“Shewdly” based on Luke 16:1-13
Most Biblical scholars are utterly perplexed by our Gospel parable of the week, they tie themselves in knots trying to make sense of a story they perceive to be a moral out-lier. The ones who are able to make sense of it do so by making it sound a bit like this little story. The story MIGHT be true, and it goes like this:
Henry Ford made a trip to Ireland to visit the place of his ancestry. While he was there, two trustees from the hospital in the town he was visiting came to him asking for a donation. He agreed to give them five thousand dollars, which at the time was no small gift. In the paper the next morning, Ford saw the headline proclaiming that the generous American philanthropist Henry Ford had given fifty thousand dollars to the local hospital. As you can imagine, Ford was shocked and called the hospital to track down the two trustees he had met with. When they got to his hotel, he confronted the men about the massive mistake printed in the paper. The trustees apologized, and said they would be calling the paper immediately to correct the mistake and print a retraction, letting everyone know that Henry Ford had not given not fifty thousand, but only five thousand. Instead, Ford promised to give them another forty-five thousand. But, he gave them a stipulation: that a marble arch be erected at the hospital entrance with a plaque that read, “I was a stranger and you took me in.”1
To be fair to most of the scholars, today's text is complicated: it is a confusing story, it is a convoluted passage, and it has many layers of meaning. The author of the gospel of Luke - who for the sake of ease from this point forward we’ll call Luke- creates some issues for us. According to the Jesus Seminar, Luke merged together a combination of source material: 1) a parable Jesus is highly likely to have stated (vs. 1-8a); 2) a saying that probably comes substantially from Jesus’ lips (vs. 13)--neither of which is repeated in any of the other gospels; and 3) explanatory material provided by the Luke, which includes further statements placed on Jesus’ lips (vs. 8b-12, and 14).
That is, the parable likely ends with “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly”. The Jesus seminar puts the parable in RED, indicating that they think it was likely authentic to Jesus. They put the final saying, “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." in pink, thinking it likely reflects something Jesus would have said. They distrust it a bit because of the way that Luke is using it. The stuff about trusting people to be honest in small and large matters, and using ill-gotten gains are all LUKE. It is OK to hear things from Luke, I love Luke, but it is important to separate out what Jesus was likely doing with this parable from what Luke was.
In order to understand what Jesus was likely talking about, it would be helpful to understand more about the laws and economic systems in Roman Palestine. Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh in Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels help us out with this and win the prize as our favorite commentators of the week! They say, “Rich landowners frequently employed estate managers (often a slave born in the household) who had the authority to rent property, make loans, and liquidate debts in the name of the master ...”2 The manager in the parable was such an estate manager. We're figuring he wasn't a slave, since he has to worry about where he'd live after he loses this job. It also seems worth pointing out that the landowner is TOLD that the manager has been mismanaging, but we don't get any evidence of the truth of the statement, nor is the manager given the chance to defend himself. It could be hearsay, but the manager is vulnerable to the accusation and now has to fend for himself.
Back to Malina and Rohrbaugh, “Traditional Israelite law provided that an agent was expected to pay for any loss incurred by his employer for which he was responsible. He could also be put in prison to extort the funds from his family. If the dishonesty of the manager became public knowledge, he would have been seen as damaging the reputation of the master. Startlingly, however, in this story he is simply dismissed.”3 That is, the landowner is being unusually generous with the manager. Remember this because we're going to come back to it. The commentators make it clear that the timing was IMMEDIATE, “In the case of the dismissal of an agent, this dismissal was effective as soon as the agent was informed of it, and from that time forward nothing the agent did was binding on the person who employed him. The plan worked out by the manager thus had to be enacted before word of his dismissal got back to the village.”4 The manager had to act with the element of surprise as well as with haste.
