Strange Shrewdness (Sept 21)

Readings, Luke 16:1-13
Image, Marinus van Reymerswaele, Parable of the shrewd manager (1490)
 
One of the great things about this parable, before even get to anything specific it might be teaching, is that it reminds us that parables can be strange. That parables can trouble our attempts to smooth out their rough edges, and disrupt our desires to map them on to easy, consistent, and predictable lessons (or, we might say, disrupting our assumptions of who is who in the zoo of a parable). We are so familiar with Christ’s parables – or at least the greatest hits like the lost sheep and coin we heard last week, that we can sometimes lose the ability to be surprised by them. But this parable is surprising.
 
To recap it… As was common practice, large landowners didn’t tend to spend a lot of time on their property and would thus employ a manager to handle the logistics and finances. In this instance, the manager has been squandering the property and stands to be fired. The manager doesn’t dispute the charge, but knows there aren’t other jobs he’d be able or willing to do. So he devises a plan, he will not try and win back the esteem of the rich landowner, he will try to win the esteem of tenants in the landowner’s debt. He calls together those who own money and has them write down their debts, take the bill of 100 and make it 50, take the bill of 100 and make it 80. The plan being that in reducing the debt, the people will be grateful and offer him lodgings when he is fired. Now the practice of reducing the debt in order to get it paid was common then as it is now, it is better to have some money and keep the people around than evict, get nothing and lose future income as well. Which means the landowner commended the manager’s shrewd action (though, we notice, does not decide to keep him on).
 
Slowing it down only amplifies the feeling that this is a strange story for Jesus to tell. Who are we meant to identify with, whose actions exemplify the kingdom, who stands in for God?
 
All this gets more complicated when Jesus offers this commentary: the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. Now we have more questions, why is it that the children of the light are less shrewd? Is this a bad thing? Using dishonest wealth to make friends seems strange – and what are we classifying as dishonest wealth? And then the reason we are told to make friends is odd: that they may welcome us into eternal homes… what are eternal homes, and how are these people able to offer such welcome?
 
Jesus continues: ‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. Ok, that’s not too bad, seems like a straightforward moral axiom – having lots or little doesn’t really change the character of our relation to money. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? Does it not feel strange that faithfulness with dishonest wealth is the path to being trusted with true riches? It seems a peculiar barometer for our capacity to handle something eternal – could all earthly wealth be dishonest?  And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’ We get to this last pronouncement and almost breathe a sigh of relief – not because this command isn’t difficult or terrifying, but at least it feels adamantly straightforward.
 
So what is going on? What are we to make of all of this?
 
We’re in a section of Luke’s gospel where Jesus is speaking a lot about money, wealth, and the strange inversions of the kingdom of God. He has already told his disciples they must give up all their possessions if they are to follow him. He has told parables of the wedding banquet, of lost sheep and coins, and a son who squandered the wealth of his father’s inheritance only to be thrown a lavish party. And Jesus will go on to tell the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and the agony of flames awaiting those who refuse to use their wealth to ease the sufferings of the poor. This strange parable takes its place in this nexus of stories, and as such we might begin to try and parse some lessons for Christian living.
 
We might begin by comparing the manager to the rich man of another parable, who realising that his storehouses were simply too small to house all his wealth, tore them down and built larger ones only for his life to be demanded from him that night. Wealth cannot be taken with you – and like the rich man who ignores Lazarus at his gates – it can end up creating a chasm between us and our neighbour, between us and God. The manager, on the other hand, recognises that all that he has can (and will) be gone. So he uses what he has while he has time. He doesn’t not squirrel and store, but uses his authority to ease the debt of those around him and in so doing make friends and neighbours who will welcome him in his hour of need. The manager, unlike so many other figures in the surrounding parables, is commended for using what he has (in the knowledge that he will not always have it) to relieve burdens, build trust, make neighbours, and receive welcome. What might it mean for us, who wish to be trusted with eternal riches, to do the same?
 
Expanding this point, if we can demonstrate faithfulness in our shrewd use dishonest wealth to make friends and receive welcome, then we come show we can be trusted with more important things. For in using dishonest wealth to ease the burdens of the poor, to create community and neighbourliness, to receive the welcome of those around us, we demonstrate that we do not serve money. We demonstrate our understanding of the finiteness of money, which even the finest and largest storehouses cannot secure from the forces of death. We cannot, Jesus remarks, serve God and wealth, but we can use wealth to serve God by using it to serve others.
 
But using wealth to serve God requires us to recognise a few things. The first is that there is something of a dishonest character to wealth – that is to say the kind of exorbitant wealth acquired by the landowner in this parable cannot really come to be without systems of inequality, injustice, and exploitation. Little wonder then does Jesus say that to devote oneself to wealth, to love wealth, is to despise God, for God is a God of justice, liberation, and dignity. And so if we find ourselves with access to dishonest wealth, do not serve it, but shrewdly use it to make friends (now, importantly, from the parable, the kind of making friends we are talking about are the poor, who the manager seeks to release from debt – in so doing he keeps with the mission of Jesus himself; as announced in Luke 4). There is something of Jesus’ instruction to his disciples that we are to be innocent as doves and wise as serpents – we must not make ourselves ignorant to either the character of wealth, nor the way it can be used to serve and bless others. And finally, the manager makes an important connection – one which is all too rare in many an age – despite having a position of some authority and importance, he is much closer to the tenants working the land the owner of the land, much closer to those in debt than to the one they are in debt to. The manager recognises this, and in so doing recognises that his future wellbeing is found in friendships and trust with the debtors rather than the landowner, the many rather than the one. This is an important lesson for us both on a material reality (as our work of justice, equality, and mercy will be bolstered by a recognition that by and large we are closer to our unhoused neighbour, or our neighbour who is a climate refugee, than the increasingly small top % whose storehouses contain the vast majority of worldly wealth) and it is also important as a spiritual reality (as we are all those who are taught by Christ to pray for the forgiveness of our debts, as we pray to be those who forgive our debtors – we are all those who rely on the largess of Christ’s grace to welcome us into the eternal household of God).
 
But even as we glean these possibilities for Christian living, we come back to the beginning and let the parable stay strange. In its strangeness we are reminded again, that the story and movement into which we are called is something of a strange one. For we seek, against the wisdom of the world, to devote ourselves to God, revealed most dramatically in the folly of the cross of Christ, as the loving master of our lives.