Saint Luke 16:1-13
If there is one thing that all of us in this room know it is that life is full of uncertainty.
We may try to be optimistic people who are a pleasure to be around but sometimes it is hard, very hard, when we don’t know what will come next. It’s difficult to be optimistic in those times when we don’t know how things are going to work out.
Remember the first time you fell in love? Perhaps it was in high school or college. You thought you had found your partner for life. They were more than you could ever ask for, dream about, and then they dumped you. At this young age you were probably devastated and came to the conclusion that Dionne Warwick was right as you sang sadly to yourself: “I’ll never fall in love again.”
Or, perhaps it was when you were older and you found that the one you thought you was going to spend the rest of your life with decided in the words of the poet/philosopher Meat Loaf that “if they had to spend another minute with you they didn’t think they could ever survive.”
Maybe it was the time when the company you had spent years working for downsized and you were going to have to find a new job later in your career.
Uncertainty can come while you wait for a report about your health or the health of a loved one.
Everybody who has ever lived past adolescence into adulthood knows the perils of uncertainty. We also know that the course of our lives is determined by how we handle any uncertainty that comes our way.
The example that Jesus gives of the crooked manager in today’s parable is almost a reverse angle look at someone who had a very creative way of facing his uncertainty. Jesus is being so creative with his story that it has puzzled scholars from the very moment Saint Luke included it in his gospel. Almost everyone that I read described this parable as leaving them baffled.
I, on the other hand, think it is deceptively easy.
What we have before us a crook who got caught.
If you read the business section you know all about him and his kind. They are the ones who overinflate the earnings of their companies. They make the profits seem bigger and the loses smaller than they really are. They have no second thoughts about “ginning the books.”
Then the day arrives when the audit committee shows up! Somebody is going to come in and try to add up figures that don’t add up. Outsiders will try to reconcile books that cannot be reconciled no matter what kinds of Voodoo accounting practices are used. Instead of rolling in dough they will find out that the company is actually drowning in debt.
We know these types of managers and if their shenanigans have affected the bottom line of our pension plans we don’t like them very much. However, the guy Jesus is telling us about has a certain endearing quality to him.
To his credit he is exceedingly self-aware. He knows his limits and they are many. He says of himself: “I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.”1 He frankly and honestly assesses his skills and determines that he doesn’t have any. He is fast becoming like the guy who is pictured above looking at a chart of his business potential and seeing an arrow pointing ever downward.
At this point he has two choices: He can stare at that chart forever or he can do something, anything. The manager decides to do something.
“Ah, I know what I’ll do so that when I lose my position people will welcome me into their homes!”2
At this point you are either going to be aghast or your going to smile.
The manager calls his master’s debtors in, one by one, and begins to go over their books.
But instead of bad news the only thing he has for them is good news.
“Listen!” he says to the first. “We’ve been going over the accounts and there has been some mistake.” You can feel the tension rising. “It says here you owe $100,000 but I think someone has programmed in too many zeros. It can’t be that much! Let’s make it $50,000.” The tension is gone as suddenly there are handshakes all around.
The next guy comes in and it is the same story. “I’ve been looking over your accounts and that statement we sent you is all wrong. That $50,000 you owe us should only read $25,000. That’s it! That’s all you owe! Look for me at the pub and buy me a drink. Winks and nods this time because everybody knows what is going on.
So it goes as one by one people come in and find their debts being magically reduced. Before long the whole town owes the conniving manager a favor.
The unseemly steward is handling his uncertainty by making certain that, at the end of the day, if he hasn’t made a few real friends at least he’ll have more than a few people who will owe him big time.
From little on we have been told that parables are earthly stories that have a heavenly meaning but this one seems to have a lot of ungodliness thrown in.
We expect that when the rich man found out what his manager was doing the police would be called, a grand jury would be impaneled, and the manager would be indicted. There would be handcuffs for the man and maybe even a perp-walk but, much to our amazement, this isn’t what happens at all.
