The Crooked Manager

19 September 2010                                                                         Luke 16: 1-13

Proper 20

We have seen the kind of character Jesus mentioned in our morning’s Gospel all too much lately.  It was people like that who developed those strange things called collateralized debt obligations, made up of subprime mortgages and processed with computer algorithms and packaged as glossy securities, to be sold to unwary investors.  They made billions of dollars doing it, and then when their fraud began to be uncovered as the scam it had been all along, the government had to come in to prop up the institutions they operated out of so that the whole financial system would not collapse.  Meanwhile, the clever crooks who had devised the fraud escaped with most of their money intact, while the cost of their crimes was spread around to the tax payers. 

Such a small time crook as the man in our story today would have looked with envy on the truly first-class swindlers at the root of our present financial crisis.  It was not that they were men of a different sort than he, but they were able to get away with the kind of scheme he could only imagine.  The similarity between the present financial hooligans and our dishonest manager, as St Luke calls him, was that neither was particularly careful about managing other people’s money.  The man in our story apparently had been serving himself with his master’s money rather than his master.  He did not do this on a grand scale, obviously, or it would have come to his master’s attention long ago.  It was probably more the case that he was taking a little here and a little there to augment his salary and live a little higher life style than would have been possible on his wages alone.  It was an indictable offense by our standards, however.  When you breach the fiduciary responsibility you have when put in charge of other people’s money, it is a criminal act. 

So the boss called in his manager and told him that he wanted the books to be put in order because he was being fired.  You wonder why the boss did not simply throw the man in jail or sell him into slavery and do a forensic audit.  Those were the days when the bosses could do very bad things to their servants with very little trouble.  We certainly would have charged him with a crime.  Perhaps the man had left his master’s business in such a complicated state, with so many people’s accounts entangled in his own, that it would have been more costly to prosecute him than merely fire him.  In any case, the steward saw the handwriting on the wall—his future was hanging in the balance.  He had spent everything he had swindled and had no reserves.  It was at this moment that he had his revelation: since he had cooked the books anyway, why not do it one more time in a grand fashion?  This time he would write off much of the debt people owed to his master, with the idea that he would be able to take advantage of their gratitude by living off their donations to him.  They would come out ahead in the deal and so would he.  These were massive kickbacks off of which he hoped to live for years to come.

And it worked!  Even his master was impressed with the criminal cleverness of this manager.  It must be the way in which Sherlock Holmes praised the evil genius of Professor Moriarty.  The man was thoroughly corrupt and wicked, but his cleverness and intelligence still had to be admired, as well as guarded against.  Jesus seems to praise the man, too: “for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” 

This parable has troubled many commentators down through the ages.  It appears as if Jesus is commending the kind of self-serving cleverness of which we see only too much in our world.  For those of us who know Him from his other teachings, it is obvious that Jesus cannot be telling people to be crooked in their dealings with each other.  We may wonder why he chose such a peculiar story to make his point, unless, perhaps, he had actually heard of such a thing or was trying, as he often does, to jar us out of our complacency. 

His actual point seems fairly clear: here was a man, a smart man, who was suddenly faced with ruin.  He knew exactly what his situation was and he knew what his future held for him if he didn’t do something quick and something radical.  “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.”  He sized up his situation and acted boldly, using every bit of resourcefulness he could muster—and, of course, not being too scrupulous in how he acted.  What Jesus is praising is his concentrated resourcefulness, his cleverness in seizing the moment, and throwing all caution to the wind, acting boldly and decisively. 

So, what was Jesus trying to tell the people who were first listening to him?  It seems as if the context requires that his listeners also be faced with some kind of crisis.  As we have seen over the years as we have studied Jesus’ teaching, there was a crisis in his day: the crisis of the Coming of the Kingdom, the Return of Yahweh to Zion.  Jesus kept saying over and over again that his arrival had precipitated a crisis in the life of Israel.  People had to take account of his true identity as Messiah and Son of God; they had to reorganize their lives—which is what he meant by repentance—and they had to follow him as his disciples along the new path he had marked out.  If they did not accept him and respond to his teaching, there was a severe national crisis brewing.  Everyone who heard Jesus wanted the Kingdom to come. But there were those who thought they had to fight for it like the Jews of old times.  Jesus marked out that way as ruinous.  We know what happened after his death and resurrection.  It was not even a generation until Israel ceased to exist in Palestine and Jerusalem was destroyed.  Jesus’ followers took a different path and became the Kingdom of God movement we know as the Church. 

