Sunday: 17th Sunday after Pentecost 20C
Reading: Luke 16:1-13
Preacher: S. James Steen

The Parable of the Dishonest Manager is so puzzling that it would take an entire course to examine it in adequate detail. And those who read or hear the parable are inclined to make two assumptions that add to the challenge of making sense of it.

The first assumption is that the master in the parable is God, or Jesus. At the beginning of the parable, when the master fires the manager for having cheated him, you may have thought, "Good for you, God! You gave him what he deserved."

On Thursday I discovered that I had lost my VISA card the night before, and then I discovered that within a few hours someone had charged almost a thousand dollars on the card. I didn't say, "I'm sure the clever thief needed that iPhone" I wanted her caught and put in jail. So, initially, the master in the parable acts as we would expect him to.

But then, when the thieving manager gets off his duff and gets busy making money for his master, by misrepresenting himself as still employed and by taking partial payment on unpaid debts from his master's debtors, never mind that he's acting as dishonestly now as he had earlier. The master apparently forgives his earlier dishonesty and even commends him for being shrewd.

Who cares how honest the manager is or whether he's repentant? What seems to matter is that now he's making money for his master. So, although it's perfectly understandable that we would cast the master in the role of God, doing so means that most efforts to interpret this parable end up performing contortions to defend God against her own bad behavior.

A second assumption that obfuscates our understanding of the parable is our natural tendency, as 21st Century Americans, to view all economic reality from the perspective of capitalism, which assumes that if you lose one job, you can find another. I once had a parishioner who was extremely dishonest, but equally handsome and smart. After a relatively short time in any job, he would do something dishonest and would then be found out and fired. But it was never long before his good looks and brains got him another chance.

This would not have been possible in first century Palestine. Once you were identified as dishonest and you lost your decent job - if you were one of the very few people fortunate enough to have a decent job in the first place - you would probably be reduced to digging in the mines or begging; and either was tantamount to a death sentence.¹ So the dishonest manager was totally out of luck, beyond the help of all the rabbits' feet and four leaf clovers in the world. He was desperate.

But the master was in a bad position, too. Besides suffering financially because of the sins of the manager, in an honor and shame based society the master stood to be seriously humiliated. If word of the situation got out, his neighbors would view him as weak and unable to control his servants. This exposure would be exacerbated by the necessity of his going out and searching for a new manager. And people would wonder about the astuteness of a master who had previously been unaware that he was being cheated. I can imagine his neighbors saying, "Well, the manager may be crooked, but the master isn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier."

This would be no laughing matter for the master. We may conclude that he has some serious self-interest in finding a way to bring this awkward situation to a graceful conclusion. And that is exactly what happens. Once we clear away all that is extraneous to the central meaning of the parable, what we are left with is a story of amazing grace.

Like the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which, if we had our Bibles open, we would see comes immediately before this parable, the Dishonest Manager is one of the radical forgiveness stories that we find only in Luke; and it actually bears a strong resemblance to the Prodigal Son. Both the son and the manager squander their property. Once they recognize how desperate their situations are, both plot a scheme to get back into the good graces of the person they have abused. And in both cases, we are privy to their plotting as they talk to themselves. Finally, the mercy granted to both the wayward ones exceeds all that they could have dreamed of in their scheming.²

In fact, grace and forgiveness are everywhere in this messy Parable of the Dishonest Manager. Nothing is quite as it appears on the surface here. Even the dishonest manager forgives partially by reducing one debt after another. He does it deceptively, without divulging what he is up to, and he does it for all the wrong reasons - for personal gain. Even though he has no authority or right to forgive anyone anything, forgiving debts is nevertheless what he goes from person to person doing. And as a further challenge to the moral purists in Jesus' audience, ironically, it is because he doesn't own up to what he's doing that the master doesn't have to face the shame that would come with exposure. I tell you, there isn't a nook or cranny in this strange story that doesn't conceal grace just waiting to be revealed.

Do some of you remember that Johnny Lee song, "looking for love in all the wrong places?" The theme song for this parable could be, "Looking for grace in all the wrong places." But the joke is that there are no wrong places, because God can take even the most twisted stories, like the true stories of your lives and mine, and turn them into occasions for grace and forgiveness.

So what's the moral of this story? Forgive, period! And I found it beautifully articulated by Sarah Dylan Breuer, who is at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge: "Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all. Luke says it constantly: The arrival of the kingdom of God is no occasion for score-keeping....Why forgive someone who's sinned against us, or against our sense of what is obviously right? We don't have to do it out of love for the other person, if we're not there yet. We could forgive the other person because...we know we'd like forgiveness ourselves. We could forgive because...we know that refusing to forgive because we don't want the other person to benefit [from our generosity] is, as the saying goes, like eating rat poison hoping it will hurt the rat. We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus' power to forgive and free sinners like us. Or we could forgive because we think it will improve our odds of winning the lottery.

It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, selfish and/or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive. Extending the kind of grace God shows us in every possible arena...can only put us more deeply in touch with God's grace."³

Amen.

¹Bernard Brandon Scott. Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2001) pp. 85-95.
²Paul Nuechterlein. "Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary." Proper 20C (September 23, 2007), http://girardianlectionary.net/year_c/proper20c.htm (accessed September 22, 2007).
³Nuechterlein quoting Sarah Dylan Breuer's Lectionary Blog: http://sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/