Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
September 22, 2019
Scripture:
Luke 16:1-13
Preacher:
Kate Jones
Jesus, the one whom we
follow, was many things. He was a
teacher – think of his great sermons, like the Sermon on the Mount or the
smaller scale teaching he did with the people who traveled with him. He was a healer – think of the people that he
healed from leprosy, from arthritis, from demon possession, from death
itself. He was a miracle worker – think
of how he walked on water, how he changed water into wine at a wedding, how he fed
a crowd of thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a few fish. And he reveals God to us, he is God in human
form – remember how the narrator of John’s gospel tells us that God’s Word
became flesh and dwelled among us.
Today’s reading,
however, focuses on Jesus the teacher.
At this point in Luke’s gospel, Jesus and his followers are traveling
towards Jerusalem, traveling towards Good Friday and the cross, and Jesus
doesn’t seem to be in a huge hurry.
Along the way, he stops and teaches anyone who will listen. Just before the passage that we just heard,
Jesus told the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son
to the Pharisees and Scribes who were complaining about the company that he was
keeping. And then we come to today’s
reading where Jesus is teaching his disciples, that group of people following
him to Jerusalem, using the parable of the Dishonest Manager.
Parables are an
interesting type of story. They are
usually stories with multiple layers of interpretation. They are stories that are used as teaching
devices that used everyday objects and people that would have been very
familiar to the original audience to tell a story, to teach a lesson. And even the parables that seem to be easy to
understand and easy to accept on the surface – stories like the Prodigal Son or
the Good Samaritan – even these parables present some challenges when we dig a
little bit deeper to see what Jesus is really trying to tell us.
We don’t have to dig
very far into today’s parable of the Dishonest Manager to run into challenges –
in my opinion, it is one of the more challenging parables that Jesus told in
all of scripture. For me, the two
biggest questions that I have for Jesus with respect to this parable are:
1)
Why does
the rich man praise his employee for giving away his wealth? And,
2)
Why does
Jesus seem to be telling us to buy friends for ourselves?
One of the challenges
is that we are living 2000 years and half a world away from the original
setting of this parable. There are so
many pieces of context that we are missing.
In order for this parable to make sense, we would have to know that the
rich man was probably an absentee landlord.
We would have to know that the manager was hired by the rich man to
manage his property on his behalf. We
would have to know that there were complex unwritten cultural rules about
giving honour and prestige to the wealthy, in exchange for being given material
favours.
For this parable to
make sense, we would also have to understand that Jesus’ original audience was
not the landowners – we would have to understand that Jesus was talking to
peasants, farmers and fishers, who were living in a society where they were on
the bottom rung. Jesus’ original
audience would not have been cheering for either the rich man or his manager.
For fun, I wondered
what this parable might look like if Jesus were telling it in Canada in 2019,
and this is what I came up with.
“Once, there was a
very wealthy business owner. He owned
companies and businesses all over the country and the world. He had his own jets, several mansions – he
even owned an island in the Caribbean where he could retreat to when life got
too busy.
“Because he couldn’t
oversee the day-to-day workings of each of the companies that he owned, each
company had a boss, a puppet CEO. These
bosses knew that their primary job was to make even more money for the wealthy
man.
“Now one of these
bosses, she was a bit of a climber. She
had worked her way up to this position through several middle-management
positions, and she felt quite smug in her situation. She often thought to herself, ‘If I can make
even more money for the wealthy man, maybe I’ll be promoted. Maybe some day I’ll be able to travel in the
same circles as he does. Maybe some day
I’ll be able to own my own jet and my own island in the Caribbean.’
“But it was not to
be. The wealthy man came to the boss and
said to her, ‘This company is not making enough money for me – you’ve been
mis-managing it all these years. Pack up
your office and move along – someone else in charge will be able to squeeze
more money out of it.’
“Well, you can imaging
how she felt, hearing this. All of these
years she had put in to the company, only to be let go. All of the pay raises she had refused to the
workers, all of the benefits that she had slashed, all of the strikes she had
squashed, all to make sure that more money stayed with the wealthy man, only to
hear this?! That she hadn’t been able to
squeeze enough money out of the workers below her.
“And so what did she
do? She threw her hands up in the air
and said, ‘Forget it! The wealthy man
will never consider me to be anything.
Before I’m escorted from the premises, I’m going to do what I can to
help those workers I’ve been oppressing for all these years.’ And so she gathered up all of the employee
contracts, gave all of the workers in the company a 25% raise in their salary
and a generous benefit package, and had a lawyer make sure that the contracts
were airtight even under her successor before she went home that evening.”
So when I read this
parable of Jesus, I don’t read it as a story about a dishonest manager – I read
it as a story of a manger who switched sides.
A person who went from serving the wealthy and elite of the world to a
person who served the poor and oppressed.
A person who used the power he had to make an improvement in the lives
of others.
So with this reading
of the parable, I don’t think that Jesus is telling us to buy friends for
ourselves – instead I think that he is telling us to use the resources that we
have at our disposal to help and serve others.
As for the other
question I had for this parable – why the rich man praised the manager for
giving away his money – I wonder if we are missing out on a bit of wordplay in
the original Greek that doesn’t translate to English. In the original Greek, the person who praises
the manager is his
“kyrios,”
which might be translated as “master” but
that can also be translated as “Lord.”
It is a word that is often used with respect to Jesus. So as well as the wealthy man praising the
manager who cheated him out of his money, it is also Jesus who is praising the
man for helping the people around him.
The reading ends with
a pithy saying from Jesus: “You cannot
serve both God and wealth.” You can only
have one top priority in your life.
Jesus isn’t saying that wealth in and of itself is a bad thing – instead
as we see in the parable of the manager who switched sides, wealth can be a
tool that we can use to serve God and to serve others. Instead, Jesus is warning us that wealth –
the acquisition and spending of money – isn’t something that we should worship.
At our Official Board
meeting last Tuesday, we had an interesting conversation about money and the
church. It is often said that if you
want to see where a person’s priorities are, look at their bank account. What things are valued enough to spend money
on? Within the church, we talked about
the church budget – as Two Rivers Pastoral Charge, what are the things that we
value enough that we are willing to spend our money on. We talked about Mission and Service giving,
we talked about how our UCW gave money to the local schools, we talked about
our music program and our youth program.
And we can also go
through the same exercise on a personal level.
If you look at your bank account over the course of a month, what are
the things that you value enough to spend your money on? Does your bank account reflect the things
that you think that you value in life?
Or, like the manager in today’s parable, are there other ways that you
can use the resources at your disposal to serve others.
Like the manager, the
things that we have in life don’t really belong to us – they all come from God
and we are given the job to be stewards, looking after them on God’s
behalf. What can you do with the things
that you have, so that your
“kyrios,”
your Lord, your master praises you for what
you have done?
And may it be so. Amen.
All sculptures by Tom Otterness
"The Real World" 1992
photo by rocor
flickr.com
CC BY-NC 2.0
"Life Underground" 2001
photo by rocor
flickr.com
CC BY-NC 2.0
"Miser"
photo by Brian Burch
flickr.com
CC BY-NC 2.0
No comments:
Post a Comment