When the manager is finally called on the carpet he discovers that his boss has rolled out a red one. His boss says:
“You, you business genius you! I wish all these priggish sons-of-light in this company showed as much individual initiative, worldly wisdom and commercial creativity! You are one shrewd operator. I’m moving you up to the front office.”3What?
Wait Jesus that is not how parables are supposed to work and they usually do but this one doesn’t.
This time Jesus leaves us confused and so shall we ever be if we think this little story is only about money. This is about much more than how we handle our finances it is about how we handle any uncertainty than may come our way.
When the auditors showed up, the manager’s future was uncertain. He didn’t know what he would do but instead of wallowing he got to work. In an often overlooked part of the parable he helped out his neighbors by reducing their debt load.
Some politicians of our day know very well the benefits of offering people a free everything and they like to do it with somebody else’s money. The crooked manager did that too. He was giving away his master’s money as if it were his own and in so doing he was making the rich man look benevolent.
Listen to me very carefully now otherwise you are going to miss something very important.
Those people downstream who were receiving the write-off didn’t know who it was coming from. We know it was the steward but they didn’t. For all they knew he was acting at the behest of the boss. So, the rich guy got credit too.
All of a sudden, as he walked around town where once there were scowls now there were smiles. Now, when he strolled down the street instead of hiding from him people were coming up to him to thank him for his kindness.
No wonder he was so positive toward his crafty manager! The rich man had gone from being a miserly pariah to being the “toast of the town.” It cost him a ton of money but the goodwill he received in return might have proved to be worth it.
The people benefitted, his boss benefitted, and the steward benefitted because he got off with a commendation rather than incarceration.
We good God-fearing folk misunderstand this parable because we want it to be a good, god-fearing story about money. It isn’t. It is about something more and what this something-moreness is can be found in the concluding sentence. J.B. Phillips paraphrases it this way: “For the children of this world are considerably more shrewd in dealing with their contemporaries than the children of light.”4
Dr. Thomas G. Long said “what Jesus wanted them—and us—to get out of this story [is that he wished] the people of God . . . were as shrewd for the gospel as the wheeler-dealers out there in the world are shrewd for themselves. In other words, there are people out there in the culture who get up every morning scheming for a buck, focusing every ounce of energy on feathering their nests, working in overdrive to save themselves and to scramble to the top of the heap. ‘I wish God's people,’ Jesus says, ‘would be just as focused and energetic for their beloved community.’"5
Some of us “children of light” when confronted with any uncertainty like to play it safe. We like to act prudently. We don’t like to spend what we don’t have or commit ourselves unless we know that we are going to succeed. We like to be certain before we act.
But the “children of the world” know how to look after themselves.
In Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase, The Message, the passage says this about these “streetwise people”:
They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way—but for what is right—using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live, really live.6
The reason so many are confused by this parable is that they think it is all about money. In the parable money is only a tool. Money here is only a literary device.
What is key to understanding is to watch how the steward reacts to the most uncertain time in his life.
He doesn’t just stand there waiting for the bottom to completely fall out. He takes action! He uses the only thing he knows how to use for not only his own benefit but for the benefit of his boss and even the entire community.
The steward takes the only thing he knows how to use and uses it.
So the question for us is what is the one, two or three things we do really, really well? What are the tools in our toolbox that we go to most often when we are uncertain? What are the gifts we have been given?
Find them! Use them.
And in the end we just might hear words that we never thought we would ever hear from the lips of our Lord: “Shrewd! Very Shrewd!”
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1. St. Luke 16:3c. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
2. St. Luke 16:4. (PHILLIPS) [J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English. (London: HarperCollins, 2000.)]
3. William H.Willimon, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Pulpit Resource. vol. 41, no. 3 (2013): 49–52.
4. St. Luke 16:8. (PHILLIPS)
5. Thomas G. Long, “Making Friends,” Journal for Preachers, vol. 30, no. 4, Pentecost 2007, 55.
6. St. Luke 16:8-9. (MSG) [MSG=The Message]
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