A sermon for Proper 20
September 18, 2022
“The parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” That’s what the footnote to this parable in one of my favorite Bibles says. The parable of the dishonest manager has puzzled generations and generations of Christians. It’s not that we can’t get any message out of it; we can. Rather, it is more that all of our wrestling with this text will bring us up just a little short, and we can’t seem to get to that easy-to-grasp, if challenging, message that the parables are so famous for giving us.
The truth is, parables can be tricky things. We can sometimes expect parables to be something they’re not. Here’s what I mean: some parables are allegories. They are stories we know and love, where each character of the story corresponds to some spiritual reality. Let’s think of the Prodigal Son. The Father is interpreted to be God. You and I are either the Prodigal or the elder son. We walk away from the parable understanding more about our place in the world, our relationship to God, and our relationship to one another.
Other parables are closer to old fashioned morality plays–stories with an ethic, a moral, embedded in them. Think about the Good Samaritan. Jesus’s message is clear even to children: treat those in need like the Good Samaritan treated the hurt man on the road.
But not all parables are like that. Some parables are closer to riddles, or even absurd jokes. They can be harder to understand. Today’s parable of the dishonest manager falls into that category.
If we try to make this parable into an allegory, we will be frustrated. For any allegory we can come up with is going to be lacking. For example, we could say that the dishonest manager is Jesus, writing off our debts. Our debts to whom? Perhaps to God the Father. There are many problems with this. First, it sets the Father up to be this absentee, vindictive creditor, and we know the Father isn’t like that. And are we saying that the Son must somehow trick the Father into relieving our debt burden? No. Finally–and perhaps most significantly–the problem with this approach is that the manager does not, as the old hymn says, pay it all. No, he only forgives a small portion. But that’s not actually what Jesus does; he forgives it all for us, a debt we could never pay.
What about one of those morality plays? Again, there are issues here. Is Jesus commending dishonesty? Is Jesus telling us to cheat our employers, to mess with the books, to go ahead and steal those sticky notes and office supplies? I don’t think so. I don’t think Jesus is trying to hold up this manager or employer as some sort of moral exemplar.
Instead, Jesus is telling a funny story to make a point, a kind of absurd joke. Jesus takes something from his listeners’ everyday lives. He tells a story about an absentee landowner and his crooked manager. Most of the land in Jesus’s time was held by absentee landowners, especially in the backwaters of Galilee. These landowners didn’t care for the tenants, because they were never there to get to know them, and they greedily sought to extract every ounce of value out of the land. These landowners appointed managers, most of them crooked and dishonest. The manager in the parable is certainly that. He has been accused of cooking the books, likely adding exorbitant interest charges on top of the exorbitant fees the landowner already had. It wouldn’t have been hard for the people in Jesus’s time to identify with this story. I can almost hear those people in the crowd saying, “yep, I’ve been there before.” They’ve been cheated by these managers and absentee landowners before.
Jesus is using these scoundrels to make a point. He uses scoundrels a lot, it turns out. He will tell a parable about a widow and an unjust judge. He will tell a story about tenants who try to take over a vineyard. Jesus isn’t afraid to use villains to make his point.
So what is it that Jesus is telling his disciples, and us, to do? While this manager is no moral exemplar, we can learn something from him. This dishonest manager has a goal–security. While he is a manager, he is adding on those interest charges, the charges he will later cancel, to make himself some extra money. We can assume he’s good at it. When he is notified he will be let go, he still has that supreme end goal, his security, in mind. So he cooks the books a little more; changes the charges; cancels a menial amount of debt, just enough. Doing this he knows will ingratiate him to members of the community, and they will make sure he is taken care of.
He is shrewd–that’s what Jesus calls him. That’s what we’re called to be, too. But unlike this dishonest manager, we follow a different Lord and a different code. And unlike the dishonest manager, our end goal cannot be our security.
Of course, that dishonest manager’s goal is always there as an idol. Security takes the form of many things–money in the bank, the right friends and connections, a solid retirement, a legacy. So much of it comes down to that false god of money, or Mammon, as Jesus says in the Greek text. Whether we have a lot of money or not, we can put it before anything else. We can put our hope for a good life in it. If only I had a little more. If that’s our chorus line, we will never stop. We could be as rich as Elon Musk and want just a little more. If only, if only. If that’s how we approach it, we’ve made wealth, money, into a god. And as Jesus says today, we can’t serve the true God and that false god at the same time.
Our end goal isn’t security; it can’t be. Our end goal is love. It’s loving God with everything we are; it’s loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. And we can be like that dishonest manager in this way: We can put that goal–love–before anything else. We can sacrifice in order to achieve that goal. We can be aggressive about pursuing that goal, about pursuing love. We can make our love of God and neighbor the first thing we think of in the morning and the last thing we think of at night. We can devote our time, our talent, and yes our treasure, to the pursuit of that goal. We can let love drive us. And we can use everything that happens in our lives, whether good or ill, to advance us step-by-step to that goal of loving God and our neighbor. If we do that shrewdly, like that manager, we will be welcomed into the eternal homes with true treasures: welcomed into the very life of God, whose very essence is Love.
In the end, it comes down to this: What do we really want? What’s our end goal in this life? And what are we willing to do, willing to give up, willing to sacrifice, in order to get there?
What god are we actually serving?
Storied Grace 