Topic: Being
spiritually shrewd by gambling on God’s grace
Intended Audience:
Jesus’ disciples (and the overhearing Pharisees)
NRS Luke 16:1-8 Then 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.
2 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.' 3
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. 4 I have decided what to
do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their
homes.' 5 So, summoning his
master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, 'How much do you owe my
master?' 6 He answered, 'A
hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly,
and make it fifty.' 7 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.' 8 And his master commended the
dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly . . .”
NAB Luke 16:14 The Pharisees, who loved money, heard
all these things and sneered at him.
Not a popular parable
While The Parable of
the Crooked Manager is neither familiar nor popular, it’s one of my
favorites. Why is it little-known and little-liked? Here are some reasons that
come to mind:
- The Crooked Manager immediately follows
The Prodigal Son in Luke’s
Gospel. How do you follow the most popular parable Jesus ever told? This
parable stands in the shadow of a giant.
- The
“hero” of the parable is a crook, which is confusing, if not off-putting.
- Even
more troubling is that the crook, when he gets caught, tries to worm his
way out of it by doing something even more crooked. Some hero!
- The
crook gets off Scott free, not only getting away with his original offense
but with numerous subsequent offenses.
- Not
only does he get away with it, but this dishonest fellow is praised by his
boss for being shrewd! Are we supposed to be cunning liars? What kind of
lesson is this?
So, are you telling me that The Prodigal Son is followed by a parable about a terminated crook who
gets praised by his boss for doing something even more crooked than what got
him fired in the first place? You’re kidding, right? When this one comes up in
the New Common Lectionary or the International Lesson Series, I imagine most
people skip it.
The Genre
This analogy is a parable. It is a brief drama with
characters and a plot.
Our “play” begins and ends with a meeting between the boss
and the manager. It has four mini-scenes:
- Rich
man fires crooked manager for wastefulness
- Crooked
manager steps aside and talks to himself until he comes up with a scheme
- Crooked
manager meets with the boss’ debtors one-by-one to reduce their debts
- Rich
man praises crooked manager for shrewdness
The Characters
There are two main characters:
- A rich
man
- The
rich man’s crooked/wasteful household manager
There are supporting cast members:
- Other
household members who bring a charge of wastefulness against the manager
- The
rich man’s debtors (we don’t know how many, but two have lines in the
drama)
- Townspeople
whose favor the manager seeks
Oikonomos
In New Testament Greek word is oikonomos (from oíkos, "house, household" and nemō,
"to allot, apportion"). It means household manager. Such a person
could be called a steward, overseer, administrator, or treasurer.
The Plot
A rich man discovers that his household manager is being
wasteful and he fires him. The manager comes up with a quick scheme involving
reducing what his boss’ debtors owe (making them happy and making him and his
boss very popular) before they can find out that he’s been fired. The boss
commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness.
What’s the crime and punishment?
“Wasteful” is a vague
term, but that is the charge brought against the manager. At the end of the
parable, Jesus calls him a “dishonest manager,” so we wonder whether the man is
stealing. Though wastefulness may not be outright theft, it nevertheless means
that he’s costing his boss money. Technically, then, he’s robbing, though it
may be theft by white-collar mismanagement.
The expected response of
the rich man would be to have the man arrested and prosecuted. If the manager
were a slave, he might have done more than that. Slaves managed money for their
masters in other of Jesus’ parables (Matt 18:23-35, 24:45-51, 25:14-30; Lk 19:12-27). A beating of a wasteful slave would
have been in order, perhaps more.
Strangely, the rich man
only made the manager surrender the books. That’s it. It’s an unusually lenient
response by an unusually generous man. The boss is neither interested in
recouping his losses nor punishing the “criminal.” Caught red handed, the
manager gets little more than a tap on the wrist. The mercy that this man shows
his manager will prove essential to the manager’s shrewd scheme.
He talks to himself about himself
We learn six things about
the manager from his self-talk in verse three:
- “What shall I do?” he asks. His perspective
is, “It’s all about me, and getting out of this is all up to me.” There’s
a self-centeredness here. A selfishness. And he sees no alternative to
fixing this than to continue in his free-wheeling, conniving pattern by
devising a dishonest self-salvation scheme. We now know without a doubt
that he’s a self-serving schemer.
