The most confusing parable

Amos 8:4-7

4Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

5 saying, “When will the new moon be over

so that we may sell grain;

and the sabbath,

so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,

and practice deceit with false balances,

6 buying the poor for silver

and the needy for a pair of sandals,

and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

    7 The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

Luke 16:1-13

1 Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ 3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ 8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9 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.

10 “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 11If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

This is, without a doubt, the most confounding of Jesus’ parables.  Even if you grew up in church, you might not be familiar with it, because most people would rather avoid trying to make sense of something that doesn’t seem to make sense.  “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.”  What could that possibly mean?  You don’t have to know much about Jesus to know that this doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d expect him to say.  And the thing is, even if you know how to find answers - like me, you’d think - you discover that there is no consensus interpretation of the parable, that none of the explanations are entirely satisfying, and - to the extent that you would like to have this parable explained - this sermon probably won’t be entirely satisfying either.  

That said, I do think considerable light is shed by the pairing of this parable with the short passage from the prophet Amos.  I don’t know the history of how the lectionary came to read these two passages together, but I do know that one of the more prevalent interpretations of Jesus’ parable is to assert - without much evidence, it must said - that when the manager changes the bill owed to the debtors, that he’s doing one of two things: He’s either removing his own commission from the equation, thus eliminating his profit and charging them the true amount; or, he is restoring their bill to the actual amount owed because the original number had been dishonestly inflated - perhaps because, echoing the accusation in Amos, he had used deliberately inaccurate measurements, intentionally defrauding the master’s creditors.  

One of the reasons we named our son Amos was in the hope that he would live into the righteous indignation of his namesake.  The prophets are characteristically concerned with what we might still dare to call “social justice”.  That has become a loaded term, in the minds of many, but properly understood it names God’s desire for God’s people as spoken by the prophet.  And of all the prophets, none was more emphatic than Amos.  

What’s being condemned here is not mere dishonesty but the way that dishonesty especially victimizes the poor.  The rich and powerful use their position to exploit those in need, to maximize their profit.  And the poor, as always, have no recourse; they are powerless in the situation.  God looks upon this injustice with condemnation, not only because the poor suffer but, even more, because this injustice destroys the community, it distorts the people of God into something that harms everyone.  

Returning to Jesus’ parable, one of it’s many confusing aspects is why the master - whom we can always safely assume plays the God-role in story - would commend the manager for changing the bills of the creditors.  The parable is cast in explicitly economic terms, and it's very difficult for people like us - we’re all capitalists at heart - to imagine that a master would be anything but unhappy about having his income reduced, that the master would not be outraged by the dishonesty on either the front end or the back end.  

Of course, the master has already told the manager that he’s going to be relieved of his position because he has been “squandering his property”.  Here again, it’s hard not to imagine that the charge involves some combination of failing to maximize the master’s profits and/or extracting wealth for himself.   We assume that a good manger of property is one who expands the portfolio.  But if the master is indeed the Lord God, we might ask what - contrary to our own natures - is the reason why God would entrust stewardship of his property to his servants?  And we might ask what kind of return on investment God expects?  

We might consider that the manager has been squandering the master’s property not by failing to maximize profit or efficiently allocate resources but precisely because he had not attended to the social ramifications of his management.  We might consider that God is not all that interested in insuring that his debtors pay back what they owe in full but that God is quite amenable to forgiving debts.  In fact, what God wants from those entrusted to manage his resources is not that they make sure that debtors give God what God is supposedly owed.  Mercy is the currency of the kingdom.  

And thus the master commends the manager for slashing the bill because finally then he was managing the resources as the master intended, using his position not as opportunity to extract wealth (however “justified” it might be) but as an opportunity to bless others.  Of course, this doesn’t seem to be the manager’s motivation; he’s calculated what will get him into the good graces of others once he’s lost his position.  Nevertheless, even if unwittingly, the manager finds himself acting in way that blesses the community, in a way which, contrary to the condemnation of Amos, relieves the burden on the poor and needy, which builds up the people of God - something which will indeed benefit the manager even as it benefits others.  

And this may help us understand the perplexing statement in verse 8, “for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” We might take this to mean that those in “the world” understand how to deploy resources toward their chosen ends much better than the Christians understand how to deploy the resources with which we’ve been entrusted toward the ends that God has given us.  From the time Amos to the present day, we continue to see resources as something to accumulate to ourselves, to use our positions to extract profit, even to exploit others, to justify our actions by claiming that we’re only demanding what we’re rightly owed.  

The whole point of the parable seems to be that God entrusts resources to us, not so that we might horde blessings to ourselves, but so that we might, like God himself, bless others.  And thus the parable also concludes with a kind of warning.  All of us, whether rich or poor, have been entrusted with God’s property, a reminder that all that we call our own comes from God and the ends to which it should be directed are the ends for which God has made it.  If we have been faithful with little then God will entrust us with true riches, whereas if we have been dishonest with what God has entrusted us, then will not be given any more. 

To the extent that we often think of God as a means to getting what we want, it’s easy to read here that if we are faithful with our money then God is going to bless us with more, so this can even become a kind of enlightened strategy toward wealth accumulation, and we might tell ourselves that we’re rich because we’re inherently good.  And likewise we might think the poor remain poor because they’ve been unfaithful, that in a sense they deserve their position.   The blessings we want most of all are the material ones.  

But the whole parable points to a different reality, that true riches are found in relationships. Again, the manager is commended when we stops using his position and the resources at his disposal to accrue wealth and instead engender the goodwill of others, to facilitate the kind of relationship that will secure his future.  Likewise, he mismanaged God’s property exactly by disregarding the members of his community over whom he had power, and worse, by distorting their relationship to God.  Rather than lifting burdens in God’s name, he increased them.  

You cannot serve God and mammon, or - as we’ll read next Sunday - the love of money is the root of all evils.  When we hear this and even as it impresses itself upon us, we probably think about it in psychological terms, in terms of where our heart is, and that the goal then is to get our heart in the right place, and if we do that then all is well.  But the passage doesn’t let us off so easily.  It confronts us with the reality that the love of money doesn’t just make it hard to love God in some abstract sense, but rather the love money makes us, in very concrete ways, bad neighbors.  Love of God and love of neighbor are not just related, but more or less inseparable, and our pursuit of riches, which we so easily justify, makes it very difficult to actually love our neighbors as ourselves.  

Jesus instead invites to consider the possibility that true riches are found not in the little kingdoms we try to build for ourselves, but only in the kingdom of God, where all that we’ve been entrusted with is used to bless others, where all resources are directed toward the building of the kingdom, where there will be nor poor or needy, but all living in right relationship to one another, and with God.