You cannot serve God and wealth. Not just because of divided loyalty, but because the two require entirely different mindsets. Serving God comes from a place of letting go, listening, and entrusting.
Jesus was serving God. At the end, he could very likely have saved his skin by recanting all the sabbath healings and the controversial message of liberation and inclusion. That recanting was the ransom demanded by the rulers and chief priests clinging to their worldly wealth and power. Jesus did not pay that ransom. He chose to let go of his very life rather than break faith with the prophetic message and the people he had delivered it to. The letter to Timothy calls that gift of his life a ransom, but the God of love and mercy Jesus preached would demand no such thing. Jesus simply accepted the full risk inherent in his unwavering commitment to the divine message and practice of universal love.
I want to turn now to the difficult parable in today’s gospel. Although parables are teaching stories, they are not strict allegories. In this case, it’s not easy to see what the parable is meant to teach. Most scholars agree that the final lines about loyalty and faithful stewardship were added by Luke in an attempt to draw an acceptable moral. The last line of the parable proper, as told by Jesus, is likely the employer’s commendation of the manager for acting shrewdly. The sticking point is that the shrewd actions that draw the boss’s praise also appear to be dishonest.
Commentators over the centuries have taken this in all sorts of directions. Does the employer represent God’s unfathomable, unconditional love? Does the reduction of debts represent divine mercy? But what, then, is the significance of the manager’s shrewdness?
Or does the parable teach a Gandhi-style “third way” strategy for nonviolently turning the tables on one’s oppressor, here represented by the boss who summarily fires the manager on the basis of hearsay? Following Walter Wink’s pioneering work along these lines, William Herzog suggests that the ruse actually saves the manager’s job. The idea is that the employer was, like many others, illegally charging interest, but maintaining deniability by relying on the manager to write that interest into the contracts. The manager then reduced the debts by the amount of the unofficial interest, knowing that any effort to reverse this action would make the employer highly unpopular. This reminds the employer, a bit painfully, of the need for the manager’s help to continue charging interest. It also illustrates that the manager had been faithfully carrying out this illegal aspect of the duty of enriching the employer—and thus knew perhaps a bit too much about the employer’s business to be let go. After all, the initial accusation against the manager was not of fraud, only wastefulness. So, the manager stays employed by finding an ingenious “third way” between passive submission and violent resistance.
As much as I appreciate the concept of the “third way” and admire the ingenuity and courage it can demand, this last interpretation leaves me a bit cold. Somehow, for us here today, I want to extract more about our relationship to the Holy One. And so, I’m going to borrow a bit from this interpretation and combine it with an idea from John Dominic Crossan to offer one more angle on the parable.
Crossan, writing about Jesus’ parables in general, notes that in the pearl-of-great-price and treasure-in-the-field parables in Matthew, we are the searchers and God is the treasure. However, the lost-coin and lost-sheep parables are usually read (and presented by Luke) the other way around, with God as the searcher and ourselves as the treasures. This is in keeping with a long scriptural tradition of God as shepherd. But, Crossan asks, what if Jesus actually told those last parables a bit tongue-in-cheek, turning us into shepherds and floor sweepers while keeping the reign of God as the treasure? After all, Jesus was fond of reversals of status and role, as in the parables of the good Samaritan, the rich person and Lazarus, or the Pharisee and the tax collector.
So what if, in today’s parable, we are the rich employers, and God is the shrewd manager? We may claim that we have entrusted our lives to God—that we have turned over whatever riches and gifts we possess to God to dispose of according to God’s will. But we are often dissatisfied with the results. We may feel that under God’s management, we have incurred some losses that we didn’t think were strictly necessary. God has squandered the stuff of our lives! OK, God, it’s just not worth it anymore. I’m letting you go. I’m going to run my own life from now on.
What is God to do? I can’t be won back by force; that just makes me dig in my heels. I might give in to begging, but not wholeheartedly or for long. Yet God doesn’t want to give up on me. Here’s where the details of my interpretation get strained, because the exact parallel would be for God to trick me into partially forgiving some people I didn’t mean to. Or perhaps, if I accept Herzog’s understanding of what the manager did for the debtors, it raises the question of whether I have padded my grievances over the years. Do I dream, not just of restitution, but of restitution with interest? Do people really owe me as much as I think?
But where I ultimately want to head with this idea of us as the employers is the boss’s realization (along Herzog’s lines) that the manager is irreplaceable. As the saying goes, you’ll always be my best friend because you know too much! God, like the manager, knows not only who owes me but also where I myself have cut corners. God knows the stuff of my life inside and out. All things considered, would I really do better on my own? It’s like the moment in John’s gospel when Peter says, “To whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life.”
Again, the parables were not strict allegories. Crossan says they were meant to disrupt stereotypes and raise questions. And the questions I have to offer today are: Do we trust God, despite the losses we’ve suffered? If we’ve lost this trust, are we ready to renew it? And if not, what needs to happen between us and God? Whatever it is, may it happen for each of us.