Proper 20, Year C
Luke 16:1-13
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
September 22, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” – Luke 16:9
Some days Jesus’ parables just don’t make sense. This is one of those days.
Parables are supposed to make us think, so running across a tricky one shouldn’t come as a surprise. However, today’s Gospel reading, commonly referred to as the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, is more enigmatic than most. We have a man accused of (not “charged with”) cheating his employer—who then very plainly does cheat his employer. And Jesus praises him for his wisdom.
If that seems strange to you, you’re not alone. I don’t know how to make heads or tails of it, and neither do most commentators. One person said that it’s like we’ve received a jigsaw puzzle with a crucial piece or two missing. There’s no broadly accepted explanation that makes complete sense. People can make parts of it work together, but it’s like squeezing one of those long, thin balloons: put pressure on one section and a different area pops out of shape. Some say the rich man is the bad guy, and the manager is acting as a sort of Robin Hood. Others say the owner simply wanted to test the manager, challenging him to get the local economy moving again. Some try to draw parallels with the Prodigal Son, a story which appears immediately before this one. But every explanation involves a significant amount of questionable assumptions and creative inferences that the passage itself doesn’t really support.
So what do we do? What happens when the Bible is confusing or even indecipherable? The same thing we do with any other written text: we look for what does make sense and try to take the context from there.
Fortunately, Jesus himself explains what he was trying to say: “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
You know how obsessive I get about words, so I’m going to do a little side work here. First, the word translated “dishonest” is usually translated “unjust,” as in the Parable of the Unjust Judge, which occurs just a few chapters after this one. You might think of it more like “unreliable” in this case. And the sentence structure suggests a tighter bond than what it looks like in English. The word is less of an adjective and more like an owner: “unreliable” doesn’t describe the wealth; the wealth itself belongs to injustice/unreliability, just as the children in the previous sentence belong either to the particular era or to the light.
The second word pair that grabbed my interest was the “eternal homes.” The word behind “homes” here generally signifies a tent or tabernacle—something of a temporary dwelling—unlike the “houses” the Manager of Injustice expects to find in verse 4. And there’s a good deal of debate around the word “eternal” here, too. Our modern use of “eternal” carries some philosophical aspects that appear foreign to Jesus’ era. We primarily think of “eternal” in temporal terms, suggesting ideas more like “everlasting” or “infinite.” In Jesus’ day, the word seems to indicate more about having a different quality of being rather than simply a length of time. There’s definitely a time aspect to it (the root behind the adjective is “age” or “era”), but it’s more than just time. It has a thicker kind of “otherness” to it. It’s similar to low quality versus high quality. For those of you into Greek philosophy, about three hundred years[1] before Luke recorded our Gospel, Plato applied the term to his Formal Reality. For me, it’s easiest to understand as something akin to “long lasting” or “enduring”—the time aspect is a part of, yet slightly less important than, the build itself. Maybe we could think of it in terms of “renewable”—something that continues well beyond the foreseeable future because it’s so well designed and manufactured that it’s always being refreshed or even refreshing itself.
With those things in mind, we can look back at the parable again. What does the manager know about his situation? (1) He’s being accused of wasting funds. (2) His future with his employer is limited. (3) He doesn’t want to be a day laborer or beg. And (4) there are a few people nearby who are highly indebted to his master (the amount of goods each person owed equaled several years’ wages). What does he do in that situation? To me, it looks like he shifts the debt. The owner doesn’t owe the manager anything further, so the manager indebts the rich man’s business partners to him in such a way that not only will they like him but they can afford to sustain him until he gets back on his feet. He traded what was about to vanish from him (the power to control people’s debts) into something that will last much longer time. That’s what Jesus (and the owner) seem to be praising.
So, as Jim frequently asks me after I preach, “so what?” What does that have to do with us sitting in our comfortable pews in our quiet neighborhoods of the Pacific Northwest?
My wife is a planner. She likes to have a trajectory for the next five years, something she can measure her personal progress against. I tend to be more of a go-with-the-flow person. Since I can’t control the future, why worry about it too much? I prepare for long term things, like investing for retirement, but I prefer to let experts pay attention to the details. I’m not quite “let go and let God,” but I am pretty close.
I think maybe Jesus is trying to give people like me a little kick in the pants with this story. Going with the flow isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to pay attention to where the flow is going. Kind of like river rafting in the spring, you can learn to read the natural signs around you and position yourself for the best trip, whether you prefer a soaking wet thrill ride or just want a smooth, relaxing day on the water.
And, as he often does, Jesus is plainly challenging all of us about our relationship to money. Do we possess the resources we have, manipulating them like a tool, or do they possess and manipulate us? Are you more devoted to God or to gain? A few weeks ago we talked about the love/hate relationship in Jesus’ culture, how you can look at it more like which direction you’re facing between two choices. Despite emotional connections, by loving or following God, it can appear like you’re hating or abandoning your family. Now Jesus applies that concept to God and goods. Which will you turn to for lasting support, the renewable or the unreliable?
“And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
[1] This was a math error on my part—it would have been closer to 400 years.