Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 18, 2022
Scripture Reading: Luke 16:1-13
I have to confess, I struggled with this week’s reading, and with what to say today. It is a very challenging parable that Jesus tells here, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this – most of the scholars that I read in preparation began their work on this parable by commenting that it is one of the most difficult parables, if not the most difficult parable that Jesus told!
Some of Jesus’s parables are a “do like this” story – I think of the story of the Good Samaritan who stopped to help someone of a different religion, a different tribe, who was injured on the side of the road, and at the end, Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” This week’s parable, with a dishonest manager cheating his wealthy manager, doesn’t seem to fit that pattern – should I go and do likewise by acquiring lots of wealth off the work of others, or should I go and do likewise by cheating my boss in order to feather my own nest? That message doesn’t fit with what I know about Jesus what he taught
Jesus tells other parables that seem to teach us about who God is – here I’m thinking about the parable of the Lost Sons, or the Prodigal Son, where the father in the story welcomes home both of his wayward sons, forgiving them before they ask for forgiveness, and throwing a party in their honour. If the father in the story can be this loving, how much more loving must God be?! But again, today’s parable doesn’t feel like that sort of parable – would God be like the wealthy man, becoming wealthy off of the work of others, or is God like the cheating manager in the story? It doesn’t quite fit.
So what could Jesus want to teach us through this puzzling story?
We begin with a wealthy man, and his manager – the one in charge of all of the property. If Jesus were telling this parable to us today, I wonder who these characters would be.
Let’s begin with a faceless corporation – let’s say a bank – let’s call it the Bank of New Brunswick, or Brunswickbank for short. (Disclaimer: characters in this story are fictional and are not based on real people living or dead!) So Brunswickbank has branches all over the province, and in charge of the day-to-day operations of each branch is a branch manager. The branch manager is responsible for acting on behalf of Brunswickbank within their own branch.
Anyways, word got back to the board of directors and CEO of Brunswickbank that one of their branch managers hadn’t been doing their job well. In a time when most branches were making a 15% profit for the bank, this branch was only making 2% profit. And so the branch manager was called before the board of directors and asked to account for what was going on. She was told that she had 30 days to provide a detailed account of her work, and if she couldn’t account satisfactorily for the low profit margin, she was going to be let go. After all, there were CEO salaries and shareholder profit that had to be satisfied!
And so what did this branch manager do when she got back to her own branch? Did she call a staff meeting and say that there was going to have to be a lot of belt tightening in the coming days? Did she let the most recent hire go? Did she cut back on branch hours and cleaning services?
No – she didn’t do any of this. Instead, when a family in the community who was really struggling after one parent had to leave work on disability came in to the branch to see if they could re-negotiate their mortgage, the branch manager brought them in to her office and cut the amount of their mortgage in half. When a local charity came in to ask for a bank draft so that they could give their support to another family who was struggling, the bank manager waived all of the service charges. When a local hockey team came in to see if the bank could sponsor their travel to a tournament, she signed the bank up as a full sponsor without giving it a second thought.
At this point, since she figured that her days in the bank were numbered anyways, she was going to do all of the good she could possibly do for her community while she was still in a position to do so.
When I think of the parable this way, it maybe starts to make a bit more sense. I wonder if we do a disservice to the manager in Jesus’s parable by naming him as a “dishonest manager.” When we look at this parable from the perspective of the wealthy boss, the manager is squandering his money; but if we were to flip the perspective and look at the story from the debtor who had his bill reduced from a hundred jugs of olive oil down to fifty, or the debtor who had his bill reduced from a hundred bushels of wheat down to eighty – if we take that perspective, then it becomes as story of unexpected generosity.
Reading and researching this parable this week, it was Cuban scholar Justo González who opened my eyes to this understanding of this parable. He writes: “[The] steward has not actually been fired yet, but is certainly on notice. In this regard, he is in a situation similar to all human beings, who for the present have a life, goods, talents, relations, and time to manage, but are also on notice of our firing. We do not know when we will be dismissed from our temporary management of all these things, but dismissed we will be. The present order is not permanent, and our authority over life, goods, and all the rest is only temporary.” (Justo L. González. Luke. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 191.)
In other words, none of us is going to get out of here alive. (That sounds way more ominous that I mean to sound. I don’t mean that none of us will get out of this building alive – I mean to say that none of us will get out of life alive!) In our life, we are stewards of what we have been given – we can choose how we use our money, how we use our time, how we use our skills – but this isn’t a permanent state. Eventually it is going to come to an end. As González writes, we are all on notice.
And so like the manager in the parable, we have a choice about how we are going to use this in-between time. Are we going to use it to hoard more and more for ourselves; or are we going to use it to do as much good in the world as we can?
Jesus’s last line in the reading is, “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
The original Greek is actually a bit more blunt at the end – a better translation might be you cannot be enslaved to both God and wealth.
For in the end, we do have to decide where our ultimate loyalties lie. We have the opportunity to decide where we want to be enslaved, to choose who we want to serve. Do we want to serve capitalism and wealth acquisition like the rich man in the parable or like Brunswickbank in my version of the parable? Or do we want to serve God through loving and caring for all of God’s children like the manager?
For we are all on notice like the manager – we may not know just how long our period of notice is going to be – maybe we have 30 days, maybe we have a year, maybe we have 50 years – but eventually we are going to have to leave it all behind and step into our eternal home in the arms of love.
How are you going to spend your notice?
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Rich and Poor, or, War and Peace
17th Century, Anonymous
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