- He doesn’t seem to be sorry for what he did.
He offers no explanation, he expresses no remorse, and he makes no offer
of restitution. The easiest thing to do would be to come clean, show
everything he’d done wrong, apologize, and set up a schedule of payments
that would reimburse his master with interest. But no. Clean and easy and
honest are not options. Either he can’t face the truth (about what he’d
done and about himself) or being honest just never occurs to him. Instead,
every neuron in his cerebral cortex is firing.
- At least he has the facts straight. He knows
he’s guilty, he knows that his boss knows he’s guilty, he knows he
deserves to be fired, and he knows he can’t get his job back by making
excuses. He’s not stupid.
- But he’s self-deceived. As he put it, “What
will I do, now that my master is taking
the position away from me?” What does he mean, “taking”? It’s already “took”!
He was fired. There are no shades of gray here. There’s no wiggle room.
It’s a done deal. But not in his mind! No one knows he’s been fired yet
except the master, and he still has the books, so “his brain is squirming
like a toad.” Maybe there’s some book cooking he can do yet. There must be
something brilliant and underhanded that he can come up with to pull this
out of the fire. Strategically, to his way of thinking, this thing isn’t
over, his job hasn’t been taken until he turns in the books, and he is just
the rascally rabbit who can presto-chango un-take the take.
- “I’m not strong enough to farm,” he says. In
an agrarian society, with farmers in the audience, no doubt, this line is
a hoot. What kind of 98-pound, conniving, lazy weakling do we have here?
What kind of pampered, manicured, spoiled sissy are we talking
about? The plowboys among Jesus’ listeners had to be loving this.
- “I’m ashamed to beg,”
he says. What a blind hypocrite (not unlike the Pharisees – Matt 15:12-14, 23:15-16, 23:23-24)! The manager is not too ashamed to waste
his boss’ money, but he’s too proud to panhandle? What a crock! He won’t
work and he won’t beg. What’s left? Let’s see. Oh, yeah! He can scheme,
lie, cheat, and steal. What’s to be ashamed of in that?
I’ve mentioned this repeatedly in these exegesis papers, but just in case
you missed it before: Jesus was funny.
What’s the manager’s goal? Popularity. If the people of the town were
given a reason to actually like him (and given what we know about him, this may
be a challenge!), maybe they will feed and house him when he finally turns in
the books.
My hypothesis, however, is that he has an unspoken hope: to get his job
back. He’s got a plan that will result in the restoration of his position or,
if not, enough popularity to be housed and fed by the townsfolk. It could go
either way, and he’ll take either one. But both results depend on one thing:
the rich man being a softy.
The crooked manager’s scheme
“I know what I’ll do,” he
says. Oh, Lord, there is no telling what this bamboozler has cooked up. Given
the brevity of this parable, Jesus has given us a remarkably colorful character,
hasn’t he? This manager is quite the weasel. So what’s the weasel gonna do?
His primary job, it
seems, as oikonomos was to collect
the rent. As the financial steward of a landed estate, his master’s debtors
would pay their rent in produce. In return for living on the rich man’s land,
they gave him a percentage cut of the goods. So the renters know the manager
all too well. They know the drill. Summoning them concerning the rent would not
seem suspect.
The key to the success of
his daring plan is that none of the renters know he has been fired. Word is not
out yet. As far as they know, the manager is (as he has been) the legal representative
of the landlord. If the manager pulls this off, he could be the toast of New Orleans whether he
gets his job back or not. Here’s the plan:
- Get the books quickly and summon the debtors
immediately to a discrete location so that no one will see what he’s doing
and turn him in.
- Keep them thinking he’s still the manager by
asking them, “How much do you owe my
master?” He’s lying, obviously. Thus Jesus can call him “the dishonest
manager.”
- See them one-by-one so they can’t talk. As
far as each debtor knows, the manager is doing him a special hush-hush favor.
And if he can keep them from talking to one another, it will keep word
from getting out before he can finish. He hurries them in and out
discreetly.
- He gets them to write out a legal bill in
their own handwriting to make it legally binding. He tells them to write
fast! “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.”
- He significantly reduces the debt of every
renter, making himself quite the celebrity in the process. He basks in his
sudden popularity, and thus insures that no renter will treat him badly if
the master, in the end, doesn’t return him to office.
