Almighty God, may you guide us to seek the Truth:
come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
To
say that was a challenging parable is an understatement. Lest you think that
you just need to reread it a few times and it will make more sense, I’ve been
doing that all week and it’s still an enigma. When I read commentaries on the
passage this week, I noticed that they all seemed to spend more pages on this
parable than other Biblical passages, sort of the way when you don’t have an answer
you just stammer on, hoping that something might eventually make sense. One
scholar even called this the “problem child of parables.” For one, the
explanation that is offered by Jesus after the parable doesn’t seem to line up
properly with the parable itself.
But really, the most
challenging aspect of this parable is the phrase “Make friends for yourselves
by means of dishonest wealth.” That sounds like a line out of The Art of the Deal more than something
Jesus would have said. When you think about faith and church, you probably
think about ethics and justice, not swindling. This parable just doesn’t seem
to fit with the rest of the Gospel. The most enlightening thing about this
parable that I found in preparing for this sermon was one scholar’s assessment
that “This parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” So if an
explanation is what you were hoping for, I’m sorry to say that you’ll be
disappointed with this sermon. But for some reason that may be obscure, Luke
included it in his presentation of the Good News, so let’s see if we can at
least glean something from this parable as it might apply to our lives.
The focus of this parable
really is the manager, who is himself a confusing character. Is the hero? Are
we supposed to like him? Maybe we’re merely supposed to respect his business
acumen, even if we think he’s a shady character. Some people read him as a
Robinhood sort figure – taking profits from the rich and giving them to the
poor, or at least, to the less rich. Others read him as a Christ figure, as
someone who forgives the debts that others owe. Still others claim that he is a
generous figure, as they point to the way that loans worked in that culture. If
you took out a loan for $50, you might have to pay back $75, as the extra $25
would be things like taxes to Rome and the salary for the manager who collects
the payments. So, they claim, this manager really isn’t cheating his boss, who
will still get what he loaned out, but that he’s simply forsaking his own cut
of the amount owed. So, some claim that this manager is exchanging present
payment for future favors, but that he really isn’t cheating anyone. But those
interpretations read a lot of things into the text which simply aren’t there,
and they don’t fit with the explanation that comes after the parable. There
aren’t going to be any magic answers that all of a sudden make this parable
easier to understand or accept.
But there is a shift in
the manager in this parable. We are told that he was squandering the rich man’s
property. Perhaps he was playing fast and loose with someone else’s money,
trying to maximize his own income. Or maybe he was simply an inattentive
manager and wasn’t doing his job. But something changed when he decided to
leave those behaviors behind. Now, if he was strictly thinking in terms of his
own selfish gains, he might have gone to each of the debtors and demanded
payment immediately and then ran off with the money. This isn’t what he did
though. He realized that perhaps it was too late to squeeze people for a
paycheck, but it wasn’t too late to build social capital. So he decides to make
friends instead of making money. He learned that when you invest in generosity,
you get a better return on the investment than you do with stocks or bonds. As the
character George Bailey learned at the end of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, “No one is a failure who has friends.”
And when his boss, the
rich man, confronts him about his behavior, he admits “You were in a big hole,
and you dug your way out through generosity. Good thinking, I’m not sure I
would have come up with that one myself.” Parables are subversive stories about
the Kingdom of God, and so they always shock us and leave us shaking our heads.
Perhaps this parable’s lesson is that generosity is the best investment.
Though we might question
the legality and morality of wiggling out of a sticky situation by defrauding
others, the manager is certainly creative and imaginative in finding a
solution. And Jesus seems to commend this ingenuity when he says “For the
children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than
are the children of light.” There’s an old Jewish story about a righteous man
who has all sorts of calamities rain down on him. And so he says to God “I’ve
fulfilled every single law in the Bible, why is this all happening to me?” A
voice comes back from heaven – “Because you’re boring.”
How often is the church
guilty of being boring? How often are Christians described as being prudish,
narrow-minded, and resistant to change? A lot. Faith isn’t about being boring,
but rather being on fire with passion for the transformation of our lives and our
world. But so often we inside the Church tend to be reserved and afraid to take
risks. We worry that we might offend people and lose members by taking a stance
or changing a position, and so we end up stuck in the past and out of touch
with the Spirit’s movement today.
