9/16/13

 

 

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 debtors 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.)

  

 

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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 would 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.

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 bipolarism. 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 IV 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 CE 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 Lukan community praising someone who has survived a pogrom by whatever means and lived to tell about it.
 
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.