A sermon on Luke 16: 1-13 by Nathan Nettleton

Christians on the whole have had such a reputation for being respectable upholders of law and order, that the fact the Jesus was executed as a criminal has always been a rather awkward inconvenience that has set us scrambling to explain that it was all a misunderstanding and an injustice. Jesus would never approve of anything shady or unscrupulous or corrupt, would he? Or would he? Well, the parable we heard him tell in tonight’s gospel reading is at least as problematic as his conviction sheet. An employed manager is accused of abusing his position, and to get himself out of trouble, he perpetrates a further series of frauds against his employer, and the story ends with him being commended for his ingenuity. And pious preachers and commentators have been trying to find a way of explaining away the mess ever since!

One thing you can be absolutely sure about is that Jesus really did tell this story. Even the most sceptical of commentators, who often dismiss large slabs of the gospel as being the later creation of the early Christians and not the authentic words of Jesus, have no doubt that this one really came from Jesus. Why? Well, precisely because it is such a problem. If the early Christians were going to modify the record, it would be to clean up the problems, not to create new ones. No matter what your understanding of the origins of the Bible, the only possible explanation for a story this inconvenient and perplexing finding its way into the gospel is that Jesus actually told it. The fact that even the early church was uncomfortable with this story is probably apparent in the text of the gospel itself. At the end of the story, there are a bunch of other sayings of Jesus relating to money, honesty and dishonesty and the need to be shrewd and prudent, and it would appear that these sayings are grouped here, not because Jesus said them right after telling the story, but because the gospel writer was looking for other things Jesus said to try to make sense of this story. You see, they don’t quite work. In this context, they come across as an anxious attempt to explain away the difficulties, but they don’t really succeed. They are all fine teachings in themselves, but they don’t actually answer the questions that the parable leaves hanging.

Now, I’m not one who thinks that there is supposed to be one correct understanding of every parable Jesus told. I think Jesus told stories, and trusted the Holy Spirit to do with them whatever was needed in the hearts and minds of each hearer, and good stories are always multi-levelled. So I’m certainly not going to stand up here tonight and claim that I’ve solved the puzzle and found the perfect explanation of this story that everyone else has been looking for. I’ve read numerous takes on this story that are quite different from one another and yet equally persuasive. So what I’m offering tonight is just one possible angle, but hopefully one through which the Holy Spirit can breathe gospel into our hearts and minds.

I’m going to begin by making a rather unusual decision about how to read this parable in relation to its context in Luke’s gospel. As I’ve already suggested, Luke adds a bunch of additional sayings after the parable, clearly trying to make a connection, and I’m going to ignore them and just take the story up to the point where it seems to end and the additional sayings begin. So it is clearly still the story up to where Jesus says “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly,” and I’m going to stop there and assume that the next line about “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light” and everything that comes after that is separate from the story. But although I am going to ignore what comes immediately after the story, I am instead going to make the more unusual step of suggesting that there might instead be some links with what comes immediately before it.

What comes before it is the parable of the prodigal son. At first glance, the two stories seem to go in very different directions. With the prodigal son we seem to have a bad boy who decides to go home, turn over new leaf and become a good boy. Whereas with the unscrupulous manager we seem to have a bad boy who, when he gets caught, pulls an even bigger swindle to save his own skin. But let me point out some parallels which I think justify us looking to one to help us understand the thrust of the other. Not only are they side by side in the gospel, but both the prodigal son and the unscrupulous manager are accused of “squandering the property”. Each of them is then described as having a conversation with himself saying “what will I do now? I know what I will do…” And what both of them are then trying to do is come up with a plan that will result in them being accepted into homes that they might otherwise have not been welcome in. And both of them end up receiving far more mercy than they hoped for or expected — in the unscrupulous manager’s case, he is not only now in the good books with those whose debts he has written off, but the master commends him too. And in a nice little nod to the perplexing nature of this story, Luke words it so that it is ambiguous as to whether the master who commends him is the master in the story, or the master Jesus who is telling the story, or indeed both.

Now if we go with the idea that these links are encouraging us to interpret the second parable in light of the first, then one important question that it reminds us to ask is “who is the target audience?” The parable of the prodigal son was explicitly addressed to the respectable religious types who were grumbling about Jesus consorting with people they had shunned and avoided as godless sinners. And in the first parable, Jesus casts these pious grumblers as the whinging older brother who is oh-so-sure of his own righteousness and who resents mercy and hospitality being shown to the one who deserves it so much less. So given that the first story ends on that note, isn’t it likely that when we come to the second story, Jesus is now continuing his commentary on the respectable religious types and their treatment of everybody else?

