The great problem in preaching many Scripture passages is that we think we already know what they mean—usually an interpretation we find easy and comfortable—so we don’t need to listen to them. That is not the problem this morning. Luke 16:1-8 is a problem parable, and our problems begin with the way our Bibles present it to us. The chapter break at 15:32 leads us to separate this parable from the one immediately before it and connect it instead with the poem that follows. We fail to see the deep connections between it and chapter 15 because, hey, it’s a different chapter! We take 16:9-13 as an interpretive key to our parable this morning—see the lectionary, which actually assigns all thirteen verses for this Sunday—when it’s actually transition and introduction to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. As a consequence, we read verses 1-8 as a parable about money, which completely jams us up, because on that basis it seems clear Jesus is praising the crook for being a good crook. That is not what’s going on.
Now, I’ve learned some things this month about the arc of Luke 14-16 which I think are important here. Let me just say, over the course of my adult life, I have treasured my colleagues, and many have been great gifts and blessings to me. I’m a preacher first, so I tend to be particularly attuned to preaching, and these past two weeks I’ve been blessed by brilliant sermons from Noah and Emily which showed me things I’d never seen before. We can even look further back in Luke 14 to the Parable of the Great Banquet, which raises two key points for the passages that follow: one, the grace of God is unbelievable, even unreasonable, on our terms; and two, “the right sort of people” may find themselves excluded by their own choice. Having found myself obliged to leave a church in considerable part because most of the new people we were attracting weren’t “the right sort of people” to my detractors, I know how much punch that warning carries.
On the basis of those two points, the response to Jesus might seem obvious: of course you want to follow him, why wouldn’t you? As Noah so powerfully articulated two weeks ago, Jesus proceeds to spend ten verses making it excruciatingly clear exactly why you wouldn’t. Jesus is doing again in that passage what he did in Luke 9, and in the Sermon on the Mount, and in John 6: forcing people to pick a lane. He wants everyone to understand that his call is absolute and he claims an authority above all others. If you say, “I’m sorry, Jesus, I’ll give you all but this one thing–I will not surrender my allegiance to this one person, relationship, authority, tribe, whatever,” he says, “Either let the dead bury their own dead or you cannot be my disciple.”
To put the matter in our culture’s terms, if you are a faithful disciple of Jesus, you will be called a hater. You will have people you love calling you a hater because the way Jesus calls you to love them is not what they want to accept as love. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that people calling you a hater necessarily means you’re a faithful disciple of Jesus; the temptation to believe it does is extremely strong in this culture that pours out powerful dopamine hits on culture warriors of every stripe, but sometimes people calling you a hater just means you’re a jerk. All the same, the warning in Noah’s passage is clear. Jesus calls us to lay everything at his feet. He won’t take everything, probably, but we have to surrender everything and let him take whatever he will. If we won’t, we are fools, and eventually our folly will be clear to everyone.
Last week, Emily looked at Luke 15:1-10 and Jesus seeking the lost, and she opened up something I had never recognized: the reaction of the scribes and Pharisees in 15:2 is a pure anxiety reaction. I should have seen that, given my training in family systems theory, but I’m too accustomed to thinking of the Pharisees as impenetrably armored emotionally and spiritually. They aren’t, they’re human, and Jesus has been doing some things to rattle them to the core. Their unaccustomed unwelcome from Jesus is a problem for them. They don’t want to accept his welcome, but they still want him to offer it, because they are the people he should welcome. They are “the right sort of people.” Put that all together, and what does it make them? It makes them the original invited guests of the Parable of the Great Banquet. It makes them the fools of 14:25-33 and the fit-for-nothing bad salt of 14:34. This is driving their angst through the roof.
As Emily showed, this means—and this is where she really blew my mind—that Jesus in 15:1-10 isn’t just defending himself or even articulating his philosophy of ministry, he’s finding the Pharisees. Why is this such a big deal? Because it sets up the next parable. That parable is commonly miscalled the “Parable of the Prodigal Son,” which in terms of missing the point is sort of like calling Hamlet a play about a Danish prince with a bad attitude and a death wish. It is in fact the Parable of the Two Lost Sons, and it’s aimed squarely at the Pharisees.
