This gospel is sometimes called the parable of the unjust steward, or if you want an updated title, sometimes it’s the story of the dishonest manager. But whatever you call it, it certainly doesn’t sound like a story where at the end, the moral is going to be, let’s find a way to be a little bit like that dishonest manager. But that is what we get. So if you have questions after having heard about this man and about what this story might mean, you’re not the only one in the past two thousand years who has felt that way.
Let’s get to the heart of the story by skipping to the end. What, precisely, is it that this steward or manager gets right? It’s clear from the story that he didn’t have a heart of gold exactly. But the answer is this: The steward writes down people’s debts. The steward forgives. He might forgive for all the wrong reasons, to save his own skin and to compensate for past misconduct. But that’s the decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself from a position from which there doesn’t seem to be any escape. And it worked — generosity and quick thinking was the only answer to the bind he was in. His life was lost, but he found a way back.
What really happened to this steward that got him to do something generous and right? It wasn’t that he had heartwarming realization about loving his neighbor. What happened instead was that all of a sudden the system by which he was living, and it wasn’t a good one, was exposed for what it was. In business terms, it’s like there was an audit, and the truth came out. It says that he wasted property that wasn’t his, and there was a crisis, and that crisis is what we care about today. Misunderstanding our relationship with money, it seems, ultimately leads to a crisis like this. Who else in the gospel squandered property, where have we heard that word recently? The word only appears in one other story, and it’s the one about the prodigal son, which we heard last Sunday, someone else who took money and ran, and by doing that lost everything, just like this manager was on the verge of doing.
Why does Jesus say today that you can’t serve both God and money, or God and Mammon, with the M capitalized, like it is a God that has a lot of power? It’s because what money has the power to do is convince us, over time, that if we have money and security then we are part of a system that works really well, since it works really well for us. Money fools us into thinking we deserve it more than others do, and that everything’s fine that way. We might not squander it wastefully, but we can end up in a crisis. Because money fools us into thinking that we aren’t stewards, taking care of a world that belongs to someone else, which of course is what we are. We gradually fail to see that a system that works great for us maybe doesn’t work so well for everyone, especially for people on the outside looking in.
People with money and security can lose sight of who deserves what in this world, they forget that God sees a world that is not divided into the successful and secure on the one hand and the people who aren’t on the other. Money hides the fact that the Kingdom of God is one fabric of people connected to one another, supporting one another even though they are separated, one body. There are people in this world whose lives are a mess, they’ve lost the game that the steward won, or maybe they never had a chance. What they need is mercy, their debts written down like in this gospel, they need a break from those who have the power to give it to them.
Jesus has all sort of suggestions in the gospel about how those of use with possessions and security can remember who we are, and come to our senses. Jesus told a few of the people he met in life to sell all their possessions. Maybe for some people Jesus felt that was the only way to resolve a crisis and start over. To one person, Jesus suggested selling half his possessions, so apparently that’s also an option. Or we can do what the dishonest manager did today, find some way to break the cycle, take people who need a break and change the usual rules about giving them one. He found a way to undo some of the years he spent working a system that only worked well for him. He didn’t do it for the best of reasons, and it’s not even entirely clear that he did it with his own money. But he reversed a broken relationship with the people his life affected, and like the prodigal son, with one gesture, he woke up, and turned towards home.
This gospel is good news for people like us. Apparently in the eyes of Jesus you can make up for squandered opportunities with some very imaginative acts of recovery. We are people who are supposed to be stewards and not consumers in this world, stewards of wealth, stewards of this earth, we’re supposed to operate a system that allows God’s possessions to reach every corner of his Kingdom. In fact, sometimes this parable isn’t called the story of the dishonest manager, but the clever manager, and it’s not so bad, apparently, to be clever and use our imaginations to turn the world of possessions and money upside down.