If so, then it is the respectable religious establishment that Jesus is now casting as the ones who stand accused of mismanaging what has been entrusted to them. In such a reading, it is God who is the owner and who summons those who have been acting as his representatives in the world, and calls them to account for abusing their position and failing to properly care for what God had entrusted to them. And indeed, isn’t that exactly what Jesus elsewhere accuses the religious establishment of? He is scathing about the way they have misconstrued God’s priorities, and tied heavy burdens of impossible expectation on people’s backs and not lifted a finger to help them. He is scathing about the ways they have interpreted the law as though God cared more about sabbath breaking than healing and reconciliation. Or as Pope Francis put it this week, the church has locked itself up in “small things, in small-minded rules” in an obsession with teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality, instead of trying “to heal the larger wounds of society.” And of course, it is primarily the religious leaders and teachers who are in the frame here, but all of us, the entire church, have to face the question of how faithfully we have fulfilled our call to represent God in the world and steward the things God has entrusted to us. Have our behaviours and our attitudes and our obsessions represented God as abundantly loving and merciful and welcoming, or have they made people fear God and feel weighed down by debts to God that they can never repay?

Now if that is a fair reading of the story up to that point, then suddenly the unscrupulous manager’s next actions might be seen in quite a different light. What does he do?

Summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’

What does he do? He cancels debt. Or should we say, he forgives debt. Because isn’t this Luke who is telling us this story, and isn’t Luke the one who repeatedly equates forgiving sin with forgiving financial debts? Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is quite specific: “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” So when faced with the imminent loss of his job, he stops trying to manage all the debts owed to his master, and begins forgiving them, discounting them, writing them off. Suddenly, instead of keeping people bound in the debts they have accrued, he is setting people free and giving them a new start. And sure, he might be doing it almost entirely out of self-interest, trying to make himself popular to secure his own future, and sure, there are all sorts of ethical questions about his right to cancel a debt that is actually owed to someone else and not him, but the surprise twist at the end of the story is that he is even commended by his employer.

That firstly raises the question of whether a more compassionate and forgiving management of the debts might have been what the employer wanted in the first place, but I wouldn’t build too much on that. More certainly we have Jesus suggesting that there is no such thing as a bad reason to forgive. Forgive because that’s what God does. Forgive because you think it will make you popular. Forgive because you hope to be forgiven. Forgive because you have got caught out and you are desperate to get yourself out of a bind. Forgive for any reason at all, but forgive, forgive, forgive. That’s what Jesus is all about. Forgive, and you can be sure that forgiving will always be a far more faithful representation of God than carefully managing other people’s debts.

And one more thing that it seems certain Jesus is trying to get through to us with is that forgiveness of the size and scale that Jesus wants us to practice is always going to be seen as suspect, as ethically unsound, as thoroughly disreputable. This is just as big and uncomfortable a challenge to us in today’s church as it was to the religious establishment of Jesus’s day. We have continued to invest heavily in respectability and law and order. We would usually be the last people to use a story of a business fraud in any positive light, let alone to wink at the perpetrator of the crime and hold him up for commendation. But then, that’s precisely the problem we often have with the gospel of forgiveness, isn’t it? It seems to go soft on sin. It seems to wink at the perpetrators. It seems to violate every respectable code of law and punishment and properly measured consequences for wrong doing that will act as a deterrent and maintain decency and order. Wrongdoing is supposed to incur consequences. The wrongdoer incurs a debt and must be made to pay. And so if some reckless Galilean comes along and fiddles the books and writes off the debt, then clearly it is a fraud. Society has been defrauded out of the debt it intended to extract for the wrongdoing. It’s a scandal. And quite frankly, Jesus couldn’t care less. For Jesus it is all about demonstrating the reckless, scandalous and out-of-all-proportion forgiveness of God, and if actually putting that in to practice leads to accusations of going soft on crime and consorting with terrorists and undermining the values and foundations of society, then so be it. Jesus will wear that, and go to the cross if need be, rather than sell out the gospel and go back to portraying God as a celestial policeman with a big stick waiting to catch us out in wrongdoing.

In the end, the only reason any of us can stand at this table today with our heads held high and an assurance that the Lord of the Feast bids us welcome is because of forgiveness, because of mercy. It is because forgiveness — reckless and scandalous forgiveness — really is Jesus’ big thing, his signature move. And so far as he’s concerned, if that comes at the price of respectability, then respectability be damned. “Here, sit down,” he says, “and let’s write off your debt while no one is looking. And then let’s open our homes and our tables and all the forgivers and forgiven can feast at the table of welcome together.” No wonder they crucified him! And no wonder we celebrate him and worship him forever!