And act he does! He gives away A LOT of money!! Malina and Rohrbaugh suggest one amount saying, “The size of the debts involved is extraordinary. Though such measures are difficult to pin down, they are probably equivalent to 900 gallons of oil and 150 bushels of wheat.”5 The Jesus seminar translated this as 500 gallons of oil and a thousand bushels of wheat.6 In any event, it was a tremendous amount. Malina and Rohrbaugh continue, “Storytelling hyperbole may be involved or, as recent investigations have suggested, the debts are large enough that they may be the tax debts of an entire village. The amount of debt forgiven, though different in percentage terms, is in both cases approximately 500 denarii.”7 We know from other parables and stories of Jesus that a denarius was a day's wage for a laborer, so we're talking about each of these amounts being 1.5 years worth of a laborer's wages, or about $28,000 based on today's minimum wage in New York.
The manager IS shrewd. He doesn’t panic at the idea of being homeless and without resources, whether or not he was guilty of the dishonest management he was accused of. He uses the landowner’s softness against him, and for the common good! Back to our commentators, “Having discovered the mercy of the landowner in not putting him in prison or demanding repayment, the manager depends upon a similar reaction in the scheme he cooks up. It is a scheme that places the landowner in a particular bind. If he retracts the actions of the manager, he risks serious alienation in the village, where villagers would have already been celebrating his astonishing generosity. If he allows the reductions to stand, he will be praised far and wide (as will the manager for having made the 'arrangement') as a noble and generous man.”8 Now do you see how it is like the Ford story? The rich man ends up being far more generous than he intends to be, in large part because he couldn’t easily take back claims others made of his generosity.
In vs. 8a, Jesus reflects the landowner praising the manager, “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he acted shrewdly.” By extension, Jesus was praising the actions of the manager as well--actions that brought debt relief to an entire village. The first listeners would have had an easy time identifying the themes of mercy and debt jubilee in the story, and knowing what Jesus was praising. Still, the praise given to the manager for his shrewd (and likely illegal) actions would have made the parable challenging. Jesus praises someone for tricking someone else out of a large some of money. The common good was met, but standard economic thinking suggests the landowner was cheated. Perhaps it is worth noting the the softness of the landowner, his preference for his employee, made space for his unintentional generosity. It might suggest that God is able to work with whatever softness we do have to create greater good!
Given the social-science context for the story, it sounds a lot like others of Jesus’ parables! In fact, it sounds a lot like the instruction to turn the other cheek (which happens to be the saying of Jesus that the Jesus seminar MOST believes to be authentic.
Luke records that saying this way, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also”. Scholars have taught us that this was a fantastically subversive action. Superiors hit inferiors with a backhand, while a front hand slap was indicative of hitting an equal. Because the left hand was used to wipe in ancient times, only the right hand was used for everything else. To turn the other cheek was not to become a doormat – it was to requires that if another hit happened, it was one that acknowledged you as an equal! It rejected the system of oppression.
It seems that the “parable of the shrewd manager” is another expression of this philosophy of rejecting systems of oppression (here including undue tax burdens and interest) and creatively turning them on their heads!! The shrewd manager found a way to care for himself, take care of his village, and make his former boss look good. Talk about a win/win! However, it took disregarding some rules/laws to make it happen, and the greater good was worth it. That's what we think Jesus was trying to communicate with this passage. We are still left with the question of what Luke was trying to communicate with this passage--not just with the parable but with the passage as a whole.
According to Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, commentator in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, an important contextual piece to be aware of is that Luke was likely writing to a wealthy Greco-Roman Christian audience. Likely Luke-Acts was written to and for his patron, Theophilus, named at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke. In this part of the narrative of Luke-Acts, Jesus was attempting to teach his disciples and followers all that was most important for them to know before his “date with destiny"in Jerusalem.9
Vs. 8b-14 speak to Luke's interpretation of this parable. A key theme in this interpretation is money/wealth and the wise use of it, which is so central to Luke's understanding of Jesus that it shows up no fewer than 8 times in the Gospel.10 This was raised by Alan Culpepper who wrote the brilliant commentary on Luke in the New Interpreter's Bible.11
This was an audacious message for Luke to deliver to his benefactor and his benefactor’s rich friends. To the end of making a fateful choice about whether or not to follow Jesus, Luke pushed them hard on the use of their wealth. Luke challenged them in a way that we don’t often get today. The line about not being able to serve two masters tends to either get ignored by modern day audiences when they have wealth or misinterpreted by others to mean that accumulation of money is inherently sinful. On the contrary, Luke’s audience was challenged into decisive, bold, creative actions--not a theological position on whether money is good or bad.