Obviously we do not live in the same context in which Jesus or his first listeners lived.  We are once again living through rather tumultuous times, but the exact significance of what we see all around us is obscure and ambivalent.  But if we do not live necessarily in a time of crisis, we do live always in a time a challenge, a time when the reality of the Kingdom of God has to be lived in the midst of social conditions which are more or less hostile to them.  What Jesus is calling us to in this story is a life of clever and radical discipleship—using everything that we have available to us in order to live faithfully as his disciples. 

This is the point at which Christians are often disappointing.  Often, as good modern consumers, they just want a little religion, as much as they can afford, enough spirituality to get along, and perhaps some occasional help from God as they go about the lives they have chosen.  Jesus wants them instead to use everything at hand—even money—to work for the Kingdom.  That is the meaning of that rather odd statement: “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.”  Jesus knows that we will always live in a compromised world—where even the money we innocently earn at our jobs is marked with the corruption of sinful systems and unjust social conditions.  We are not to turn crooks ourselves, but we are to take the elements of what we have to work with and use them for God’s eternal purposes.  That does not mean that we will bring in the Kingdom of God—as Tom Wright has reminded us—but it does mean that we will be working for the Kingdom of God.  And every bit of work that we do along this line will endure into the next phase of the world and still exist when the Kingdom does come.  Nothing is lost—in the Lord, such labor is not in vain, as St Paul reassures us. 

But it will take a real concentration and a real commitment in order to live this kind of life.  We must realize that the money we use, for example, to work for God and do his will, is also the money that is a power in its own right and rules and governs in our world.  We cannot serve money and God—but we can use money for God if we are careful and keep our wits about us.  The thing to remember as we go about making our way and living for God here is that what we have, especially our money, has been given to us—we may have earned it technically speaking, but it is still a gift.  Lots of people work really hard and get nothing for it.  The faithful steward, as opposed to the unfaithful one, knows that everything he works with belongs to his master.  He is to be clever and resourceful, with concentrated mind and dedicated heart, to the success of his master’s business.  That is what Jesus means, I think, by this: “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?” 

One day we hope to own something for ourselves—but that day is not now.  Of course, I know that we have titles to our houses and lands, our bank accounts are in our names.  But the faithful Christian person knows that he is only a manager for God in this life.  It is the age to come which will see him enter into his true heritage.  Now is the age of stewardship—we are working for God and not for ourselves, if we understand the challenge of Jesus.  That was the problem with the unfaithful manager all along—he never got that part right.  Still, for the time being he was incredibly lucky and smart and resourceful.  We are to be smart and resourceful ourselves, only not on our own behalf, but on God’s. 

Several national elections ago, one of the main presidential candidates was coached by his wife with the phrase: It’s the economy, stupid.  So it seems to be again in our day.  So it has been for a long time.  Economy is the word by which we indicate how we gain and spend, how we earn and give, how we manage our households and our societies.  Economics is inevitably political, because politics has to do with how as a society we do things together.  Money has always been an important part of politics.  If there is not enough, if enough people don’t have it, if some have too much, then people go hungry and our common life breaks down.  One of the ways that it breaks down, oddly enough, is when money becomes too important, that is, when people start saying that we have to do this or we have to do that because of economic laws, when we forget that there are values higher than money, when we forget that some of the most important things cannot be bought or sold—or at least we ought not to try.  Do we have to let people go hungry because they have no money?  Must they live on the streets because they have no money?  Money itself becomes a law to be obeyed.  In that case, we have allowed money to become a god and God himself has been lost sight of.  The only way to break the power of the false god of money, mammon, is to give it away, to learn how to be a faithful steward of the manifold gifts of God, to remember that being welcomed into the eternal habitations is the goal of Christian economics.