The text today is one of the strangest in all
of the gospels. What are we to do with it? How do we even attempt
to make sense of it?
Jesus tells the story about how one of the employees goes to the
boss and snitches on one of his fellow employees. The snitch tells
the boss that one of his managers has been playing fast and loose
with his property. The boss calls in the dishonest manager and
tells him to clean out his desk. He tells him that he wants a
complete accounting. Show me the books tomorrow. Rather quickly
the manager begins to realize how he is in much hot water. He
says to himself, "I am too old to start over again, I've
grown accustomed to a fairly good lifestyle. I'm too weak and
too proud to dig ditches. What am I to do?
The dishonest manager thinks and reasons and comes up with a plan to secure his future. He calls in the first debtor, "You owe 100 jugs of oil, make it fifty." And the first debtor leaves shaking his hand, kissing his cheeks and skipping on the way out. The second debtor comes in. He owes the boss a hundred containers of wheat. The dishonest manager tells him to make it eighty and the debtor leaves with a smile on his face and hope in his heart. The little swindler manager has just written off vast sum of money at his owner's expense! It is a strange story.
We might come up with all kinds of understandings, "Perhaps the manager was the victim of some kind of office intrigue. Maybe some of his coworkers had it in for him." Such things happen in companies. Or perhaps you are thinking, "This guy is really a crook. Not only has he swindled his boss out of great sums of money, but he continues to swindle him. He thinks about nothing but himself and his future. This guy has no ethics whatsoever."
What are we to make of this? Well for one thing, we might agree that Jesus has quite a sense of humor. I can imagine Jesus' audience holding their sides and having a good belly laugh. We like stories where the little guy puts one over on the big boss. We enjoy movies like Office Space, Working Girl, Nine to Five, The Secret of My Success. It's a great theme today, why not back in Jesus day? How funny to watch the little manager in a desperate situation, take matters into his own hands and by some hook and a great deal of crook, put one over on the boss. It's funny but it is not very moral. But then we get to the end of the parable and it is not very funny. Jesus commends the dishonest manager. We expect Jesus to make some fine moral point, to uphold some good ethical standards. We certainly don't expect Jesus to have the master commending this manager. And yet that is just how the parable ends. Jesus has the boss praise the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. So what do we do with Jesus' approval? How does this parable square with Christian ethics? How can Jesus praise an embezzler?
This may be one of the toughest parables Jesus ever told. There is some indication that even Luke himself had trouble with this story, because it appears that Luke added a few "clarifying" verses at the end of the story which tend to obscure things rather than clarify. Luke has Jesus say we cannot love God and money. That is true but does it relate to the parable? Luke tells us to be careful of the one who is not faithful in small things because that person will not be faithful in big things. That is true but does it have anything to do with the parable? When you think about it Luke's explanation doesn't fit the parable. What the manager did was clearly dishonest and what Jesus did was clearly praise him for his dishonesty! There is no way that Luke can weasel out of that.
Along come the learned scholars and the preachers. Through many contortions, they attempt to make this parable make sense. They explain to us that perhaps the parable got jumbled over the years of Christian tradition. They speculate that what really happened was that the manager included an exorbitant excess of interest owed to his boss, and all he did was cut down the interest to legal limits, so what he did was not so wrong. Perhaps, they say, the unscrupulous manager only cut out his own commission, so that he was not so dishonest after all. And so on.
I don't often do this but being that the commentators, and the scholars, and the big name preachers have no better insights than that, let me offer my own personal and unique understanding of this passage and how I came to it. Often when I'm stumped by a Bible story I ask myself the question, "How else might this story have gone?" What else might have happened? For example in the story of Adam and Eve--if God had not punished them with expulsion from the garden what else might God have done? The obvious answer-eliminated them and started all over again.
In the story of Noah and the Flood. How else might this have been told. A good story could be made of the flood alone. Noah and his family and their salvation aren't all that important to the telling. You see so many of these stories that we feel illustrate the wrath of God were really included in the Bible to show the mercy and graciousness of God. Anyway that's the technique. Get into the story and see how it might have gone. So we look at this dishonest manager. He's been ratted on but the boss hasn't seen the books yet. What might he do? Seems to me he might try to recoup some of that money before he has to show those books to the boss. He might have sent out two strong thugs to those debtors with the message, Pay up in 10 hours or you'll be wearing cement overshoes. Cough up the cash tonight or swim with the fishes. Then being the reprobate he's made out to be, he produces for the boss the cash, keeps his job, figures out who ratted on him and makes sure he's fired. That's how the story could have gone. But it doesn't.
The story's point, it seems to me, is that he forgave his fellow businessman's debts rather than to try to kiss up to the landlord. Jesus commends him as shrewd because he forgives. Now there are all kinds of places where Jesus commends people for forgiving. A lost son comes home have squandered his fortune and before the words of repentance are out of his mouth the father has swept him up in his embrace. A man comes to Jesus on the Sabbath and out of compassion Jesus heals him. Most often, Jesus tells us to forgive out of love and compassion, but might there also be a certain shrewdness to forgiving out of self interest.
The Bread for the World offering of letters campaign last year petitioned congress to pass a $435 million legislation that would relieve the debts that forty different countries have to the United States. In a wonderful bi-partisan effort it was passed. Perhaps some of that was coming from compassion but you can't tell me there isn't a little self interest involved in allowing those countries to get on their feet financially so that the needs of their people might be better met and their governments stabilized. Can it be wrong to be shrewd in forgiving?
Taking this scenerio of the parable another step: I think this story assumes something of the boss. Dare we imagine that the boss in this story might be identified with God. What in these few short lines do we know about the boss. What might the manager think the boss will do? Certainly the boss could take him to court. And what's the manager got anyway that the boss might want or need. The manager has always been dependent on the largesse of the boss for his lifestyle. Nothing that he was using was his anyway, all his goods and where withal were bankrolled by the boss. So what might the landowner do? The landowner might have sought revenge, had him roughed up, maybe had his thumbs broken. Apparently the manager wasn't afraid of that. Why not? Well I suppose he knew the boss. He knew that's not how the boss works. It's not the modus operenda of this boss. It's not in his nature. For the greater part this past week it has been gratifying to be uplifted by the religious preaching and the articles and the interviews and the testimonies of faith. I know that I have found comfort and strength in what many have had to say that directed me to the depth of my faith as we faced a terrible crisis. But I must tell you that I have been appalled and anguished by those few who would want to suggest that the events of this past two weeks are in any way part of God's plan or in any way an acting out of God's wrath. That is not the God I know through Jesus Christ and it is not the God I pray to.
Even the dishonest manager knows enough about the boss to know that vengeance is not his way. Surely we should. So perhaps this parable is about our relationships with each other--maybe it is about forgiveness. Maybe God wants us to forgive the debts that are not even ours. Maybe God is big enough to handle the debit we create through our forgiving others.
And so we pray in the words Jesus taught us; And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
Amen.