The Rev. Ann R. Lougee

September 23, 2007

A Challenging Parable

Luke 16:1-13

 

Many people these days are fans of the various Survival-themed shows on TV.  Whether it’s a fiction about people lost on some remote island or a reality show with contestants placed somewhere in the world to compete for a million dollars against other ordinary people, the spectacle of people scrambling for survival draws a lot of viewers. 

 

Similarly, some of the highly-publicized celebrity trials of the past few years show us people saying anything, doing anything, telling any lie necessary to get out of trouble or avoid going to jail.  What we see in these examples are people struggling to save themselves with total commitment.

 

Some of this same human instinct for survival is at play in this gospel story.  We don’t usually associate the good news of Jesus with such cunning and underhanded behavior, but in this parable, Jesus suggests that in the actions of the dishonest steward there is a certain kind of model for the godly life. 

 

Jesus comments, “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”  In other words, the followers of Jesus have a lot to learn from the secular world about things like commitment, doing whatever it takes. 

 

This is one of those parables attributed to Jesus that lets us know that if we think we understand it quickly, we almost certainly don’t.  Right from the start, it is meant to boggle our brains.

 

First of all, the amounts of the debts in question are huge.  Our translation says that the first debtor owed a hundred jugs of oil, but what the Greek text really says it that it is a hundred “baths” of oil.  Since a bath was equivalent to nine gallons, this debtor owes nine hundred gallons of olive oil. 

 

The second debtor owes one hundred “kors” of grain, and estimates of the size of a kor range from six and a half to 12 bushels.  Whatever the actual size was, the amount of grain was between 650 and 1200 bushels, a very large amount.  So the rich man and his debtors were dealing in big commercial interests, not household quantities.

 

Now, a real question for me is was the steward cheating the master by reducing the size of the debts?  Or was he acting righteously by cutting out the interest that had been figured into the debts, interest prohibited in Jewish Law cited in Deuteronomy 23:19-20?  Or was he even cutting out his own commission to reduce the debts and gain good will?

 

Any of these three explanations is possible.  Most commentaries pick the first explanation, that the steward is cheating the master, based on the fact that Jesus calls him a dishonest steward.  So then, another puzzler is why the steward was praised by the master. 

 

Jesus spoke quite a lot about money in the gospels, often with this same kind of quirky logic that may be hard for us to grasp.  Here’s a modern story that has the same kind of humor but is easier for me, at least, to understand:

 

It seems that a prairie farmer appeared at a bank asking for a loan of one dollar.  He acknowledged that it was customary to provide collateral for any loan, and produced a ten thousand dollar savings bond to be deposited in the bank’s vault until the loan was repaid. 

 

A year later the farmer came back and renewed the loan, paying seven per cent interest on the first year:  a nickel and two pennies.  This happened for several years, with the farmer always paying his seven cents interest due. 

 

Finally the bank manager couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.  “We are quite happy to make you this loan,” he said to the farmer, “but I have to ask why you want it.  After all, we’re holding ten thousand dollars for you, so why would you want to borrow one dollar?”  The farmer replied, “I pay you 7 cents interest a year.  Do you know how much you folks would charge me per year to keep my bond in a safety deposit box?” 

 

That kind of brightness and imagination is commended in several of the  stories attributed to Jesus.  So, just plain being smart about using resources may be one way to read this to understand why the master in our parable commended the dishonest steward. 

 

One view says that the crooked steward exercises wisdom in responding to the request of the owner to give a report of how he had managed the money, not hiding how he had settled the accounts.  His open shrewdness, then, helps the owner to see him in a new light. 

 

Seeing things in a new light is really what parables are all about.  Parables are not like proverbs that give common sense wisdom in an easily remembered saying.  The function of a proverb is to inculcate in you a single, easily-grasped, moral. 

 

Whereas a proverb tells you about the world and how it works, a parable jolts you into seeing the world in a new way.  As I’ve mentioned before, a professor of mine once claimed that if you aren’t upset by a parable, you haven’t understood it.

 

As Stephen J. Patterson points out in his book The God of Jesus, “One of the reasons Jesus’ parables are so troubling is that they seldom offer any single, concrete answer to the questions they raise.  They are seldom reducible to a single idea, a proposition, a moral.  There is an open-ended quality about them... 

 

“Jesus’ parables lead one into a new way of thinking.  They do not bring one to a final point of meaning – a new set of rules to be followed, a moral to the story...the meaning of a parable does not take the form of final principles to be derived from it.  Its meaning is directional; it points one in a new direction that must be thought through.”

