Decades ago, as a young preacher I read this good advice, from a long since forgotten source: when writing a sermon, rather than immediately going to the Bible commentaries to read and follow the scholarly work of the experts, pause for a moment, read the passage through, pray over it, and develop your own interpretation. THEN, after you’ve made your preliminary case, go to the experts and see what they have to say. Be ready to change what you wrote in the first place, but make sure that they’ve made a stronger case than you did before you change too much.
Applying that method to this
morning’s reading from Luke, I read the scripture, prayerfully sat with it, and
got absolutely nothing, not a whiff of what was going on here. Yes, it ends with the memorable punchline,
“you cannot serve both God and mammon” but how that pearl of wisdom emerges
from this mess of a story…? The actions undertaken by all of the
characters involved are underhanded to a degree, the sneakiest sneak gets
praised by the landowner, and Jesus (according to Luke) seems to just roll with
it. Which left me not only confused as to the content, but as to why Luke
included it in his gospel. None of the
other gospel writers included this parable in their collections, and, frankly,
I’m with them.
So this week, I approached
the theologians basically empty-handed, needing a LOT of help. And the first
guide I found was a Lutheran seminary professor named Lois Malcolm.
· Admitting that this is a difficult text, she writes
“The story itself sounds quite contemporary.
· “A dishonest manager is about to lose his job because
he has misspent his employer’s assets.
· “Because he doesn’t want to do manual labor or receive
charity, he goes around to all the people who owe his employer money and
reduces their debts. He does this so that they will be hospitable to him after
he loses his job”. This is particularly important, because as resident manager
of the farming operation he is not only going to lose his job, but his home as
well.
· To his credit, he is not accused of pocketing any of
the money himself, and is even congratulated by the landowner for having been
crafty in a challenging situation…but the landowner will be getting much less
financial return than before, and the manager is still very much fired.
That helped me to at least
understand the action, thank you, Lois Malcolm. But why would such a strange story be
included in the gospel of Luke? On to my
next guide.
Over the years, a couple of parishioners
have told me of their appreciation of the work of Pastor John MacArthur. John, who died two months ago at age 86, was
for 56 years pastor at Grace Community (Mega) Church in California. His opinions and mine don’t align well on many
topics, but I’ve always admired his ability to wrestle with a Bible reading and
emerge with something faithful and accessible. And I offer him a posthumous thank-you, for
his lengthy essay on this text which cracked it open for me. He wrote, “Keep in
mind there’s nothing in this parable that’s secret or hidden or allegorical or
mystical.” In other words, do not look for hidden meanings or identities as you
might often do with a parable, such as assuming that the master is an allegory
for God; in this case we just read it as written.
There’s a human master, a
human manager, and human creditors, and all of them act exactly as one might
think, in a world where cheating and side deals are widespread. A wealthy
master has assigned management of his farming operations to an on-site manager
who “has proxy to act on behalf of this very wealthy owner.” The master correctly identifies that his
manager is “irresponsible and incompetent” and correctly decides to fire him,
but inexplicably doesn’t tell him to clean out his desk this minute. The
manager, caught in his dishonesty but given a window of opportunity to soften
his landing, curries favour with creditors by giving them a huge discount on their
debts, as much as fifty per cent. And these weren’t small debts: John MacArthur
estimates the amount of oil written down was the product of 150 olive trees,
and the amount of wheat written down was the product of 100 acres. The
creditors, astonished at their good fortune, take the deal before the ink dries.
Curiously, the master praises
the dishonest manager, but how he assesses these actions hardly matters,
because the moral of the story is that it is not a moral story; it’s a
description of the kind of underhanded dealings we deal with all the time in
the world as we know it, the way things work in this age, and such
dealings will have no place in the Kingdom of God. The way we live our lives matters, in being
truthful, in handling our finances ethically and faithfully, in mirroring God’s
concern for those on the margins; these are ways that we invite the new way,
the Kingdom of God, to reach into this broken world.
If we take this gospel
reading in this way, as a story contrasting the underhanded dealings of today
with the promised Kingdom of equity, fairness, and inversion of the social
order – the punch line fits.
