Honor Among Thieves (Proper 20 C)

Honor Among Thieves
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
19 September 2010; Beijing, China

Readings: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 and Psalm 79:1-9; or Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

Jesus said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, `What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' Then the manager said to himself, `What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' So, 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.' And the master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.  Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth." Luke 16:1-13

God, take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The early Church Fathers were pretty unsparing when it came to wealth.  St.Basil the Great said that the riches common to all are held by the wealthy not  because the wealthy earned them, but because they were the first to seize them.   St. John Chrysostom said that the rich do not enjoy what is their own, but what belongs to others.  St.Jerome said that every rich person is either a thief or a thief’s heir. 

This near universal condemnation of wealth by the early Church is not simply a reflection of “sour grapes” by people who did not enjoy wealth.  Some of the fathers came from well-to-do families, and all of them benefited from the gifts to the Church from wealthy people who came to be believers. 

The early Church’s condemnation of wealth was rooted in the Hebrew Scripture’s call for social justice and in statements by Jesus in the Gospels like. “it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” (Matt 19:24; Luke 18:25).  Jesus’ ministry was primarily to the poor, the dispossessed, and marginalized, and this left its mark on the Church.  The “good news” of God’s reign breaking into human life is all about those left behind by the economic machine.  It calls us to serve “the least of these, our brothers and sisters” (Matt. 25:40). 

It is important to remember this when approaching today’s Gospel, a parable that often forces those preaching it to explain it away.  It is often called “the Parable of the Dishonest Manager,” or “the Shrewd Manager.”  I think it should be called, “the Parable of the Crooked Accountant,” or, more simply, “Street Smarts.”   The problem is simple—the story has Jesus praising, either directly or indirectly, a person who is explicitly called “dishonest” (tes adikias, v. 8).  He sets a sharper up as a model for the Christian believer, and then adds three separate sayings where he characterizes wealth as “dishonest” (tes adikias, adikio; vv. 9, 11).    These sayings themselves seem to be competing efforts at understanding the parable.  (C.H. Dodd famously said that in verses 9-12 we see what appear to be notes for three separate sermons to preach the parable.)  

For the original audience, the parable of the Crooked Accountant was probably less shocking than the parable of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son’s Loving Father.  In both of these latter, the scenes described went against social norms and expectations: Samaritans were not expected to be “good,” and fathers were expected to be stricter disciplinarians of wayward children. 

But the scene described in the Parable of the Crooked Accountant would have been recognized as something familiar.

The economic system of the period clashed with the stated religious values of Jesus’ co-religionists.    Torah said, do not oppress the poor.  Torah said to not practice usury, that is, lend money at interest.  Torah said that land should remain in families, and should be returned to them if lost through mismanagement or misfortune at least once a generation, in the Jubilee Year.  But the dictates of the agricultural economy in Palestine under the Romans meant that the vast majority of small landowners were dispossessed without hope of restoration.  Many became tenant farmers who had to pay for the right to remain on the land by giving previously negotiated amounts of harvested products to the new owners of the growing vast agricultural estates.  Some were dispossessed entirely, and became more precariously day laborers, who received less than a living wage each day for field work such as digging.  The large estates grew as the small farms were bought up because of debts unpaid.  

The rich man in the story has a manager or accountant whose job it is to make sure that the rich man gets richer all the time while appearing to live his religion.    It is the manager who charges the usurious interest, and demands payments in kind from future harvests of the poor farmers in the process of losing their farms.  The manager is the enforcer, and in the process lines his own pockets by padding the bills and rates to include a “service fee” for himself.   The rich man doesn’t want to know the details—that would implicate him in breaking Torah—he just wants to see a positive balance in the books at the end of the year and not be bothered by the dirty details. 

Then, as now, the weak had few weapons to defend themselves or fight back against the powerful.  Then, as now, their primary weapons were passive non-compliance, subtle sabotage, evasion, and deception.    It is probably some of the debtors who bring forth the charges of corruption against the manager that force the rich man to sack him.    

But the manager or accountant is clever.  For one thing, he is completely honest with himself about his own abilities and limitations.  He does not want to fall immediately into the hopeless mass of day laborers: “I am too weak to dig, and I am too proud to beg.”  So he himself uses a weapon of the weak to defend himself.  The landowner was not privy to how much the accountant was skimming,.   So the accountant rewrites the accounts and the invoices, removing his own profit.  He does this to curry favor with the on-the-downward-slide tenant farmers and small landowners that he has previously been gouging, again, probably the very people who started the rumors of corruption.

He is so successful that when the great landowner finds out how the accountant has pulled a golden parachute out of his hat while in free-fall, the landowner has to shake his head in admiration and say, if only we could all be that shrewd! 

The parable is almost certainly one that comes from the historical Jesus.   Jesus was no prude, and was not a man bothered religious scruples.  He was a craftsman from a backward and religiously suspect part of Palestine (Galilee) who lived in close proximity with the dispossessed peasants and day laborers.  He addressed his ministry primarily to them.  He focused on the heart of his Jewish faith.  He looked around and saw how messed up the world he lived in was, but did not lose faith.  He worked and worked and worked to help bring the reign of God closer.  He taught that it is in our midst, but we have to hear God’s call.  He criticized the falsely religious, the scrupulous, the outwardly pious.   He criticized the wealthy and said that it is the poor who are the blessed.   The first shall be last and the last first, he says.  Just like the powerful manager in today’s parable who is reduced to using a weapon of the weak.  

And in today’s parable, he tells us that we should be at least as shrewd in trying to hear and follow God’s call as crooks can be when they feel threatened with a loss of livelihood.  Use the weapons of the weak if that is what it takes.   
 
As if to underscore the obvious point that the Dishonest Manager had to forgo his own short-term profit for his long-term security, Jesus concludes the sayings about the parable by adding,  "You cannot love both God and money."  Tellingly, Luke recounts the audience reaction: "The Pharisees,who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him" (v. 14).

Free us, Lord, of petty scruples and the illusions we have of ourselves that flatter us at the peril of our souls  Help us to know how helpless and hopeless we truly are, and make us aware of our desperate need to use whatever means you put within our reach to hear you, respond to you, and help all these, your family, whom you call us to serve.

In the name of Christ, Amen.