Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
“Then the master commended the dishonest manager for his
shrewdness…” What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on in this
parable? A manager is busted for some kind of unethical or illegal business
practice and gets fired. Too proud to beg and too stubborn to get dirty, and
hoping to convince someone into giving him a new job, he finds people who owe
his boss and starts writing down their debts by up to 50%.
What we expect is that when the boss suddenly gets only 80%
or 50% of his investments returned, he goes into a rage, demands the manager be
arrested, his assets frozen and liquidated, and that the Jerusalem Street
Journal publishes an exposé on corrupt middle managers and the harm they do
to the banking industry.
That’s what we expect. That’s not what we get. “The master
commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness…” This is a strange story
all the way around. It would be strange if it was in today’s Bloomberg Business
Report, but it’s even stranger because it is a parable of Jesus. It’s supposed
to tell us something about the kingdom of heaven, about God acting in mercy and
grace through Jesus Christ. You know, the kind of stories we got last week with
the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, or even the Prodigal Son. Instead, we get a
story of the master commending the manager for being a quick study in – what? –
Machiavellianism – the end justifies the means? Saving his own neck? Give away
money that wasn’t his to give, in effect, stealing and helping others steal? Is
that what Jesus is teaching us about discipleship? That it’s OK to steal if it
means we can make our lives easier as a disciple in the world?
Without a doubt, this is one of the most difficult, if not
the most difficult parable to study. Yet, that is the exact reason why it’s
important for us to look at it and consider it this morning. Surely, there is
something new to understand, at least somewhat, about Jesus. Let’s go on a bit
of a Biblical, literary journey, a theological mystery, if you will, of trying
to figure out what is all going on in this parable that we know as the unjust
steward.[1]
Let’s start here: is the steward a good guy or a bad guy?
Depending on how we read the parable, we can make him out to be either the hero
or the villain. If we make him out to be a bad guy, then the master’s
commendation is seen as sarcasm and the moral of the story isn’t much more than
what the surgeon general might print as a warning: “Shady dealings are
hazardous to your soul’s health.” Let’s assume, at least for now, that this is
NOT what Jesus is trying to teach us, so let’s work with the steward as being a
good guy.
So, let’s go back to the story for a second. Someone informs
on the steward, telling the rich man that his manager is wasting his money. Ah
– this is interesting. Jesus uses the same language for the prodigal son who
wasted his wealth, also. The manager, like the son, has lost everything. It’s
as if he’s dead. He has nothing left of his old life – nothing at all.
So, he drops dead to his old life, his old responsibilities,
and his old way of doing things. Because he is freed by his death to think like
he’s never thought before, he is able to become an agent of life for everyone
else. By forgiving portions of others’s debts, he is giving them life. It’s
funny: these debtors didn’t want to deal with him before because he controlled
their death; now, with him dead to all the laws of bookkeeping, they are
receptive to his new method life-crediting. They trust him because he's a
crook! And, joy of joys, life begets life, so much so that even the master
himself experiences a rebirth, rejoicing at the new life given to all.
So, in other words, this isn’t a parable about money at all.
Instead, it’s a parable about a crook, and life, and forgiveness, and grace,
and compassion.
So, seeing this parable this way, we also discover something
else: it’s not a story about a money manager but it becomes a story of Jesus
Himself.
Think about it: in the parable, the unjust steward becomes a
dead ringer (if you pardon the pun) of Jesus Himself. He dies and rises, just
as does Jesus. And, in his death and resurrection, he raises others to life.
But, third and most important, he is a Christ-figure because he is a crook,
just like Jesus. Let me explain.
Crooks are not respectable citizens. You might give your
neighbor your house keys and ask him or her to water the plants and feed the
dog, but you would never do that to a known crook. They would steel you blind. For
that matter, you wouldn’t want them for a neighbor! You would never ask a crook
to be your character witness, or your best friend. It just isn’t respectable.
Respectability is all about power, life, success, having the winning
combination of skills to make it to the top.
Grace does not come through respectability. Jesus is not
respectable. Remember last week’s Gospel lesson? The Pharisees were murmuring
because Jesus received and welcomed sinners – sinners being code for tax
collectors, prostitutes, and those whom the pharisees considered unworthy. They
murmured because He broke Sabbath customs. They murmured because He touched the
unclean. They murmured because he consorted with crooks. Even when they killed
Him, they surrounded Jesus with criminals.
Jesus became a crook, unrespectable and despised, so that He
could catch a world that was terrified, mocked, and burdened by the
“respectable” class of leaders. He became weak for us who were broken in sin;
He became sin itself. He died for us who were dead in our own trespasses and
sins. St. Augustine once called the cross “the devil’s mousetrap,” baited with
Jesus own disreputable death. Jesus’ dying declaration, “It is finished,” was
the trap snapping closed on the devil’s neck.
To push the metaphor just a bit, the cross is a trap for us
criminals as well, baited with Jesus’ own criminality. See yourselves as the
shabby debtors in the parable. You don’t want to try to manage your debts
against God’s almighty power, but when you see your Redeemer looking just as
shabby and crooked and down-and-dirty as you, you are drawn by the bait of the
cross. He looks at you and holds you with formerly entrapped hands and welcomes
you as friends – a whole mess of crooks. What’s a group of crooks called, I
wonder? A gathering? A gaggle? A flock? A congress? No…a church, called,
gathered and united together, former crooks now made saints in the blood of
Jesus.
What a picture, huh? Identifying this crooked manager with
Jesus and then calling Jesus a crooked thief – why, it’s almost scandalous!
It’s disrespectful; it lowers standards; it threatens the good order of things.
Yes – yes it does. That’s the very reason the leaders of the
people and the forces of the self-righteous sought to get rid of Jesus.
And, it is a very real temptation that we face still today,
wanting to fancy and gussy up Jesus, changing Him into a respectable citizen
from the attractively crummy crook that He is. We want to clean up Jesus
because we want to be cleaned up. We don’t want to be riffraff and cons; we
want to be civilized and respectable.
But Jesus remains the ex-con, the crook, the criminal, the
one with the checkered past who stands in front of us and in front of Master
God. He mediates for us and advocates for us fellow crooks and criminals and
debtors. And, we trust Him because He is like us in every way. Like the steward
in the parable, He is the only one who is able to convince Master God to give
us the kind word of mercy.
“And the master commended the dishonest manager for His
shrewdness…” “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the
name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
[1] I
am indebted to Robert Farrar Capon’s book, Kingdom, Grace, Judgement:
Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus for this
understanding of the parable. Portions of this sermon are borrowed liberally
from the chapter on this parable called, rightly, “The Hardest Parable,” pp. 302-309.
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