September 22, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

The Hardest Parable to Understand

Third in a Series of Sermons on Luke

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 16:1–13

If you read the weekly emails I send previewing the service, you already know that this is one of my favorite passages of Scripture. You can’t possibly read a story like this one and label the Bible as “simplistic,” “irrelevant,” or “idealistic.” It’s far too complicated not to be real. To say it another way, you can’t make this stuff up—it’s stranger than fiction.

In the story we hear today, a rich master owns a variety of interests, and a number of people are in debt to him. The man is rich enough that he doesn’t directly manage his own business affairs—he has a business manager for that—and he hears that the manager has been squandering the money, so he fires him. Now this manager is in trouble. It had taken him a while to rise to this position in the rich man’s estate; he is no spring chicken. He’s also a known quantity among the people in the neighborhood: he’s probably dealt with many of them in business contexts when he was mismanaging the rich man’s estate, so he doesn’t have a sterling reputation among them. As he considers his options, he quickly concludes that his body is too old to return to manual labor, or perhaps he’s grown too soft to handle it. And he’s too proud to beg: he’s not going to go to the debtors he used to shake down and ask them for a handout. So he comes up with an idea.

The manager sets a meeting with everyone who is in debt to his master. As the first comes before him, he asks, “What do you owe the master,” and the man replies, “One hundred jars of olive oil.” The manager says, “Let’s make it fifty and forget about the rest.” In the meeting with the next debtor, the manager asks, “What do you owe the master?” “One hundred containers of wheat.” “Let’s make it eighty,” says the manager. And he deals this way with every one of the debtors, cancelling a part of what they owe. Presumably the manager’s strategy here is to be sure that he has many people who will remember that he made their lives a little easier and they will now be indebted to him. But clearly he is only achieving this by under-collecting on behalf of the master, essentially continuing to mismanage his master’s money, even after he has been fired.

I expect that most of you have some basic inclination toward justice and honesty, so we don’t like this manager and what he is doing. Furthermore, this is the Bible, and so we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the master to realize what is going on and to set things right. Finally the master speaks up, and we are shocked when, instead of punishing the manager, he commends him because he has acted “shrewdly.” What?

There are a few details missing that make it hard to understand exactly what is happening at this point. It may be the case that the master had no idea what the manager had done in reducing the debts and that he didn’t know he had been swindled again by the manager. Perhaps he just saw that somehow the manager had won himself some favors and commended him for it. That seems hard to believe though. It seems more likely that the master did see the manager reduce the debts, but that he was some combination of impressed with the “shrewdness” of the manager and rich enough not to care about the losses. To us, however, the master’s response is deeply unsatisfying. It plays out—right in front of us, in the Bible of all places—the circumstances we can’t stand in the real world: the coworker or politician who cheats his or her way out of trouble and never pays the price.

At the end of the story, there is some commentary, and it’s not entirely clear if it is supposed to go with the story of the manager that comes before it or if it is an introduction to the story that comes next, but it concludes with Jesus muddying the waters even further when he says, “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.” And this teaching makes the whole parable Jesus has just told all the more confusing, for he has offered a very straightforward either-or kind of a teaching in response to a story that is anything but straightforward, full as it is with moral ambiguity. To finish off the messiness of this story, there is no indication of how things turn out in the end for the manager or for any of the merchants whose debts have been reduced or for the master, whom we might alternatively call powerful or benevolent or foolish and naïve. We’re just sort of left with an ambiguous story.

The reason I like this story as much as I do is because it’s so easily comparable to the morally ambiguous, unpredictable, unfinished nature of so much that happens in the world. Think about how messy things are in the real world: Over the past two weeks, the international community has gone from an impending threat of war, potentially involving several countries, to a circumstance in which some are claiming that there are more possibilities for peace in the Middle East than there have been in a long time. There is certainly not widespread agreement about this, but some analysts are claiming that dialogue not only with Syria, but with Russia, Iran, Israel, and Palestine is more hopeful than it’s been in a long time—and this just two weeks after what seemed like an imminent military strike. Consider what David Sanger wrote about it in the New York Times:

In their more honest moments, White House officials concede they got here the messiest way possible—with a mix of luck in the case of Syria, years of sanctions on Iran, and then some unpredicted chess moves executed by three players Mr. Obama deeply distrusts: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and Iran’s erratic mullahs. But, the officials say, these are the long-delayed fruits of the administration’s selective use of coercion in a part of the world where that is understood. (David Sanger, New York Times, 17 September 2013)

We got here the messiest way possible, among unpredictable alliances between people who don’t trust one another, in the midst of coercion where coercion is fully expected, and also owing to a little bit of luck.

Sound familiar? Think about the Bible story. The master and the manager do not trust one another, neither do the debtors trust the manager. The master could not have predicted, when he fired his manager, how that man would react, this manager who went on to form an unexpected alliance, coercing people over whom he had some fleeting influence to become indebted to him. And in a nice little stroke of luck at the end, the master didn’t mind the way the whole thing played out: he praised the manager. You can imagine the manager, at the end of the story, lighting a cigar and beginning to tell the story to his friends, beginning by saying, “No doubt about it: I got here the messiest way possible.”

I have always thought that it is comforting to find such a scenario in the Bible. I’ve thought that it’s nice to open the pages of this ancient text and read stories that are as messy as our very own lives. That way we can know that as messy as our own lives ever become, there is always evidence that God will understand, that we don’t have to worry that we will come before God with anything that is too sordid, too far gone, or too corrupt and unbelievable to be appropriate for conversation. I think that’s a part of the wisdom of this passage. But it’s also more than that.

It’s my hunch that, for many of you, if the story and its interpretation were to stop there, that would be deeply dissatisfying, because we’ve come to expect more from the Bible, to expect that God’s Word will not only relate to the messiness of life in this world, but that it will somehow call us out of, above, and beyond the mess of life. We carry some level of fear that the mess we see before us most days is as good as it gets, and we would be deeply disappointed if that turned out to be true.

Biblical commentator Helen Debevoise articulated this fear in an article I read this week:

Somewhere in the middle of our journey we stopped living for Christ. We stopped believing that Jesus died and was resurrected and that life was made new. Somewhere along the way it became easy to serve all those pressing demands: of people, of schedule, of money. Somewhere along the way, the vision for God’s call became cloudy and muddled. We stopped hearing God’s voice and joined the crazy survivor-takes-all mentality. Somewhere along the way, the challenges seemed so much bigger than the answers. So we huddled in an effort to save whatever was left and forgot about living for something greater. (Helen Debevoise, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary)

The beauty of this passage is that the mediocre, predictable, good-enough life articulated by the manager there is not enough for us, and we know it. So Jesus responds, giving voice to the idea that we want something more. It means something to us that Jesus responds to this story not by affirming it but by reminding us of what we know deep inside. Jesus turns to his disciples, having told this story, shakes his head, and says, “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 hate the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” We all know this is the higher calling to which we are called. There is a seed within us that likes to know that God understands the messiness of the world but that wants to be called above and beyond the mess to strive for something better. Maybe the truth behind the story is that no matter how far gone things have become, we all still seem to know, deep inside, the difference between what feels right and what feels wrong and to long for more of the good. That’s God being real with us in the real world. And that’s God planting within us a seed of divinity—calling us always to a better and fuller life than the one we have right now. Amen.