There are three key things to understand here. One, the younger son’s behavior is worse than we realize, coming to the text as we do with our individualistic assumptions. In that culture, where family and community were paramount, his demand for his inheritance amounts to the declaration, “Dad, I wish you were dead,” and turning around and selling it, thus permanently reducing the family resources, made him Public Enemy #1 in the village. Two, he does not repent in the foreign country. He comes up with a plan to earn back his place in the family. The hardest part will be making it to the house, because it sits in the center of the village, and the villagers will be lining the street waiting for him before he ever reaches the gate. He’ll have to run a gauntlet of familiar faces screaming hatred and throwing things; he’ll have to survive that before he can ever plead his case. The younger son only repents when his father takes that gauntlet on himself, humiliating himself to save his son. The younger son is broken by grace. Three, the elder son is every bit as alienated from the father, and insults his father just as badly at the end of the story (by refusing to join the party) as the younger son did at the beginning. The story lands unresolved in the Pharisees’ lap, for they are the elder son. How will they respond? Will they, too, accept being broken by grace?
This, then, is the emotional and theological setting of our parable this morning, which we’re told is spoken to the disciples, and which addresses a key question raised by chapter 15: how far does God’s grace go? We need to hear this story in light of that question.
Now, if you’ve been around, you know I talk a lot about Kenneth Bailey, and these two parables back to back are the main reason why. It was here I saw he knew things I’d never heard of, and I’m deeply indebted to him for everything I’m going to say next.
So let’s tell the story, shall we? The setting is common and familiar for Jesus and his disciples: a great landowner hired an estate manager to take care of renting out the land. Some of the tenants would farm the land or tend the trees themselves; others were rich enough to rent larger pieces and hire people to do the work. Each one paid a fixed amount of their yield as rent. Note that: they paid a fixed amount, not a percentage. They owed the same regardless of how good the year was. The manager was paid a salary by the master, and also collected a fee from each renter as they signed their contract. That fee was not, however, reflected in the contract, which stated only what the tenant owed to the master.
We’re told the estate manager was wasting the master’s wealth. Something about that phrase made me wonder this week if the manager had a gambling problem; it would fit with the story, as we’ll see here shortly. If that’s so, it’s a story we’ve heard before: man starts gambling, man starts losing, man gets in a big hole, man embezzles from employer telling himself he’ll return the money when he starts winning, man keeps losing, and the hole keeps going deeper. In any case, someone blows the whistle, and the master summons his crooked employee and demands, “What’s this I hear about you?”
Now, the typical response in that culture would have been to loudly and firmly protest his innocence. There were many time-honored defenses the manager could have used and many people to whom he could have tried to shift the blame, including the master himself, and that’s presumably the sort of response the disciples expected. Instead, he says nothing. The master has him dead to rights, but the question “What’s this I hear about you?” doesn’t tell him how much the master actually knows; not only will any defense be fruitless in the end, he might only succeed in giving the master more rope with which to hang him. His silence is prudent; but, of course, it’s also a confession, so the master continues, “Turn in the books—you’re fired!”
It’s critical to see the master’s great mercy here. Legally he could have had his employee hauled off that instant and thrown in jail until he could repay or work off his crime, but he doesn’t. He tells the manager to go get the books, bring them back and turn them in, and simply trusts the man to do so. He doesn’t go with him, send a guard along, or even summon another servant to tell everyone he’s canned the guy. The manager turns and leaves the room, affirming by his silence his guilt and the justice of his punishment, and the master just—lets him go.
It seems likely the manager would not have been shown such mercy had he mounted a vigorous defense, but that’s not the reason for his silent surrender; mentally and emotionally, he’s already moved on. He knows the situation is hopeless, so he doesn’t waste his breath trying to get his job back. Instead, he puts all his energy into finding a new one. He considers manual labor, but rejects it—not because it would have been a tremendous comedown for an educated man in a white-collar job but for the pragmatic reason that he’s not strong enough. He thinks about begging for a living—it was considered a legitimate occupation, though extremely low-status—but decides that would be too much of a comedown. But what other options does he have? He’s been fired as a scoundrel, so who would hire him?
I wondered a few minutes ago if he was a gambling man; if he was, the plan he adopts is a prime example. His master has shown him great mercy, so he decides to stake everything on that mercy. He’s been told to turn in the books, but left on his own to do it. No one in the community knows he’s been fired. Because he didn’t try to fight, his master didn’t set a guard on him. He has the freedom to act, and he uses it. If his plan fails, he’ll be thrown in prison, but that might happen anyway. If it works, he’ll be a hero in the community. The whole story will eventually come out, but someone will hire him anyway, out of gratitude for his actions and respect for his ability. They’ll just keep a close eye on him, is all.
