Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
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Readings: 1 Timothy 2: 1-7 and Luke 16: 1-13
Have you ever been less-than-honest when compiling your income tax return? Have you ever haggled over a bargain so successfully that you’ve left the seller at a disadvantage? Have you ever been involved in a slightly questionable business dealing? Sue Pickering writes that we help sustain systemic injustice whenever we avoid tax, tweak an insurance claim, gamble our wages, purchase goods made by exploited workers, turn a blind eye to dubious working practices, or make wealth acquisition our life goal and fail to help the poor.
All these issues arise from the content of today’s gospel, the message of which is one of the most controversial to be found in our cycle of readings. Jesus seems to be advocating what some might call ‘sharp practice.’ It’s a parable that has worried a good many people on that account. The story is known as the parable of the dishonest steward. At the end of it, the master commends the dishonest steward for his shrewdness, even though the manager seems to be doing a bit of a deal which leaves his master worse off. The observation follows that ‘the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.’ Then comes the instruction – ‘Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. The NEB translation has – ‘Use your worldly wealth to win friends for yourselves, so that when money is a thing of the past, you may be received into an eternal home.’ The nub of the matter comes in the very last verse of the gospel – You cannot serve God and wealth. The Authorized Version had that famous word that nobody uses now – Mammon. You cannot serve God and Mammon – a word that seems to bring together the concepts of wealth, money, gain.
The passage does raise many questions, but before we start to accuse Jesus of underhand business dealings, there are a number of points to consider.
Firstly, as in many New Testament passages, it is not entirely clear where Jesus stops speaking and the evangelist takes over. We should remember that the putting together of the books of the bible as we know them was a long process. The early manuscripts of the gospels had no punctuation and no breaks between sentences or chapters. Various versions of each gospel were to be found in the major church centres around the Mediterranean. In the account of the dishonest manager, some scholars believe that the words of Jesus end with the telling of the parable, and that it is the evangelist who has added the comment about making friends through dishonest wealth.
A second problem emerges with the content of the parable. When the rich man calls on the manager to settle the accounts, the manager reduces the amount owed by two debtors. Business transactions in oil and wheat in first-century Palestine were very common, but the Jewish law of usury forbade the taking of interest from Jews on loans of any kind. But the Pharisees had found a way round this. They argued that the reason for the taking of interest on a loan being forbidden was to protect the poor from exploitation. If the transaction was a business partnership then surely interest on a loan could be seen as acceptable. So the Pharisees laid down a rule that if the purchaser already possessed a quantity of the commodity he wished to borrow, be it oil or wheat, then he could not be considered poor or destitute, so interest could be levied.
This may all seem to be excessive detail to be bringing into an address such as this, but filling in the background helps us to understand better what was going on. You’ll recall that the manager calls in the debtors, and reduces the bill of two of them. In fact, he was probably just waiving the interest on the loans, and making them pay back the original amount borrowed. We can begin to see why the rich man commended the manager’s shrewd action. He had lost out on the unofficial interest of the transactions, but received back the original amount loaned. Yes, the manager had been wasting his master’s goods, but in this instance he had earned his favour, which might be very useful in the future.
It becomes clear that it is risky to put just a single interpretation on the parable. But I think we can take three messages from it.
Firstly – the virtue of single-mindedness. The dishonest manager is determined to salvage something from the mess he had made of his career. The master saw, too, that his best interests had been served by the manager’s action in this case. Later on, Jesus encourages his disciples to show the same spirit of single-mindedness in their spiritual lives.
Secondly – when we look into the background of the parable, we see Jesus attacking the Pharisees for the way they manipulated the Law of Moses for their own good. They were astute enough to keep to the letter of the Law, whilst disregarding the spirit behind it. This was a far more subtle and dishonourable form of single-mindedness than the manager had displayed, and much worse because it came from the supposed religious leaders and guardians of the faith. But are we at times guilty of manipulating procedures, religious observances and perhaps even God himself to get what we want, rather than to seek what might be God’s will? We would all do well to review our own lives day-by-day and measure them by the standards of Jesus’ teaching. Jane Williams suggests – ‘Take a long hard look at yourself; the things you find funny, the things that you think of as wrong and the things you think don’t matter much, where your natural sympathies lie, what makes you feel secure or insecure, who you would turn to in times of trouble. Decision time, says Jesus.’
The third point we might consider is that it is probably true that ‘the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.’ The biblical scholar William Neil, said, “Astuteness and financial expertise have never been reckoned to be attributes of clergy, for example, who are expected to be concerned about ‘higher things’. In Church affairs, ‘the other-worldly’ whether in holy orders or not, are respected for their piety, or learning, or pastoral concern or kindliness. But the raising of funds, maintenance of fabric, insurance of property and such like, are generally felt to be better left in the hands of competent business people among the laity.” Mind you, he was writing in 1975. Those of us who are immersed in church life must be careful not to ignore what goes on in the world outside. A good practice is to take up St. Paul’s directive in the reading from 1 Timothy today, that ‘supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions.’
How easy it would be to become divorced from the thinking and the problems of the 90% of people in this country who don’t worship God on a Sunday, and for whom the Church seems to have little useful to say. It could be tempting to pull up the drawbridge and withdraw into our own world, but St. Paul is urging the community he is writing to to engage fully with the world, through prayer, even though it may be hostile to them.
If we are going to bring Jesus and his message to others, we must be able to identify with people we meet and be in touch with their world, just as schoolteachers need in some way to enter the wold of their students – to get to know the fashions they follow; the stuff they watch; the life-styles they adopt.
And all of us should be looking for signs of God’s activity in each situation we meet – to be discovering God in the margins of life; to see him in people’s expressions and personalities; to understand their struggles and aspirations; to share their joys and sorrows; to live life as fully as possible and to try to find God in it all. Words from Canon Rex Davis, “It is really an unsatisfactory perception of Christianity if one assumes it is about a nauseating niceness. It is really about the toughness and realities of life, about God entering the muckiness and murkiness of the human condition.” Maybe by immersing ourselves in life in this way, and by making it our prayer, the children of this age may be drawn nearer to the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom which we have a share in bringing to fulfilment.