- He delivers the books with the new figures to
his master.
Crazy or courageous,
brainless or brilliant, it’s a gutsy move. He has everything to lose. The boss
may not have thrown the book at him before, but he might throw it at him now,
aiming for right between the eyes.
The rich man’s choice
The manager has forced
the boss’ hand. He only has two options.
- Go to the renters and explain the mistake.
- Do nothing.
Explaining the mistake is
a problem, however. Once the debts had been reduced, the manager was a popular
guy. The renters and other townsfolk likely saw him as a hero, and they might
not take kindly to his being fired. Moreover, the boss was no doubt suddenly a
popular guy, too. Everyone would have assumed that the boss had authorized the
cuts. For him to turn around and take it all back would go over like a lead
balloon. He would become the villain. If he cares anything about popularity, he
can’t select this option.
The only other option is
to do nothing. Doing nothing, of course, means that the new reduced rates
illegally obtained must stand, the renters must never know that the manager had
been fired, they must never know that the debts were reduced without authorization,
and the manager must keep his job. For the sake of popularity, this is what the boss
decided to do.
The boss did more than
that, however. He praised the dishonest manager for his cunning. He was
impressed and expressed admiration. What a parable!
I believe that this outcome
was foreseen by the crooked, scheming manager. I believe he planned for this,
the best of all possible outcomes. It was a gamble, yes. But he bet it all and
believed it to be a good bet.
What made him so sure
that the master would do nothing? Simple. The boss let him off easy before, so
he bet the farm that the boss would let him off again. It was the boss’
generous mercy in the beginning of the parable that the manager banked on. When
he could have and should have thrown the book at him, he didn’t.
The Mishna contains the
oral traditions followed in Jesus’ day by the Pharisees. They were written down
finally in 200 A.D. And the Mishna is clear about what should have happened to
the wasteful, dishonest manager: 1) he should have paid back the losses; 2) he
should have been tried; 3) and if convicted, he should have gone to jail. But
Jesus—ever the challenger of Pharisaic legalism—tells a parable in their
presence about a rich man who ignores the legal, religious traditions, and
let’s an offender of the law go his way without remuneration, trial,
sentencing, or punishment. The word that most aptly applies here is grace.
The meaning: from light to heavy
As with The Parable of the Friend at Midnight and The Parable of the Unjust Judge, our
featured parable uses the ancient teaching technique of “from light to heavy.” If
THIS is true, how much more then is THIS true! If something is true in a
lighter everyday situation, then how much more true it must be in application
to a much weightier matter.
This can be put a couple of ways:
- If a
dishonest manager can bank it all on getting grace a second time from a
pushover boss, how much more then can you, a sinner, bank it all on the
mercy of your loving and gracious heavenly Father?
- If a
boss forgives the crimes of a crooked manager all for the selfish sake of
his own vain popularity, how much more then can you count on the
forgiveness of your heavenly Father whose sacrificial mercy is willing to
pay the full price for your salvation, even if it means he comes off looking
like a weak fool?
The meaning in light of the immediate context: Pharisaical opposition
The Pharisees responded to Jesus’ parable with a sneer. And
no wonder! They held the oral laws recorded in the Mishna in equal esteem and
authority with the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament. The oral law is clear
about what to do with the manager, as surely the meticulous Pharisees knew. And
Jesus throws a parable in their faces in which “the God character” lets the
manager off the hook demonstrating a blatant disregard for the law. How can God
disobey God’s law? Ekmukterizo means to deride by turning up the nose, to sneer at, to scoff at. Sneers
are smiles of utter contempt.
Soon they would do more than sneer. Soon they would do to
Jesus what they felt the rich man should have done to the manager. They would
have him arrested, tried, and convicted. Grace is more terrifying than anything
to the graceless.
For more on Jesus' parables see my blogs The Absurd Parable of the Unforgiving Slave, The God Who Gambles, Parable of the Vine and Branches, The Crooked Manager, The Friend at Midnight, Heaven Is Like a Crazy Farmer, He Speaks Of . . ., Salted With Fire, Talking Sheep and Goats, Is Your Eye Evil?, Two Prodigals and Their Strange Father, The Lazarus Parable Is Not About the Afterlife,and Jesus Used Parables Like a Sieve.
"The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a
woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it
was leavened." (Matthew 13:33)
