Street Smart Jesus (proper 20c)

Street Smart Jesus
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
22 September 2019--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

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.

I remember the first time I heard it working for the Federal Government, that word from a boss that tells you to get something done without involving the boss: “Just make it so, I don’t care how. You take care of it, I don’t want to get too far down in the weeds on this.  Just do it. I really don’t want to know the details.”   I understood as a junior State Department Officer that I, the underling, was expected to meet certain goals by whatever means necessary, however messy, and at the same time maintain an appearance of tidiness, order, and calm.  It was only years later that it dawned on me what the boss’s unstated assumption was: “If there is ever an investigation, I want to be able to say honestly I didn’t know.”

Today’s Gospel is a parable often called “the Dishonest Manager.”  I think it should be called, “the Golden Parachute,” or “the Street Smart Manager.”  

It almost certainly comes from the historical Jesus—no church leader in his right mind would have made this up and put on Jesus’ lips what appears to be praise for dishonesty.   Preachers have been trying to explain it away ever since, including Luke in today’s Gospel.  Those three sayings (vv. 9-12) he tacks on the end of the parable read, in the words of C.H. Dodd, like notes for three separate sermons to preach the parable.  

For the original audience, the parable 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 Street Smart Manager” 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, re-establishing original ownership at least once a generation, in the Jubilee Year. 

But in Palestine under the Romans, 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 hefty amounts of the anticipated produce.  Farmers failing to pay for whatever reason were forced off the land and fell into the anonymous and miserable mass of day laborers, whose physically hard 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 here has a manager running operations charged with ensuring 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 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. 

Like most hatchet men, the manager is the one who attracts the wrath of those who suffer from the system he enforces; the landowner is left free and unstained above the fray, honored by all.

Then, as now, the weak had few weapons to defend themselves against the powerful: passive non-compliance, subtle sabotage, evasion, and deception.    It is probably some disgruntled debtors, angry at the manager’s lack of pity, who float the rumors of corruption.   

The landowner could try to punish the manager as a thief. But that might expose his own role in the extortion.  Better not let the sordid details be known.  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.

The manager is clever.    He admits to himself 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. 

In order to feather his own retirement bed, he curries favor with the very tenant farmers he has been gouging.  He rewrites the promissory notes, and gives the debtors all huge reductions, removing his own service charge and the usurious interest charges.

The strategy is so successful that when the landowner finds out how about it, 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 bothered religious scruples.  He was a craftsman from Galilee, a backward and religiously dubious province.  He lived closely with dispossessed peasants and day laborers.  He addressed his ministry primarily to them.  His parable here is an inside joke for such people—the great and the mighty are so rich that they can afford on occasion to forgo the rapacious squeeze their underlings apply to the poor.

The difference between honest and dishonest is sometimes tricky:  in a corrupt system, the ‘honorable’ landowner may actually be dishonorable.  The dishonest steward has to honestly assess himself and 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 cuts the rates and stops 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 think that the Historical Jesus had something else 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 Street Smart Manager tells us to be smart too.  Where he honestly assessed his own and his master’s nature, acted accordingly, and got off the hook his corruption had led him to, we must honestly assess our own failings and God’s crazy love for us.  And we must act in accordance with the truth that we are beloved, despite it all.   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.  Act like you know it.

There are many ways we act as if we don’t trust 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 loathe to show them love. We think that people cannot change. 

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 trusting 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.