FINDINGS II
Proper
20 - C - September 19, 2010
Luke 16: 1-13
Luke 16: 1-13 Jesus
told his disciples this story: "There was a wealthy man who had employed a
manager to see to his affairs but was told that the man was squandering his
property. So he summoned the manager and said to him, 'What is this I have
heard about you? Give me an accounting of your management as I am herewith
discharging you.' The manager had to think quickly and said to himself, 'Hmm.
What am I going to do now that my master is discharging me? I am not strong
enough to dig (in the fields) and I am ashamed to beg.' (Pause) 'I know what
I'll do so that when I am finally out of a job, people may (seeing that I am a
good person) ask me into their homes.' So just as he had been summoned by the
master, he summoned his master's debtor's one at a time. He asked the first,
'How much do you owe the boss?' The man said, 'A hundred jugs of olive oil.'
The manager replied, 'Take your bill and reduce it to 50.' Then he asked the
next how much he owed. He said, 'One hundred bins of wheat.' The manager said,
'Write it down to 80.' (None of that went unnoticed by the master) who
commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. It is a fact
that secular people are shrewder in dealing with their own generation than are
those who live in the realm of the sacred. So I tell you that you are living in
the world as it is, and you should make friends in it by means of dishonest
wealth (if necessary) so that when it is gone and the end is near, you will be
taken as friends forever. It matters not how much is at stake in honesty or
dishonesty. It's the principle that no one can serve two masters because a
slave can be loyal to only one of them. And one cannot serve the cause of money
and the rule of God at the same time." (Translated and paraphrased by Harry T.
Cook)
 By Harry T. Cook
9/13/10
RUBRIC
Clarity and facility would not be adjectives one would use
of the above passage. Those who would take it seriously would apply themselves
as rabbis apply themselves to a page of Talmud: at length, doggedly and looking
for an argument, any argument as to its meaning.
The key is to read the last line first and work back from
there. The central point is the impossibility of divided loyalty. In what many
first century Jesus Jews thought would be a soon-coming next world, loyalty to
the love of money and its accumulation would be beside the point. And if that
soon-coming next world was to be the work of an immaterial and timeless power,
then loyalty had better be to that power.
In 21st century terms, we might say that, while material
ways and means are essential parts of life and living, their possession and use
must be informed by the conviction that those who possess and use them are only
stewards of them. Death renders them irrelevant to the steward. What lasts is
the steward's reputation made or unmade by the quality of his stewardship.
WORKSHOP
The fact that the manager's self-serving cunning happens to
serve the cause of justice (if the forgiveness of debt in any amount is just)
is the quixotic aspect of this passage. It is related thematically to what has
preceded it in chapter 15 (the parables of the lost/found sheep, of the
lost-found coin and of the lost/found son), viz. redemption and release.
The key, as we have observed, to parsing this passage is its
last line which deals with the unworkable idea of divided loyalty, a kind of
ethical bi-polarism. The whole convoluted story is told as a context for the
God vs. mammon line.
Can it be that Luke's odd choice of the example of a
dishonest manager arose out of actual experience? A resident manager for an
absentee or uninvolved owner is often tempted to run the enterprise to his own
benefit, which finagling can entail a minor defrauding of the owner and heavier
burdens on the workers -- and some helpful, unreported income for the manager.
Do keep in mind that it has not been uncommon even in our own time for absentee
owners and landlords to keep their tenant managers in near-poverty, just a
drachma or two north of the underlings.
That may have been the kind of situation Luke had in mind
here so that as part of the justice accomplished in the reduction of the debts,
the master/lord/kyrios was himself liberated of excess cash to the benefit of
the underpaid manager. (Perhaps some one will send on this issue of FINDINGS II
to the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal.)
Meanwhile, those at the bottom of the economic ladder in
this scheme were relieved of the levies the manager had imposed upon the debts
they already owed the master. It was a strangely arrived at justice, but it was
justice. But then comes the caveat that the incidental unfaithfulness exhibited
by the calculating manager implies that he will be unfaithful in large,
systemic ways. Maybe he cannot even be trusted with what is his own.
There is a sense here of cobbled together passages that, as
a result, clash thematically. Luke is clearly working up to the "God and
mammon" pronouncement, but hardly by a direct or coherent path. (The journey to
Jerusalem begun at 9:51 has proceeded in much the same manner.) At other places, Luke has said that
financial and material resources are at best incidental and at worst irrelevant
(see 12: 13-21).Yet they seem here writ large. Thus one must ask what is the
meaning of the mammon/money and what is the difference between "unrighteous
mammon" and "true riches." The distinction will be made in the passage that
follows immediately upon the one at hand, viz. the parable of Dives and Lazarus
wherein we will learn that having wealth (or, in the case of our manager
friend, cadging a bit of it) is not the problem. It's what one does with what
one has.
This passage under immediate consideration has all the
earmarks of an exhortation a late first century leader might have given to his
or her community. Such communities were often in crisis. As in Luke 14:25ff the
call to discipleship often confronted the called with decisions of crisis
proportion, so being a Jesus Jew or Gentile inquirer toward the end of the
first century C.E. could put one in the kind of no-win situation in which the
manager found himself. The one thus in a bind must, for survival's sake, figure
out how to extricate himself at the lowest cost. You can just hear the preacher
in a Lucan community praising someone who has survived a pogrom by whatever
means and lived to tell about it.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
The troubling story of the dishonest manager being praised
by the owner he has defrauded may have been a first-century version of a
television news promotion for a story soon to come during the 11 p.m. news -- a
titillating tidbit that was sure to bring the viewer back to the newscast after
his program was over even as the arms of Morpheus beckoned.
The story must have fascinated those who first heard it, and
heard it attributed to Jesus whom Luke had already depicted as specially chosen
by virtue of his birth to be the fulfillment of the divine promise of peace,
good will among men.
The owner's almost smiling commendation of his thieving
manager was one of admiration. It reminds this writer of the reaction of George
C. Scott playing the role of Gen. George Patton as he watched the armored
columns of Edwin Rommel's tanks advance just as Rommel had prescribed in his
book on war tactics. Said Scott/Patton: "Rommel! You magnificent son of a
bitch! I read your book!"
The hint is that one can see skullduggery in a limited way
as a kind of good work. In Luke's imagination (or recollection if he actually
knew of such a wheeler-dealer manager), the manager, rather than gathering what
pelf he could lay his hands on, faced facts and contrived a plan whereby he
might escape the worst of his fate. He would, using his boss's wherewithal,
reduce the debt of those whom he had supervised, becoming a kind of Robin Hood
to them.
It is a case of making the proverbial pitcher of lemonade
out of lemons, the omelet out of broken eggs. The lemons by themselves are
prohibitively sour to the taste and the cracked eggs useless unless
transformed. The egg did not survive to produce the new life nature intended
for it to do, but at least helped sustain an existing life.
The passage, thus, is an invitation to hope for the best in
the midst of what could be the worst.
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