It’s impossible to know Jesus apart from the story that he lived but it is equally impossible to know Jesus apart from the stories that he told. Apart from the beguiling stories that he told woven from the fabric of everyday life.
Why does Jesus use these curious yarns to speak about the kingdom of God?
Jesus uses parables because he knows how we are wired. He knows that or crafty brains want to put up walls and duck the truth. And because Jesus loves us, he is determined like some crazy fool to break through to places where we can grow.3
It will take a lot of stretching and growing to understand the parable put before us this day. As Justo González’s observed: “It is not uncommon to see on our church windows portrayals of a father receiving a son who has strayed or of a sower spreading seed, or of a Samaritan helping the man by the roadside. But I have never seen a window depicting a man with a sly look, saying to another ‘Falsify the bill.’”4
Yet that is what we have before us today and, if we listened very carefully, we might find ourselves saying with those who heard it the first time. “Surely you jest.” And we might have heard Jesus reply, “Surely, I do not jest. And don’t call me Shirley.”
Almost everybody, scholar and students alike, are confused. They can’t get over the fact that Jesus has made a crook almost palatable in this parable. They can’t get over the fact that the manager heaps praise on this charlatan. They can’t get over all of this because they can’t admit that deep down in their heart of hearts there is a grudging admiration for this steward. He is one crafty character.
In the beginning of Jesus’ confusing little story, he doesn’t look so cunning. He looks more like a crook who got caught. At this point we are right with the master in firing the guy.
We 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. When tax-time comes around their returns could win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. They have no second thoughts about “ginning the books.” They would sell their souls to keep the company afloat or help get the company what it wants.
At first there are only rumors for the wayward manager. Who knows where these charges are coming from but then the audit committee is called in. They are going to try to add up figures that don’t add up. These 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.
The guy is in big trouble and he knows it. He also knows his limitations.
In my favorite line is all of scripture he sums up his skills perfectly when he says of himself: “I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.”5
He frankly and honestly assesses his skills and determines that he doesn’t have any. So it is time for him to go to work and uses the only skill he has. He may not be able to make the books balance but he is crafty and he is going to put that one ability he has to work full bore.
I don’t know about you, but I am beginning to like this guy. He could have stood around staring at his shoes all day and wondering what is going to happen to him but instead he goes to work with the only skill he has left – his ability to be, let’s just call him this to be polite, a creative accountant. It is what got him into this mess perhaps it can get him out. So the shrewd guy gets to work.
“Ah, I know what I’ll do so that when I lose my position people will welcome me into their homes!"6 he says to himself. While money may not be able to, in the words of the Beatles, “buy him love” it might be able to find him a warm place to stay on a cold night.
Up until now when he has called one of his master’s debtors into his office, he has been the bearer of bad tidings. Now he is Mr. 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 $10,000.” The tension is gone as suddenly there are handshakes all around as he asks, almost as an aside, “By-the-way, do you still have that coach house out back of your place that you are not using?”
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. He is fast becoming the stuff of legend.
The unseemly steward is handling his misfortune by spreading good fortune all around and thus 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.
To make matters worse, we expect that when the rich man finds 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. Proving once again that Jesus has the ability to cause us to say, “Surely, you jest.”
When the manager is finally called on the carpet he discovers that his boss has rolled out a red one.
Dr. William H. Willimon envisions the conversation between the man and his boss going something like this:
“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.”7
I wonder how surprised he was when his boss commends him for his actions. It turns out that they are cut from the same cloth and “game recognizes game.” This sort of cheating the system ... is an acceptable way of doing business to a whole group of folks; Jesus refers to them as “children of this age.”8
“Maybe the parable ... is simply a grim but truthful portrait of the world as it is ... the real world in which we are called to be “children of light.”9
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.''10
Richard Lischer called “The steward ... neither a child of the night or of the day, but of the twilight.”11
That’s where we live out our lives. In the twilight sometimes doing what is good, and just, and right, and sometimes not so much.
That is where we live and that is where Christ calls to be children of the light.
Beyond the right-doing and wrong-doing in the parable there is Jesus the master storyteller who leaves us scratching our heads and wondering what we should do now, or next.
“Keep working on that, keep trying to live in the twilight and still be children of the light. Keep trying that, keep at that, Jesus seems to be saying with a laugh, and see where it takes you.”
To which we might say, “Surely you jest.” And Jesus would certainly reply. “Surely, I do not jest. And don’t call me Shirley.”
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