A Shrewd Bet (Proper 20C)

A Shrewd Bet
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
22 September 2013--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I worked for the Federal Government, I on occasion would hear certain phrases from my “higher-ups”:  “Just make it so, I don’t care how.”  “You take care of it, I don’t personally want to get too far down in the weeds on this.” “Just do it. I really don’t want to know the details.”

These phrases are the dark side of delegation of work and authority.  The underling is expected to meet certain goals by whatever means necessary, however messy, and at the same time maintain an appearance of tidiness, order, and calm.  An unstated assumption was this:  “I may be asked about it by the Press or members of Congress, and I want to be able to say honestly I don’t know.”  Such phrases are not limited to Federal or governmental service.  They occur in the private sector as well, where the unstated assumption is “this is all about profit and loss, the bottom line.” 

Today’s Gospel is a parable about such a supervisor and underling.   It is often called “the Parable of the Dishonest Manager.”  I think it should be called, “the Crooked Accountant,” or, “Street Smarts.”   It’s a problem for many, since Jesus here seems to praise a person he calls “dishonest” (v. 8), and sets him up as a model for us.

It almost certainly comes from the historical Jesus—no church leader in his right mind would have made this up and put it on Jesus’ lips.   Preachers have been trying to explain it away ever since.  Even in today’s Gospel, just after the parable itself, Luke tacks on three somewhat contradictory separate sayings (vv. 9-12) in an effort to make sense of the parable.   C.H. Dodd famously said that these 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.  Both of these stories 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 in “the Crooked Accountant” would have been familiar to Jesus’ listeners.

The economic system of the day clashed with stated Jewish religious values. Torah said, do not oppress the poor, do not charge interest, do not practice usury.  Torah said, let land remain in families, and if they lose it by mismanagement or misfortune return it to them 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: they had to pay for the right to remain on the land by signing notes promising at the harvest payment of hefty amounts of the anticipated produce.  Farmers failing to pay the absentee landlords were dispossessed entirely, falling into the anonymous and miserable mass of day laborers, whose hard manual work did not pay enough to feed a single person, let alone a family.  The large estates grew as more and more small farms defaulted on loans and were sold.

The rich landowner in the story has a manager who runs his operations.  It’s his job to ensure that the landowner gets richer.  He puts a hefty interest charge on the principal of the loan and imbeds it in the sum to be paid.   He works on a kind of commission and must pad the bills and rates he charges to include a “service fee” for himself.   The rates are extortionate, and designed to drive the farmers off their land.  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.  “Just get me the right bottom line—I don’t want to know the details.”   Like most hatchet men, the manager is the one who attracts the wrath of the those who suffer from his boss’s policy of exploitation and abuse; the landowner is left free and unstained above the fray, honored by all, including those he privately has been setting the manager on.  The farmers blame the manager and not the landowner for the gouging, little aware the underlying dynamics.

Then, as now, the weak had few weapons to defend themselves against the powerful: things like passive non-compliance, subtle sabotage, evasion, and deception.    It is probably some disgruntled debtors, angry at the manager’s pitiless business practices, who float the rumors of corruption against him.  The report come to the landowner—“He’s taking advantage of you.  He takes in way more than you are receiving.  He’s crooked.”     

The landowner could have the manager tried and punished as a thief. But that might make his own role in the extortion public.  Better not let the sordid details be known.   He wants to be seen as an upright member of the community, generous, a respecter of Torah, not as its violator, the greedy and heartless man he actually is.  So he decides to quietly sack the manager.  He asks for a final accounting so he can pass on this dirty job to some other hatchet man who can be more discreet in lining his own and as well as his master’s pockets.

The manager is clever.    He admits to himself clearly 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. 

He curries favor with the very tenant farmers he has been gouging.  They now might provide him with future needed hospitality and care.  So he rewrites the promissory notes, and gives the debtors all huge reductions.   He removes his own service charge, to be sure.  But given the huge sums involved in the write-offs, he also digs well into the unjust interest charges the landowner has been considering his rightful due, as long as he personally did not have to know about the sordid details.

