An Incomprehensible Parable

Sometimes when I read the Bible I’m left scratching my head … maybe you’ve had that experience as well. It’s easy to understand parables like The Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, but then there our stories in Scripture which seem almost incomprehensible. Today’s Gospel reading is one of those times, because I need to tell you “The Parable of the Dishonest Manager,” is a very troubling story, involving rather shady business practices … and Jesus seems to approve of them!

Now, I admit, I don’t know very much about commercial business practices. For the last 42 years I’ve been a minister, and although I know how to read a spreadsheet and encourage people to give money to the work of God, I don’t know much about selling widgets, or how to make them, or market them, or ship them.

However, I have watched the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas, and I’ve watched The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio. And so I know, in the pursuit of business profits, stealing is wrong … and cheating is wrong … and fraudulent practices are wrong. And those things are wrong whether practiced by a shoplifting teenager or a commodity leveraging stock broker. Wrong!

And so I begin this sermon by confirming to you, I do not, in any way, condone or tolerate stealing … despite what Jesus may be saying in this parable …

Jesus told many strange stories … this one is the strangest. And interestingly enough, scholars often debate whether or not Jesus really did or said something we read about in the Bible, but without exception, those scholars believe Jesus actually did tell this parable.

Now, not to be critical of you members of the congregation here today, but I must say, I was rather surprised that as I was reading this parable to you this morning, you sat there as if this parable from Luke Chapter 16 made perfect sense … that makes me wonder about your morality.

Ah … but the heck with morality. Jesus is on a roll … a rich man hears that his manager is stealing from the company?

So, he calls in the manager and says, “Show me the books … you … you little thief!”

And the manager responds, “The books? Sure. Master, just give me until tomorrow to gather up all the accounts.”

Thus the swindle begins ...

The little crook calls in some of his master’s customers. “How much do you owe my master? A thousand? Let me drop a zero so it’s only a hundred. How do you like them numbers?”

To another: “Four million! Well, look at this. It appears, thanks to my efforts, you owe only four hundred!”

Huge sums of money are written off, so when the master fires this little crook, he can go to these debtors and say, “Hey! Remember me? The guy that helped you rip off my former boss? Maybe you wouldn’t mind slipping me a few bucks …”

But he doesn’t get fired!

The next day when the boss calls this little swindler into his office and says, “OK, show me the books!” The manager presents the ledger. You can see where he’s scratched through, erased, rewritten over … and thoroughly cooked the books.

And the master says… “You … you … are a business genius! I wish all the other straight-laced managers in this company might show as much individual initiative, worldly wisdom, and commercial creativity … as you have! You are one shrewd operator! I’m moving you up to the front office! Even without an MBA from some ivy league college … you act like you have one.”

Now, if I were there when Jesus told this parable, I might have shouted out something … like … “Jesus, there are impressionable young people here”

Could Jesus really have been serious in telling this story? Surely he must have delivered this parable with a wink and a nod.

In the original, surely Jesus ended this with, “Just kidding! We all know stealing is frowned upon in the Ten Commandments. Boys and girls, model yourself on this story and the RCMP will be knocking on your door! It’s a joke!”

Now, that’s the way Jesus should have ended this parable, but here’s what he says instead, “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly… for the children of this age are more shrewd … then are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so when it’s all gone, you will go to dwell in the eternal home …”

There are definitely problems with this parable, because here I am, this enlightened child of light with a good theological education, telling this story to you … my fellow children of light, faithfully here in the pews of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church … while those “children of this age” – the ones Jesus praises - are still in bed or sipping lattes at Starbucks while reading the New York Times or sitting on the deck of the cabin without feeling one bit guilty about not being in church! That’s why we, good church-going Christians, call them, among other things, “children of this age.”

Their morality is based on what feels good, and making a quick buck and being wise in the ways of the world. But you, unlike them, get up early on Sunday morning and arrive promptly in church at 10:30 am, to praise God and hear how to live a good, decent and respectable life.

Now some of you may be saying to yourselves, “Relax …Wes will make sense out of all this. He’s leading us down some unfathomable cul-de-sac, and then at the last moment he’ll pull the rabbit out of the hat and cleverly show us the true and rightful meaning of this perplexing passage of scripture … and it will all make sense!”

I’ll use the knowledge I’ve gleaned from my advanced theological degree to turn things around … maybe we’ll discover the translation from ancient Greek to English isn’t quite right and all the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place!

Well, forget it!

I know you children of light, want to see me perform some scholarly sleight of hand in order to clear things up … “You see, Jesus doesn’t really mean … what he plainly said! … but, here’s the thing … I can’t clear it up …

Believe me, if there were some way out or around this outrageous, ill-considered, perplexing parable, I’d be happy to tell you about it!

