material wealth and the friends who had been acquired by the skillful application of it.[8]
Jesus wants us to be “children of light”,[9] seeing our own peril in the example of the shrewd manager…..seeing the urgency of providing for our own spiritual future, making changes at the deepest level of life, being faithful in the little things, spiritually.
He wants us to live with the light of God shining brightly in our hearts and minds, allowing us to see that we must make a choice: we cannot be tied to the comforts and material wealth of this life, if we would have an eternal life with God.
And that choice – the choice to be faithful in spiritual things – even as the material wealth of this world will eventually pass away, is the choice Our Lord urges us to make today, even as He called his original Twelve and those who heard Him on the road to Jerusalem so long ago, to choose:
“You cannot serve God and wealth.”
AMEN.
[1] As we are doing in this, the third year – Year C – of our current cycle, making our way through the Gospel according to Luke.
[2] In the same way, liturgical worship “saves” the congregation from a pastor’s temptation to make worship into a one-man show, or to allow worship to be driven by gimmicks or stunts that are meant to be entertainment.
[3] See Luke 12: 13 – 21, read on August 5th.
[4] See Deuteronomy 23: 19 – 20.
[5] A denarius, often quoted in the Gospels, was a coin that equivocated to the average pay for a day laborer’s daily wage.
[6] Verse 12
[7] Verse 8
[8] Surely the enduring nature of the eternal life, versus the passing nature of material wealth and earthly friends, is a key part of Our Lord’s teaching, as well.
[9] Verse 8. This phrase, which seems more at home in John’s Gospel (see John 12: 36), appears only here in Luke, and also in the other two Synotic Gospels (Matthew and Mark).
