Here at this parish, my fellow priests and I have the great fortune of doing a weekly Bible Study together. Every Wednesday after staff meeting, the five or six of us take turns reading the Sunday scriptures and chatting with each other about what they are saying, and what they might mean for this congregation in our time. As we read this week’s Gospel passage about the quote-unquote “dishonest manager” who is, nevertheless, said to “act shrewdly,” we were puzzled.
In this parable of Jesus, only found in Luke, the rich owner of a big farm operation threatens to fire his business manager for incompetence. So, the business manager goes to everyone who owes the company money and cuts them a deal. After all the deals are made, the manager reports back to the owner, and the owner is quite pleased with him.
The manager may not have made back all of the money that was owed, but at least he had done something, and it likely benefited everyone involved: the debtors got a discount, the manager got in their good graces, and the owner got some of what was due.
The story itself makes sense, I think. But what’s confusing is this word “dishonest.” The manager is called a “dishonest manager.” And when Jesus inserts his own commentary, he says:
“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.”
Uh…what? Where exactly does dishonesty come into play, and what does this have to do with Jesus?
Are we supposed to be “con artists…for Christ?”
As you can imagine, this set the clergy Bible Study on edge. We were abuzz with anxious energy…
“Maybe we’re not getting something about the ancient world?” one priest suggested.
“Maybe I’ll just stick to the Jeremiah reading this week,” another priest said.
“…Good luck with that, it’s pretty bleak,” I muttered under my breath.
Meanwhile, in my notebook I was making notes about junk fees and commissions and kickbacks, desperately trying to find a hook that could make meaning of this story, and Jesus’ seeming suggestion that we should do sketchy business dealings for the sake of the Gospel.
It turns out that even the most learnéd scholars are unsure of the complete meaning of this parable. One scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, even suggested that true meaning is, quote, “irrecoverable.” Unable to be recovered.
Fortunately, others, like Andrew McGowan, don’t think the situation is that dire. His commentary reminds the reader that, while every parable, or moral story, of Jesus contains metaphors meant to relate to some aspect of the Kingdom of God, not every parable is an allegory.
This means that, while the story references an aspect of Jesus’ ethical framework, it doesn’t mean that every single part of it maps perfectly onto reality. To understand the underlying ethic of this story, we can’t just pull out a couple verses from it, and call those things the plain truth.
We have to look at the story as a whole: who the people are, what they are doing, their underlying motives, and the impact of their actions. We have to enter their world.
So, let’s try…
The first thing to note is that the Greek word for “dishonest” translates to something closer to “unrighteous” or “unjust,” and the phrase, “dishonest manager” is more like “manager of injustice.”
Basically, the manager isn’t uniquely “dishonest” – he is as unjust as anyone else forced to do business in an inherently unjust context: where luck and ambition determine who gets to live well. That means that the gist of this story isn’t that the business manager is “dishonest,” it’s that he is living within a society run by money. And that means he has to make difficult and imperfect choices in order to get by.
As a middle manager, his job was to collect the rent from land that was cultivated by tenant farmers. This was not a profitable business for the renting farmers, but merely a way to survive. Hopefully, after rent was paid, they would have enough left over to take care of their families.
In order for the manager to make money, he would need to take the rent that was owed to the owner, his boss, and add an additional fee, which he would then keep as his own income.
Apparently, the manager had not been doing this successfully. The story implies that he had failed to collect the rent at all. Under pressure from the owner, he finally does go out and collect the rent, but he offers such a large discount, that it doesn’t seem like he’ll have any take-home pay.
He undercuts himself to the benefit of both the tenant farmers and the owner, in hopes that this will foster positive future relationships when the money runs out.
On paper, the manager is kind of bad at his job. And yet, the owner praises him for finding an imperfect solution in an unjust system.
When we take a look at the story as a whole, we see a bigger truth that resonates with our world today…
We are still caught up in a social and economic system that forces us into lifestyles of injustice. We are all victims of institutions and businesses that exploit our work while diminishing our humanity.
And we are all exploiters ourselves. We do what it takes to feed our families and have a roof over our heads, at a cost to someone else, whether it’s a factory worker in Bangladesh or a minimum wage worker in Austin.
Because we are caught up in the middle of things, we may not be able to fix the whole system, but that’s not the point…of this parable, at least.
The point is that we can make choices about how our money moves, even when we don’t have much power. We can make choices about how we see ourselves in the middle of everything – choosing to use our limited agency to solve a problem, even if imperfectly.
We can repent for the ways we have let money make decisions for us, instead of leading with our values. And we can determine to choose lasting relationships over monetary gains.
We can let money be a tool for a good life instead of a solution in itself.
And this leads us back to our Collect…
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.
Heaven – shorthand for the Kingdom of God – is a very different kind of business venture. The point isn’t what you can show for yourself. It is how you show up: on the path of Christ, in the community of the faithful, and in the world Christ longs to draw to himself.
The Kingdom of God is about who you are and who you are with, a ragtag group of rich and poor, owner, manager, and tenant, all members of the household of God. As Christians, we cultivate friendships and communities that are heaven smart, not business smart. We find pathways and build bridges, not by force, but through humble, risky, self-sacrificial connection.
We live in an imperfect, unjust system of “dishonest wealth” that we cannot ultimately count on. The only thing we can count on is God, and one another. So, we open our hands and let go of what binds us. We grab our neighbors’ hands, and we pass the peace and pray. We commune together, and we take care of one another.
And we are drawn more deeply into the broken and healed Body of Christ, who binds up the broken things in us – the injustice, the indignity, past wrongs – so that we can find a home with one another.
Amen.
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References:
- “A Steward of Injustice,” Andrew’s Version
- The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina, Luke Timothy Johnson
- Commentary on Luke 16:1-13, Working Preacher, John T. Carroll
Leah Wise 