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| "The Worship of Mammon" E. DeMorgan, English 1909 |
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. (Luke 16:8b)
Oh,
yeah. The Parable of the Dishonest Steward in Luke’s gospel is one of those
lessons pastors can’t seem to navigate smoothly. It’s like a driver’s test
where we keep running over the orange safety cones because we don’t really know
for sure what Jesus (or our evangelist, St. Luke) is trying to tell us. My old
seminary professor of New Testament, the late great John H. P. Reumann[i], would remind us that
there are different ways to hear each of these stories. There’s the
often-cryptic way in which Jesus preached them to his community (which could
enlighten some hearers and really piss off others), and there’s the way our
gospel writers used the stories Jesus told to speak to their communities
decades later.
This
is one of those parables people don’t always like. It’s like the Prodigal Son
where some folks get upset because the numbskull wasteful son gets a big party
while the faithful “good” son gets left out. In the parable the Revised Common
Lectionary selected for Pentecost 15 (Luke 16:1-13), a white-collar criminal
seems to be the hero. Not only is this guy the hero, but he gets commended for
his own sneakiness! This should bunch up the Fruit of the Looms of any American
who looks with horror at the increasingly bloated disparity of income in this
nation. Not only are the rich getting exponentially richer by the second, but
they never seem to face any penalties whenever they choose to screw the rest of
us!
So!
We have to ask just what exactly is Jesus trying to teach us by telling us this
story? Dr. Reumann would remind us that the story probably stopped at verse 8a.
It went like this: An estate manager (and there were a lot of these guys in
Jesus’ day because rich landowners didn’t have to supervise their estates. They
could hire someone else to oversee the tenants and keep the books) is accused
of wasting his boss’s money. The boss tells him straight he’s going to get
fired and he has to turn over the books. He doesn’t want to become a laborer or
a beggar, so he summons all his boss’s debtors and substantially reduces their
debts, thereby making himself a hero and someone the debtors would want to do a
solid for in return for getting them out of debts they couldn’t possibly live
long enough to pay. When the boss finds out about this, he’s impressed. He
doesn’t hire the guy back, but he has to take his hat off at how swiftly and
cleverly the manager got himself out of a jam.
There
are a couple of historical facts which we need to know. First, the manager was
probably empowered to make the loans in the first place. He could set the rate
of interest. Even though charging interest was technically illegal under Jewish
law, he could simply add a commission to the bill so it wouldn’t look like he
was shaking down the debtors like a Mafia loan shark. Reumann and other Bible
scholars maintain the steward cut out his own commission and didn’t cheat his
boss at all by doctoring the original bills. In fact, he probably bought the
boss some good will by cutting the debts. Secondly, in the world of the text,
the debts were pretty heavy. Reumann estimated that it would take the average
working stiff ten years to pay back what these guys owed. For granting
such relief the debtors wouldn’t just welcome the manager into their
homes—they’d name their kids after him.
The
smart guys of the Jesus Seminar[ii] claim the parable ends
here at verse 8a. The sneaky guy gets commended, and Jesus leaves it up to the
listeners to figure out what the story really means. Luke added all the
interpretive stuff in verses 8b to 13 when he wrote his gospel.
If
you cut out verses 8b-13, you could just say the manager was in a pickle, knew
he had to act quickly, and did so. What does that have to do with us? We know
how the times are. They’re just as desperate, confusing, and uncertain for our
generation as they were for those who heard Jesus preach centuries ago. We have
resources, but how do we use them? How should we use them? Are we
squandering the things the Boss has left in our charge? Does the Church really
need big, elaborate buildings? A full-time professional clergy? Traditions
which modern folks no longer understand? How are we called to reduce the burden
of our neighbors? These are questions we should be asking.
Personally,
I like to speculate on what effect the manager’s favor to the debtors might’ve
had on him as a human being. Obviously, this guy only helped out the debtors so
he could get something in return. Still, I wonder if acts of charity—for
whatever motivated them—influence those who provide them as much as those who
receive them. Would this manager gain a new awareness of the people he’d been
overcharging? Would he see them as human beings now that he’s broke and
dependent on their charity for him? Would he understand their circumstances
and—dare I say it?—become “woke?”
Our
evangelist tacks a lot of morals onto this story. You can’t serve God and mammon[iii], and the day will come
when all our “dishonest wealth” will be gone. What will we have to say for
ourselves then?
Thanks
for visiting me again. If you have a take on this parable, let me know in the
comments. I’d appreciate hearing from you!
[i] Dr. Reumann, rest his soul, wrote quite a long excurses on this parable in his book
Jesus in the Church’s Gospels: Modern Scholarship and the Earliest Sources (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1968). Dr. Reumann passed in 2008, but the book is still in
print.
[ii]
See Funk, Robert and Hoover, Roy The Five Gospels: Searching for the
Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993)
[iii]
Fun fact: the term “mammon” used in verse 13 (also in Matthew 6:24) in the King
James Version is said to come from a semitic word meaning “that in which one
fully trusts.” Other sources say it was the name of the Syrian god of wealth.
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