A Puzzling Parable

One day, in your neighborhood, or perhaps at your work, an acquaintance, knowing that you are a church go-er, asks you some questions about your faith:  What is Christian faith about? Who is Jesus?  Why do you believe as you do?  You are a little surprised, taken aback that this person would approach you, and not sure how to answer.  What can you say in just a few minutes, something intelligent, heartfelt, meaningful?  You think quickly—but realize that coming up with a slogan like “God loves you’ or “you are forgiven” isn’t going to get the message across.  Then you remember that the most vivid way of communicating truth is to tell a story, like Jesus did. But which one?  Which story?  Which parable best sums up the message of our faith?

Your mind jumps from the lost coin to the good shepherd to the prodigal son to the Good Samaritan.  Surely one of these can communicate the story of forgiveness and new life.  You pick one, and as you tell the story, let’s say of the good shepherd, as Pastor David did last week, the shepherd who won’t let even a little lost sheep stay lost, you realize again, the power of parables, to get across the message of God’s love.  And you see anew the power of the person, Jesus of Nazareth, who first told these short, pithy, image -filled tales so that we would understand, even centuries later, the message he came to bring.

But I would wager that you never thought, while you were running though that hit parade of parables, you never thought about the one we just heard as our gospel message from Luke.

And why is that?  This story is one that confounds and confuses us and if we had to explain the essence of our Christian faith in a few short minutes, we would not choose it.

And yet it here, in our lectionary, a story which is so unclear that the commentators essentially throw up their hands and say that they cannot reach scholarly consensus on its meaning.  Given that there is no one interpretation which will satisfy, I thought this morning that it would be interesting to see why there is confusion, and also to see if there is some way that we might thread our way through, to see if we can come to our own, albeit controversial reading of this puzzling text.

But first, a few words about texts, which do not fit.  Texts, which make us uncomfortable, or have us scratching our heads about their meaning.  Texts which we would rather throw out than try to understand.

The Bible is a complex series of book—a library really—with many different authors, written over hundreds of years, and compiled by different editors, in many different historical settings.  It is inevitable that there will be inconsistencies and different takes and ideas expressed, given this diversity.  The good book may seem to have overall coherence but from time to time, the point of view of the writer may cause us difficulty. Texts about women’s roles will feel outdated to us, although it is interesting that some denominations are still fighting over them. Texts, which identify Jews as enemies of Christians, sometimes taken out of context, have been used to justify anti-Semitism. And we are not the only ones to want to leave behind certain Biblical verses.  Martin Luther wanted to throw out the whole letter of James, since it talked in a favorable way about doing good works, and not the grace alone which was the hallmark of Luther’s theology.  Thomas Jefferson made his own version of the New Testament,  leaving out the supernatural stuff.  Needless to say, it was a much shorter book.  So we are in interesting company when we want to have the Bible conform to our own ideas or values. 

So, what do we do with these texts?  Do we throw them out, or do we use them as examples of how to interpret the Bible so that we can understand that God is still speaking?  You can guess that my answer would be the latter—interpret, and not discard.

But still, when we come to a story like this one in which Jesus seems to imply that being dishonest is laudable, we wonder, couldn’t we just skip over this, just this once?

Let’s not—instead, let’s try to see what is going on here, which could help us understand what might be behind this parable, and what it could mean for us.

The story opens with a manager who hasn’t done his job.  The owner of the business finds out and calls him in to find out what is going on.  The manager realizes that his job is in jeopardy and he doesn’t like the idea of being laid off, so he hatches a scheme.  He will reduce the debts of those who owe his boss money, and those people—the debtors—will be grateful to him and help him out in the future.  A clever idea, isn’t it ?

And the parable teller seems to think so too.  The manager is commended for his quick-witted response.  The story seems to be saying that being dishonest has some virtues.  And that is what causes all the trouble.

If the story had concluded with “you see, the manager was wrong”, everyone would be happy.  That conventional response fits in exactly with what we expect.

But we don’t get what we expect.

We get the opposite.

Now, this is where the story gets interesting, because even within Luke's gospel there is some reluctance to leave it there with the comment about “the children of this age are shrewder than the children of light.  Make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”

Luke adds a coda, a rebuttal to these statements right away, a sermon within the gospel, almost as if he is saying, I have this story and I don’t want to get rid of it, because it is part of the tradition but I can’t just leave it like that, with a statement approving dishonesty.  So I, Luke, will add my own commentary so that everyone will know that Jesus didn’t mean to compliment the dishonest steward.  These are the last words we hear, about the impossibility of serving two masters, about having to choose between God and wealth.

Which we all agree is true.  But the parable on its own, leaves us with an ambiguity.

Perhaps you have seen the movie Lincoln, starring Daniel Day Williams, which came out last year.  Many of us, through our American history classes, have a memory in our mind of Honest Abe, a man known for his integrity, who as president of the United States led our country into the Civil War.  We don’t think of Abe Lincoln as a wheeler -dealer, but almost a saint in American history.  Lincoln’s war was fought for good reasons, to preserve the union and to free enslaved peoples. 