Those of you who spend
time around young children know the power of their imaginations and the sense
of wonder with which they see the world. Our almost four year old daughter
isn’t much for naptime anymore, but she can sit on her bed with a few stuffed
animals and have quiet time that keeps her happy for an hour. How many of us
could do that? How long before we’d start with symptoms of withdraw from our
smartphones? The world has a way of beating our sense of wonder and imagination
out of us. Technology is great, but it also has a way of keeping us always “on
the clock.” There’s no longer separation between a work life and a home life
because emails and texts keep us tethered to our desk, even when we are at
home. So the line between work and play has essentially gone away – it’s all
work and little or no play. And risk taking isn’t valued in many places. If
your boss saw you at your desk daydreaming, would they say “That’s great, I
hope you’re exercising that imagination” or would they say “Get back to work”?
That’s the thing about
this manger, he’s creative. He saw a third option where most would only see two
– either steal and run or be poor. But he found a different way by investing in
generosity. So maybe that’s why Jesus seems to hold him up as an example,
because he’s not boring, because he has a sense of imagination, and because
he’s willing to trust the generosity of others enough to be generous himself.
How do you think the Church could be imaginative? How could you be more
creative and open to new ways of doing things? How could be our faith lives be
more exciting and less boring?
And so the manager decides
to invest in others instead of himself. As Jesus says, “No slave 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.” The manager
realized that he can’t look out for his own best interest while he’s also
looking out for the best interest of others. The word that Jesus uses for
wealth is “mammon,” which you might remember from older translations. Mammon is
the basis for one sort of economy – it is the economy of money and wealth.
Mammon works as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. We all know that
there are limits to money: it only buys certain things, it can be lost as easily
as it is gained, is inwardly focused, and is a limited resource. Mammon is the
currency of an economy of scarcity, where there might not be enough to go
around, and so we often toil and stress about having enough of it. The manager
realizes that investing in that economy isn’t going to end well for him because
he’ll run out of money, so he decides to invest in a different economy.
One preacher[i] has remarked that the manager
instead invests in God’s economy, which is one of abundance, outward focus, and unlimited
grace. Contrasting this to the economy of mammon, he calls it the “economy of
manna.” You’ll recall that in Exodus, when the Hebrew people are journeying
from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land of Israel, each day God provides the
people with the food that they need in the form of bread, called manna. No one
has too much bread, and no one has too little, and hoarding manna doesn’t work
because it spoils within 24 hours, but fresh bread always shows up the next
morning. It’s a fundamentally different sort of economy. Instead of worrying
about what we don’t have, the economy of manna provides for us the secret to
happiness – learning to be thankful for the things which God gives us plenty
of, things like love and hope.
So the manager shifts
from operating in the economy of mammon, which is about anxiety and scarcity,
to the economy of manna, which is about trust and abundance. And in doing so,
he becomes commendable to us. He goes from using people to relying on them, and
thereby shows us something about how we might navigate our faith in a world of
cutthroat economics. The question that this passage puts to us is which economy
do you put your stock in? Mammon or manna? Wealth or God?
Now this certainly isn’t
to say that money is evil, but it is not to be a god which we serve. Do you use
money to serve God and God’s intention for our community and your life? Or do
you serve money by worrying about it and letting it rule your life? To borrow a
phrase from financial advisors – does your money work for you, and God, or do
you work for your money? This parable is an invitation to invest in an economy
of relationships, of friendships, of generosity, of imagining new ways to use
money faithfully.
Still, I wish Jesus would
have chosen another way to say that than “Make friends for yourselves by means
of dishonest wealth.” Even after spending all week praying with and exploring
this passage, I still agree with that scholar who wrote that “This parable
defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” And maybe that’s fitting because
that’s what God is like. God is always beyond our grasp and our understanding.
And maybe that’s what faith is like – there is no one size fits all solution. Faith
isn’t a set of directions, but rather gives direction to our lives. This
parable is a reminder that you don’t have to figure it out or have all the
answers in order to be a faithful follower of Jesus. You just need to pursue
God over mammon. And if you’re not sure how “dishonest wealth” fits into that
equation, well, you’re in good company.