I know, many of you wonderful, upstanding children of light, came here this morning hoping to receive more wonderful light … hoping perhaps to engage in some moral fine tuning in the midst of your already exemplary lives of faith and moral rectitude. You’re trying, like good Christians everywhere, to find the right way to walk in life. You want to be a better human being … and you’ve come to church because, well, what better place to stiffen the old moral fiber – to be fortified and uplifted for Christian living … than to come to church!

You know what I’m thinking when I reflect on this parable? I’m thinking Jesus is about something much more important, than making you and me feel good … or commending us for being good people.

Maybe Jesus is really doing what he said a few chapters earlier in the Gospel of Luke.

Remember when Jesus said, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Maybe Jesus really does love those business people with raunchy ethics and slippery ways of making a quick buck! Maybe he loves them even before they clean up their act and become certified better human beings!

I remember one time I preached on this parable. It was when I was in Unionville. It was a young congregation, and after the sermon, a particular businessman in the congregation wanted to see me and talk to me about my sermon. Now, I knew this man, and we’d shared a glass or two of wine. He was a senior executive with a multinational company, and he’d regaled me with stories of bribes to foreign officials, somewhat underhanded tactics of beating out the competition, and the ways in which he made sure, no matter what happened to him or the company, he’d be walking away with enough money in his bank account to set him up for life!

So this tycoon took me out for lunch so he could lambast me for preaching this parable without saying for sure why Jesus told the parable. He thought it wasn’t a good message for the young people or those just starting out in business. He called me “irresponsible.”

I didn’t really try to defend my sermon, but I did think to myself, “You pay yourself big bonuses and no matter what happens, you’re going to walk away scot free with a golden parachute. Maybe you don’t realize, Jesus is making guys like you the hero of his parable!”

I thought, “How odd of Jesus to insult the goodness of the children of light, by commending this man’s shrewd and cunning ways.”

You’ve got to love a Saviour who would dare tell a story like this. Don’t you find it rather strange, with all of the serious, morally uplifting, important political, economic, and social issues before us, that Jesus would waste his precious words with this unholy parable … “Hey kid. Come over here. Did you hear the one about the boss who called in this little creep …”

James Joyce wrote a story entitled “Grace.” It opens with a drunk businessman falling down stairs in a bar. He’s a drunk, and due to his drinking, he neglects his poor wife and family.

After his near fatal, drunken plunge, a group of his buddies at the bar, come up with a scheme to reform him. They want to get him to a particular Jesuit priest – Father Purdon - who has a reputation for tough sermons.

They figure, “That ought to sober him up and bring him to his senses!”

But then, to their dismay, that night the priest preaches on this parable: “For the children of this age are wiser…than the children of light….”

Joyce says, “Father Purdon developed the text with resonant assurance….one of the most difficult texts in all the Scriptures…. It was a text which might seem to the casual observer at variance with the lofty morality elsewhere preached by Jesus Christ. But, Father Purdon told his hearers, the text seemed to him specially adapted for the guidance of those whose lot it was to lead the life of the world…it was a text for business men and professional men. Jesus Christ with his divine understanding of every cranny of our human nature, understood that not all were called to religious life.”

James Joyce entitles the story, “Grace” … Grace …

Let’s be honest. Despite our earnest efforts and our desire to think well of ourselves, most of us are, more than we like to admit, “children of this age.”

We want to move toward the light … but then there are these shady urges, these secret habits, the things we think and do when nobody’s looking.

Some of the things we’ve done in life, don’t look so good in the light of Sunday in church.

We may pledge our allegiance to the Kingdom of Heaven, but all too often – more often than we want to admit - the Kingdoms of this World own us.

You’ve got to love a Savior who doesn’t mind getting mixed up with some of us low “children of this age,” even to allow us to nail him to a cross, so determined was he to love us … as we are … rather than as who we wish we were. Only a Saviour with a gentle, loving appreciation for the antics of “the children of this age,” could save sinners … like you … and like me ...

Why did Jesus tell this parable? I don’t know. Over forty years of thinking about this story … and I still don’t know!

But then, I’ve had four decades of working for the “children of light” and something about church can mislead us into thinking, when Jesus says, “I’ve come to seek and save sinners!” Jesus isn’t actually talking about you and me.

But if by chance, there’s somebody here, who is a card-carrying member of “the children of this age” … somebody better at being shrewd than being good, then maybe you hear this story differently from the rest of us good ones.

Maybe you’re thrilled when the master calls in somebody who’s a lot worse than you and says, with a smile, “Well done, shrewd servant.” And with a wink and a nod says, “Sometimes I get tired of these goody, goody children of light with their moral pretentions. I can use a shrewd wheeler dealer like you.”

And to your surprise, relief and delight, he makes YOU the beloved hero of the story!