 

The parable makes little sense if we try to treat it as an allegory, if we try to assign roles and say the master is God or Jesus and the steward is a disciple, that kind of thing.  Instead, one way to read this is as a classic “how much more” saying.  Such a saying uses a rhetorical device common in antiquity, the argument from the lesser to the greater. 

 

What the dishonest steward has done in reducing people’s debts is to create good relations between himself and a variety of people.  He has come to the realization that, when you’re in trouble,  friends are more important than money.  So, the parable cues us, (this is the lesser to greater part) if even a crook realizes that relationships are more important than money, how much more should the children of light realize that “true riches” have to do with relationships rather than wealth or possessions. 

 

Another approach to the parable sees that it works as a paradox, which takes two contradictory things and puts them together.  An example might be speaking of loneliness in a crowd.  Loneliness is usually quite the opposite of being in a crowd, and yet, we can put them together to prompt a recognition that both of them can prompt a longing for a means of escape.  Just so, in this parable, we recognize that godliness is the opposite of dishonesty.  And yet, there is something that must be teased out in order to understand what living faithfully means... 

 

Dishonest persons will do anything to make a buck, to increase their well-being, to survive, while we honest folks are restrained in our behavior by decency, by honor, by integrity, by respect for the law.  The crooked are totally committed to saving their own lives, at anyone else’s expense, while the children of the light play it safe and act prudently. 

 

Children of the light do not tend to be shrewd and cunning.  We tend to be careful, cautious, deliberate, and conscientious.  These are all good traits, the kinds of things advised in Proverbs and that the gospel lesson two Sundays ago was about – counting the cost of an undertaking.  Yet, if this is all there is to our way of thinking and acting as Christians, then an important aspect of faith is missing. 

 

The missing piece is a sense of abandonment, of total commitment, of a willingness to do anything we feel God asks, to step out on a limb of faith, to rush forward to do something that needs to be done, to scramble to act in love in the face of danger. 

 

In chapter 10 of this same gospel, Jesus puts it in a way more familiar to us.  He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”  To do that requires total commitment.

 

When a person follows a call of God, it usually means abandoning oneself to uncertainty.  It may mean leaving one job for another, not knowing if your move will lead you to success, or moving from one place to another, not knowing if your move will lead you to a safe place. 

Most of us consider ourselves sensible people, and we’re more cautious than that.  Jesus’ disciples were probably people with common sense, too, and that may be why they were so slow to catch on to the Gospel message. 

 

What today’s gospel lesson may teach us is something new, shocking and unreasonable.  It’s a lesson in total commitment.  Like the embezzling steward who drops everything, even his love of money, and scrambles to save his skin, like a criminal who will say anything to get out of trouble, sometimes even the church needs to have a sense of abandonment of what we have previously accepted as orderly and proper. 

 

We need it in order to accept God’s call, to follow where Jesus leads, to love without calculating the nature of the sacrifice.  Doing these things can be signs of our growth into a more mature faith. 

 

The lectionary, that is, the schedule of Bible readings, for the season after Pentecost is devoted to the subject of Christian growth.  The lessons appointed for this long season, which is called Ordinary time, are selected to teach us aspects of discipleship.  One aspect of maturity in discipleship is to grow in our ability to give ourselves away. 

 

The unjust steward demonstrates no mere ten-percent effort.  His scrambling, survival mentality shows 100% commitment.  The parable suggests that we learn to give of ourselves so completely that God’s reign, comes more into being.  To give of ourselves is to live. 

 

When we focus on things outside of our own selves, we become more alive.  We learn to scramble, not for our own existence, but the for life and well-being of all people.  That is loving God with all our hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

 

It’s a paradox that we should have an attitude of abandonment and at the same time be godly, honest and prudent people.  But the Gospel is nothing if not a paradox. 

 

We don’t merit God’s grace, but we receive it anyway.  Jesus dies, apparently defeated by worldly power, but his spirit lives on undefeated while the Empire that killed him is long gone.  We lose our lives when we cling to them, and we gain them when we learn to give them away. 

 

To be honest and cautious and prudent, and to be shrewd and cunning and quick-thinking.  These things don’t seem to go together.  They create a paradox.  Just so.  The life of faith is a paradoxical way of life. 

 

The Gospel of Luke is full of stories that challenge our comfortable assumptions: the dishonest steward, the farmer who built more barns, the rich man who ignored his suffering neighbor Lazarus, the ruler who valued possessions more than abundant life.  All of these point us toward the better path, the path of radical trust that Jesus walked before us. 

 

Do they give easy answers?  Certainly not.  Are they worth thinking our way through, struggling with difficult ideas?  You bet your life.   Amen.