September 18, 2016 - Personal Meditations on the Parable of the Dishonest Manager

What was said about this passage in Creator's 9/18 worship is reported in a separate post.

Years ago I knew today's reading, Luke 16:1-13, as "The Parable of the Unjust Steward". There was general agreement it was a hard parable to understand.  I suppose this is especially true if, like most of us, money is a primary idol we are constantly tempted in our lives to put before God in importance.

Coming from the one who said "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.", this parable is easy to understand. Our initial inclination is to disagree with, or at least confuse, both the parable and what Jesus says about the rich because of the importance money takes on in our lives.

We want to think we live out in our lives what Jesus taught.  For the times we fall short there is Mark 12:17 - Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This allows us the pretense to act from the belief that at least part of our lives belong to Caesar rather than God.  

Most of us are comfortable with Jesus breaking the law and healing on the Sabbath because there is no modern "moral" dilemma to accepting the violation of the ancient rule. When our Christian beliefs cause us to move to civil disobedience, for example, there is another kind of gravity that takes over. We operate best when we know we are obeying the laws of God and Man. This parable invites us to think of the transactions we engage in daily from a new perspective.

This parable is not hard to understand but rather is uncomfortable because the manager or steward being called dishonest or unjust in verse 8 is troubling in a different way than, let's say, "The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard".  In that parable the landlord does what the steward does - violates what most "reasonable people" would consider "just" under the law. Still what the owner does affects his bottom line only.   It is easier to accept the owner's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" top-down kind of generosity than what happens in this parable.

Here the manager is generous with another person's property. On the surface this appears to confirm the manager's "dishonesty". It goes against the law and our sense of social justice. There is something else in play, however. The rich man's perspective changes from verse 2 'What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' to verse 8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.  

The Dishonest Manager can function as a transforming Christ figure in this parable. Triggered by the rich man's dismissal in verse 2 the Dishonest Manager faces the impending loss of his fortune and social rank. His old life is dead to him which opens possibilities that he would never have acted on before. He perceives a different value in the transactions he brokers.  The goodwill of others as a calculation in his bargaining increases in importance.  His knowledge of, and relationship to, his master's debtors lets him customize deals advantageous and acceptable to those debtors.

Somehow the rich man's perspective changes to see this bargaining of the manager as advantageous as well. Does he see goodwill as more important than he initially thought in a transaction as well? Is the manager no longer "squandering" the rich man's property now but rather putting old debts to better use?  Is the rich man, perhaps, seeing his debtor's partial payments as money he never thought he would collect? Does the rich man discover a dishonesty or the "mammon" he did not see in his collected wealth as described in verse 9? I say to you, make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth, so that when you fall short, they may receive you into eternal dwellings.


What prompts the rich man to change his mind might be interesting to contemplate but what is critical is the move away from operating as if mammon were God.

Jesus is not celebrating the manager's fraud in this parable but rather the freedom from the strict bookkeeping where mammon, as the worldly gain personified as a false god, is put in God's place. Isn't this a parable about ultimately about relationships triumphing over the world's everyday avarice that is seen as a necessity and constantly being perpetuated in daily life?