Unlike perhaps most of us, they were more likely to identify with the landowner and his experience of being manipulated into generosity. Luke pushed them to consider the steward, who in our parable faced not only the loss of his position but of his livelihood! He acted decisively, boldly, and creatively! He acted in a way that would have brought mercy and jubilee to an entire village and love to his master, while costing his master a LOT of money. Luke’s audience faced a situation that required bold, decisive, creative actions: whether or not they would follow the way of Jesus. This choice was encumbered with life-altering implications for how they used their wealth. Hanging onto it meant rejecting Jesus, rejecting God, and rejecting eternal life. Following Jesus meant something more and other than just giving their money away. It meant using wealth as a tool for mercy and jubilee, for bringing about God’s kin-dom on earth. It meant upending an economic system of usery and exploitation. It meant upending the fabric of the existing social contract.
Today, we face the same choice. Today we are relentlessly bombarded with messages about being consumers and needing to shop now and later today and tomorrow and every day so we can consume and needing to work in the highest paying jobs possible so we can support that consumption. Our society and economic system compel us into lives built on the exploitation of the poor, the marginalized and of this planet until they have nothing left to give us. The myths of our society are designed to silence objections: the cries for relief of the poor are said to be class warfare, global climate change is called a “theory”, the well-being of the economy is used as a proxy for the common good, and – of course - we’re told that any real change to our economy or the abuse of our planet would cost jobs, bankrupt businesses, and waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. That is, we’re told in many ways (large and small) that we can’t afford to be a just society because it would upend our society as we know it. This misses the point that not only can’t we afford to continue life as we know it, and upending society is going to have to happen to create an actually just society, but we are called to a higher way of being and a higher way of living in relation to each other.
Are we bold enough to follow Jesus? Are we willing to rock the boats of stability that keep the oppressed down? Are we decisive enough to follow Jesus? Are we willing and able to differentiate between the desires of consumerism and the needs of the kin-dom? Are we creative enough to follow Jesus? Can we see through the claims the economic system makes clearly enough to see how the system steals from the poor to give to the rich?
Finally, are we shrewd enough to follow Jesus? Given the broken systems that oppress, are we shrewd enough to mess them up? Jesus praises the shrewd and rewards bold, decisive, creative action. Let’s go and do! Amen
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1 Story told by Nichole Torbitzky in “September 18, 2016-Proper 20 (Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost)” on the website “Process and Faith”http://processandfaith.org/lectionary-commentary/september-18-2016-proper-20-eighteenth-sunday-after-pentecost/" accessed on 9/17/16.
2 Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 292.
3Malina and Rohrbaugh, 292.
4 Malina and Rohrbaugh, 292.
5 Malina and Rohrbaugh, 293.
6Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), pp. 557-9.
7 Malina and Rohrbaugh, 293.
8 Malina and Rohrbaugh, 293.
9Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, “Luke-Acts, Propaganda for World Mission: The Church's Internal and External Relations” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Howard Clark Kee, et. al. (Cambridge University Press: USA, 1997) pp. 519-523.
10Jesus denounces the greed of Pharisees in Luke 11:39-41. A rich fool forfeits his soul in 12:13-21. Jesus speaks of a prudent steward in 12:42-48. Jesus tells a parable in which the outcasts are called to a great banquet in 14:15-24. Jesus speaks of the cost of discipleship and giving up all possessions in 14:33. And finally, the parable of the prodigal son in 15:11-32 immediately precedes today’s reading.
11R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1995).
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Rev. Sara E. Baron and Kevin M. Nelson
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
September 18, 2016