After spinning this yarn of a
cheating manager who plays the current system, Jesus says “if you have not been
trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true
riches? 12 And if you have not been trustworthy
with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own? 13 No
one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or
you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God
and money.” (Luke 16: 11-13, NIV)
These words from Jesus are a
stern indictment of the way things are in the world, but there is a generosity
of spirit here. In our current context,
the temptations to cut corners are all around us and Christ is well aware that
we live in this bind. But he also says,
softly but definitely, that there’s no future in selling out to the lure of
chasing the almighty dollar. Earlier in
the gospel of Luke (9: 25), when speaking of the path of self-denial and taking
up the cross, Jesus asks “ 25 What good is it for
someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self?” and
I hear him reiterating that point here when he speaks of choosing which master
to serve, God or money. At no point does
Jesus say that money is inherently bad, but he does say that it must not hold
our hearts. So we must choose: do we give our hearts to God, the source of the creative
and connective love that brings life alive, or do we give our hearts to money,
status, and material wealth?
Those questions are good ones
to ponder on a regular basis, for as scripture says, “the love of money is the
root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6: 10). Not
money per se, but the love of it, and all systems of domination that make sure
that there are haves and have-nots. On
its own, hearing this early Christian condemnation of capitalism is important,
but today I want to look at one aspect where greed has had particularly
devastating consequences.
In this season of Creation,
when we consider the beauty, the gift of nature, I want to reframe the choice Jesus
puts before us, between lovingly tending this planet and all living beings that
rely on it, or acting as unjust managers and treating earth as a consumable
asset. That’s a daunting choice for us
to make, so start small: all the little things we do as individuals and as
communities do make a difference, like purchasing locally-produced goods more
often than things that needed to travel by ship, air, rail and truck before coming
into our possession, and following the three Rs of reduce, reuse, recycle…which
can get expanded into eight or nine Rs with rethink, refuse, repair, recover,
regift, and repurpose! (guiding principles of our Osoyoos United Church Thrift
Shop!!).
But beyond that, the
challenge Jesus places before us in Luke 16 comes down to our common heart as a
society. In some manner, we’re going to
end up participating in the erratic and truly barbaric global economy: but will
our engagement consider the consequences of our global carbon footprint, our
impact on the fish and the birds and the mammals and the microbes in all the
world, or does the saying “he who dies with the most toys, wins” sum it up more
accurately? As Jesus tells his story
about the dishonest, self-oriented manager, I think of the number of side-deals
made daily, deals to line someone’s pockets at the expense of public safety and
environmental sustainability… and I grieve the shortfall of honesty,
accountability and empathy. Jesus yearns
for us to treat all of humanity with lovingkindness, and to treat all this
wondrous world with awe and respect, he calls us away from serving money and
materialism – and yet, the choice is ours.
And at this point, we hear echoes from earlier in our faith story (Deuteronomy
30: 19, NCV), when the Hebrew people had a choice to make with implications not
only for themselves, but for future generations: “Today I ask heaven and earth
to be witnesses” said Moses, on God’s behalf. “I am offering you life or death,
blessings or curses. Now, choose life! Then you and your children may live”. Choices
made for the benefit of the planet are choices for life!
And as tempting as it is to
pile on that point to try to make it even more forcefully, let’s leave it at
that. In telling the story of a
non-resident landowner, a trusted yet slippery manager, and delighted creditors
who get their debts miraculously discounted, Jesus moves our thinking from the
way things are, to a promise of a new realm, the Kingdom or Kin-dom of God, a
realm of human dignity and equity, a realm which respects this planet as an
expression of God’s awe-inspiring work.
Our calling, the choice we are called to embrace, calls us to integrity
and fair dealing, to respect the needs of our neighbour, to respect the planet
itself and all who dwell therein. May we
and the world be freed from being shackled to the whims to the material gain, and
opened to the new ways, the Kingdom ways of love, equity, and rebalance. In the name of the risen Christ we pray,
Amen.
References cited or
consulted:
Crossan, John Dominic. In
Parables. NYC: Harper & Row, 1973.
Funk, Robert W. et al. The Five
Gospels : What Did Jesus Really Say? NYC: HarperOne, 1993. Pp. 357-358.
MacArthur, John. Grace to
You. Luke 16:1-13, 2014. https://www.gty.org/sermons/90-467/a-good-lesson-from-a-bad-example
Malcolm, Lois. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-25-3/commentary-on-luke-161-13-3
© 2025 Rev Greg Wooley,
Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.
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