Dead Enought To Raise

Proper 20C: Luke 16:1-13 St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC 9/18/2016

Jim Melnyk: “Dead Enough to Raise”

What in the world do we do with a parable about a crook who is made out by Jesus to be a vehicle of grace?  Nobody seems to know for sure – and it’s hard to find people who agree with one another wholeheartedly on how to read this parable of the Unjust Manager.  Yet Robert Farrar Capon, a modern day scholar on the parables, does just that – he calls it a parable of grace.

We start with a manager who allegedly squanders his master’s money – the Greek implies he is falsely accused.  It’s not just bad business decisions we’re talking about here.  The word Luke uses to describe the man’s business skills is the same word used by Luke to describe the reckless actions of the prodigal son in an earlier story.  Someone apparently is out to get him, and the boss, without any double checking, gives the manager his notice. 

But before the guy clears out his desk, he goes to a couple of company debtors and cuts a sweet deal with them in an attempt to assure himself of a job in the days to come.

To one debtor the manager says, “Take your bill for one hundred jugs of olive oil (that’s about 900 gallons) and change it to fifty.”  To another he says, “Take your bill for one hundred containers of wheat (that’s at least 1,000 bushels) and change it to eighty.”

As far as we can tell, the master of the business has been double-crossed by his manager, and yet – believe it or not – the master commends the manager for his cunning action.  Perhaps the master realizes he messed up in the way he treated his employee, and he has to laugh at himself when his actions come back on him.  Nearly two thousand years later we’re still trying to figure out exactly what it is Jesus is trying to tell us! 

We could speculate, as many scholars do, that the owner may have been dishonest himself, pushing his manager to cook the books – overcharging his clients, or possibly charging exorbitant interest rates – something that would have gone against the teachings of Torah: sort of like those challenged centuries before by the prophet Amos – merchants who used false weights or kept a finger on the scale to increase their profit and feed their greed. 

 We don’t know if the debtors were deadbeats, far behind in their payments – in which case getting eighty percent, or even fifty percent, on the dollar beat dealing with bankruptcy claims – and would have made the boss happy.  We don’t know if they were honest businessmen trying to deal with books that had been fixed, and the manager was compensating for the owner’s greed.  We don’t know if everything was on the up-and-up and they had every intention of paying the agreed upon price – and then made out like bandits thanks to the actions of the manager.

All we know is that the manager was seen as shrewd by his boss in revising the accounts.  Perhaps he was he simply cutting out his share of the profits, figuring it might secure him a job in spite of his loss, and therefore the master admired his strategy? Was he cutting out illegal interest rates in an attempt to make his master look good in hopes of keeping his job?  Or, was he taking one last shot at his boss for getting fired?  We just don’t know anything for sure – at least at first glance.

We do know, however, that Jesus liked to use outsiders, outcasts, and anti-heroes to prove a point.  Many of his parables were scandalous in who they portrayed as unfaithful to the Covenant and who ended up as faithful witnesses to God.  Remember Jesus breaking bread with tax collectors and sinners last week? 

Remember the prodigal son?  He squanders family, friends and wealth – remember that he’s described in the same way as this reckless manager?  The prodigal becomes a vehicle for repentance and reconciliation.  His actions become the stage upon which the unconditional love of his father is acted out.  His story calls attention to the older brothers’ struggle with his own faithfulness and love, and therefore reminds us of our own struggles as well.

The story of the Good Samaritan uses a heretical, enemy-turned-hero to draw attention to the actions of a priest and a Levite who ignored the greater teachings of Torah in leaving a wounded man to die along the roadside.  Jesus’ portrayal of the Samaritan underscores his teaching to love not only our neighbors, but the sojourner or alien in the land, and our enemies as well.

Even the wider faith tradition followed by Jesus reveled in the same storyline.  Consider Jacob, who deceived his father and stole his brother’s birthright.  He took both Laban’s daughters as wives, then stole most of Laban’s flock.  In the end, God named a people for him – Israel.

And then there’s this dishonest manager, who sees his life falling apart before his eyes until he comes up with a plan that captures his master’s attention even as he helps out those who owe his boss money.  Today’s parable reminds us that while God’s grace is always present – always available to us – perhaps “grace works [best] on those it finds dead enough to raise” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Grace); and certainly the manager in our story sees his comfortable life dying before his eyes. 

Capon basically sees this parable as a story about a con man told by someone who was treated by many as a con man and criminal himself.  Like Jesus, the manager “dies and rises.”  “Like Jesus…by his death and resurrection [the manager] raises others” – especially those in debt to his master].  But…most important of all,” according to Capon, “the unjust manager is [a] Christ-figure [because he is held in contempt] like Jesus” (ibid), and grace comes to us via brokenness rather than respectability.

Theologian and author Dallas Willard once wrote, “The Gospel is less about how to get into the kingdom of heaven after [we] die, and more about how to live in the kingdom of heaven [while we’re still alive],” and today’s story is about that struggle to be faithful in the now rather than the later.

The dishonest or shrewd manager turns out to be yet another anti-hero of the parables – one who in this instance helps Jesus remind his followers, and the Pharisees who are listening in on the story, how real the allure of status, possessions and wealth can be – and how real a struggle to be faithful to God can be for those who are caught in the grasp of their own wealth.  The manager – for all his alleged squandering and his cunning glory – reminds us how “our relationship to [wealth] tests our faithfulness [to God]” (Christian Century). 

Our anti-hero challenges us to look at the resources – the blessings – we have, and decide how we might use them to build relationships rather than hurt or destroy them – challenges us to consider how we might help others rather than hinder them.  How we might look to live into the kingdom of heaven today rather than worry about how we’ll get in to the kingdom after we die.  And only we can make those decisions for our own lives. 

We are all unjust managers or masters at some point in our lives – but Jesus is still there for us – still invites us to live into the kingdom.  As my former New Testament professor reflected just the other day, “The end of our story, like the end of the [manager’s] story, is not, thank God, either our righteousness or our wickedness.  It is the Master’s creative and redeeming Word” (christopherbyranonline.com, 9/17/2016).

As stewards of God’s many blessings ourselves, our first call – our chief duty – is to be faithful in our response to God, and then faithful in how we love and serve our neighbor.  How we use the many gifts we have from God “is a clear and accurate indicator of our priorities” – of what we find most important about our lives and our faith (Christian Century).  The parable of the Dishonest Manager, with all its strong-worded morals tagging along, calls us to pay attention to our faith – and to our commitment to serve one another in God’s love.  It calls for us to use our gifts wisely and faithfully rather than be used by them. 

Indeed it is a challenging call to answer, but we have the strength and the grace to make it happen.  After all, we follow the greatest anti-hero of them all – Jesus the Christ.