The movie focuses on Lincoln’s work to get the House of Representatives to pass the 13^th amendment to the Constitution outlawing slavery.  It had to happen before the end of the war, so that the issue of slavery would be settled before the defeat of the South.  We see Lincoln working under pressure, doing what he had to do to get the bill passed.  He negotiates with the different wings of his party to get them on board with his plan, and he sends his emissaries to quietly promise federal jobs to congressmen who would support the bill.  He orders delegates from the South not to come Washington for peace talks, so that he can say that they are technically not in the city.  He did everything he could and a purist might say that he might have used an extreme form of situational ethics —but the bill did pass, guaranteeing that the South would not reinstitute slavery after the war was over.

When the movie came out, there was a lot of political commentary about its message.  More than one op-ed page column noted that it was a good movie, not only for the acting which won an academy award for Lewis, but for the truth that it told.  In order to get something done it was necessary for Lincoln to be shrewd.  He needed to know his opponents and how to reach them.  He had to know the people on his side, so that he could continue to count on them.  He needed to be realistic, and like the manager in our story, he had to know the art of the deal, in order to accomplish a great deed, for the greater good.

I take this story of Lincoln not to be a primer of how to act but as a parable, just like Jesus’ parables, stories that turn on paradox and complexity.  They are not meant to be taken as moralistic tales of right and wrong. I give this example not to say that the ends justify the means or that we should approve of bribing government officials to do the right thing.  We shouldn’t. But we also know that in order to accomplish some things, compromise, seeing the others point of view, give and take, and negotiation may be necessary.  It is hard work and it takes all one’s wits and energy, sometimes, to get the right things done.  Would that we had a few Lincoln’s in Washington today!

Like this example of Lincoln, parables are difficult to grasp for the very same reason, they are not meant to be stories, which we can apply simplistically.  No, they are meant to shake us up and keep us wondering.  As biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan claims through his research, parables succeed as stories not because they fit our preconceived worldview but because they blow our minds open.  Even the ones we think we know aren’t meant to be reduced to a morality play but instead play with our hearts and minds.

For example, a parable we know well, the Good Samaritan, isn’t so much about being a good neighbor, and helping those in need—although it has that element in it, but rather, it is about who was a good neighbor.  It was the outsider, the Samaritan, the one who was Other, who was scorned and mocked for his beliefs and his heritage.  The outsider did the right thing.  To translate the parable’s significance into our context, you have to start by figuring out who is “Other” for you.  Let’s use the political realm as an example.  If   you identify with conservative ideology, your other is a liberal democrat.  If you are on the left, it would be a right-winger.  As Jesus tells the story, the people from your own party pass by and do nothing, but the other stops for the bleeding man on the road.  Now it would shake us up to say that.  But that is today’s equivalent of what Jesus said in that parable.  It plays with our hearts and minds and causes us to think: who is my neighbor?  The one in my in- group, or the one who does the good deed?

Our parable today also forces us to think about our actions, our choices, in a nuanced way, and to see that life is complex, and that there are grey areas.

We don’t know for example, if the shrewd manager was reducing his own commission, or cheating his master.  We don’t know how it ends, either.  Maybe the master takes him back as an employee.  Maybe it is the decisiveness of the manager that is praised, and not the specific action.  There is a lot we don’t know, and therefore we can speculate and wonder.  Perhaps the very ambiguity of the story is meant to ask us to ask ourselves, how would we act?  And not give a rote answer but one, which digs deeper into the way things really are. 

If the Incarnation means anything, God is not outside of all these material questions, but right here in them, calling us to notice, asking us to think, reminding us that life is complex, decisions fraught, and people are human, not angels.

Finally, we can read this story as one of mercy, God’s mercy for us human beings.  The manager is portrayed as one who is out for his own survival—who among us hasn’t been?  And his decisive but dishonest way is understood and even accepted. God shows mercy even toward this human who is trying to survive by his wits.

 Susan Guthrie, a writer and Episcopal priest, reads our parable from that very perspective as she says, “I wonder about the dishonest steward.  What happens after the master commends him for his shrewdness?  Perhaps the master decides not only to keep his friends close but his enemies closer.  Perhaps they become great friends, and feast side by side with other sinners and scoundrels.  A feast to which we are all invited, of course.”

If you have to tell story about your faith, well, maybe this is one too long to fit into a casual encounter.  It is nuanced, it is a puzzle, not to be solved in a day or a sermon.  But if you do have a bit more time, and an interested listener, maybe this one merits a hearing after all.  Because its point, made by the master of parables, is that God is merciful even to the dishonest steward and the rascals among us.

And also that life is complex….and Jesus understands.

Thanks be to God, Amen.