The manager is betting that the landowner will not react by pressing charges against him for further theft.   He shrewdly assesses his boss’s basic character:  the landowner values respectability above the actual wealth he has used to buy it. That is why he originally said, “Make the bottom line but I don’t want to hear the details” and has already chosen to silently fire the manager quietly instead of risking a public revelation of all the sordid details of how the landowner man made his wealth.

The strategy is successful, so much so that when the landowner finds out how the accountant has pulled a golden parachute for himself out of his hat while in free-fall by essentially writing checks on the landowner’s account, he can only shake his head in admiration and say, I wish we could all be that shrewd! 

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 closely with dispossessed peasants and day laborers.  He addressed his ministry primarily to them.  This parable reads like an inside joke for such people—the great and the mighty are so rich that they can afford on occasion to let scruples make them forgo the income provided by the rapacious squeeze their underlings apply to the poor.   A sum that spells the difference between eating and starving, living or dying, for the poor is for the rich a mere rounding error.

The story suggests that the difference between honest and dishonest is no simple matter:   in a corrupt system where the wicked prosper by oppressing the poor, the honorable may actually be dishonorable.  The dishonest steward has to honestly assess himself and the nature of how he has gouged people before he can find a way out of his dilemma.  He becomes honest only when he realizes the lie at the heart of how he has earned his livelihood and the wealth of his master. When he is willing to cut the rates and stop gouging, even though this may be crooked by the standards of the system, he is actually recognizing the true way of the Reign of God.   And when the Reign of God breaks in, grace happens.  If only we could all be that shrewd! 

Luke clearly believes the parable is about how we use wealth, and how we need to be smart in using our current resources to insure a better future in God’s kingdom.  But I am not so sure that this is the point the Historical Jesus had in mind. 

Jesus elsewhere says “Even bad parents know to give their children good things: bread and not a stone, an egg, and not a snake.  God is a lot better than that, so just imagine what he has in store for us!”    “If a guy who wants to stay in bed at midnight will get up and help a noisy friend at the door simply to get some peace and quiet, God will surely give you us things when we make some noise in prayer!”   Jesus likes using edgy images to get at truths about God.

Just before this story in Luke, Jesus gives several parables about God:  a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep out in the wilderness to seek out one who has gotten itself lost, a crazy woman who throws a big expensive party in joy when she finds some lost petty change, a somewhat ineffectual father of a dysfunctional family who won’t adequately discipline a wayward son, shamelessly runs out to meet him when he returns from his debauches, throws a big party for him, and then has to deal with the sullen wrath of the older son who feels slighted in the whole affair.  All of these stories stress the fact that God’s love is crazy love.   Jesus is saying God is wild about you!  God loves you without shame or reason.  Loving you is in the nature of God.  

The parable of Crooked Accountant tells us to be smart and lay our bets on God’s crazy love, because that’s God’s nature.  If a crook can be smart and play his cards right because he understands his own failings and his boss’s quirks, maybe we need to fess up and be honest about ourselves, and really let ourselves wake up to the truth of God’s love.   Be street smart like that crooked accountant!  God is crazy about you.  Put your bets on that.   

There are many ways we don’t place our bets on God’s love.  We feel guilt and shame even though we have been assured of forgiveness.  We doubt that maybe God’s love will one day overcome everything and win, and that all will come into its embrace.  We are slow to forgive others, and to show them love.

Trusting God’s love is a liberating thing.  It is what lies behind Martin Luther’s famous line, “Sin boldly!”   He is not telling us to sin, but to lose our silly scruples, and our fear of offending God.

Jesus is not telling us here to be dishonest.  He wants us to be truly honest, and to let the disreputable and unrespectable side of the Reign of God win us over, work in us. 

Truly betting on the reality of God’s love means we do not need to have fear.  It means we do not need to have regrets. It means we can love, and give, and sacrifice, and enjoy life and friends and family without shame. 

Thanks be to God. 

Amen.