He has to act quickly; he doesn’t have long before he has to turn in the books. He calls in the tenants, one by one. No one else knows he’s been fired, so the lower servants obey his orders and the tenants answer his summons. They only come because they believe he has a message for them from their landlord. He treats them brusquely, for he has no time for the usual courtesies: if the master discovers his plan, all will be lost. The tenants will never cooperate with him if they know he’s cheating the master, for that would end their relationship with their landlord—not only financially, but socially as well. They couldn’t take that risk for any amount of money.
As it happens, however, the manager’s plan goes off without a hitch. He asks each tenant, “How much do you owe my master?”—not because he doesn’t know, he has the contract right in front of him, but just to bring the full weight of their debt home to them. He reduces each one’s debt by about 500 denarii, which is roughly twenty months’ wages for an ordinary laborer. He lets them believe he talked his boss into making the reduction, since the whole point of his plan is for the people of the village to give him the credit for their unexpected windfall. He has them make the changes in their own handwriting so it’s clear they’ve signed off on the deal, and away they go, rejoicing.
That done, he takes his newly-changed account books and turns them in to his master. The master looks at them and knows immediately what his former employee has done. He knows the whole village is bound to be throwing a party in his honor. His tenants think he’s the most noble and generous man who has ever lived, for he has given them an unprecedented and almost unfathomable gift. Legally, he has every right to cancel the unauthorized reductions—but if he does that, their joy will turn to rage, and they will curse him for his stinginess. It isn’t rational, but it’s human. Otherwise, all he can do is keep his mouth shut, accept the praise of the community, allow the manager to do the same, and act like he meant it all to happen.
This was the servant’s calculation: faced with that choice, his master would keep quiet. After all, he is a generous man (even if he hadn’t meant to be quite that generous), and generosity is one of the qualities expected of the rich and powerful. He’s also a merciful man, as he had already shown by not jailing his larcenous manager. And so he reflects for a moment, turns to his former employee, and says quietly, “You’re a shrewd man.” You’ll note that’s all he praises the manager for, certainly not for his morals; that’s the point of Jesus’ comment which follows. And how is the manager shrewd? He knew his master and trusted the master to be who he was. He risked everything on his plan, because if he were found out halfway through, it would all blow up in his face, but at the same time, he risked nothing at all. Pulling it off was the only way to avoid ruin, and if he does, the risk of the master not playing his part—is zero.
The manager is an example for us not in his dishonesty but in the fact that he was wise enough to know where his salvation lay. His actions are a compliment to the master—backhanded, sure, but no less sincere for all that. The manager believes so deeply in his master’s generosity and mercy that he’s willing to stake his whole future on it—and he wins. The master is so generous and merciful, he chooses to pay the full price for his former employee’s salvation.
The principle here is a standard one in rabbinical teaching, commonly referenced as “from the light to the heavy,” which roughly means, “how much more.” In other words, if this crook got out of his crisis by relying on his master’s mercy, how much more will God help you in yours if you will only trust his mercy? And all humanity is in crisis. We are the steward who has misused what was put in our trust. Excuses are worthless, and God—the master—is a God of judgment. And yet, he is also a God of mercy. All we can do is stake everything on the unfailing mercy of God, trusting that he will pay the price for our salvation. If we do, like the crooked manager, we find that risking everything is actually risking nothing at all. We can take a great flying, tumbling leap into the mercy of God because his mercy is as sure as the dawn and more solid than the earth.
For those who haven’t thrown themselves on God’s mercy, the application is obvious. Those of us who have might think this irrelevant to us, but it isn’t. This isn’t just our admission to the kingdom of God, it’s the life of the kingdom of God. When we see salvation as just a “Get Out of Hell Free” card, we make God’s grace far too small a thing; many churches, and many churchgoers, act as if we get our ticket to heaven punched by grace then spend the rest of the trip working off our fare. That’s popular religion; though often called Christianity, it is not the gospel. As we have been saved, so we are being saved, and so we will be saved, and so we live: all of life, at every point and every moment, wholly dependent on the mercy and grace of God.
“Dice at Casino” © 2011 by Flickr user Images_of_Money/TaxRebate.org.uk; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Deed–Attribution 2.0 Generic