September 23 , 2007
Pentecost 17, Luke 16:1-13
We probably all know something about flawed heroes. Some of our best heroes have been bandits, or worse. I grew up with a very warm spot in my heart for Robin Hood, largely because of the old black and white Errol Flynn movie that I watched as a kid. Then there were Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, Jesse James. There was an article in the paper about Jesse the other day that spent some time debunking the idea--popular in his day--that he, like Robin Hood of old, robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Even Vito Corleone we were told in the second Godfather movie, had taken to crime as a way of seeking justice for his less powerful neighbors. Given our love of outlaw heroes, you’d think it would be easier for us to accept the parable of the dishonest steward that we heard this morning.
Dishonest! The word stands out. It keeps us from hearing anything else in this parable. If there is some kind of a message here for us it is lost in our outrage and confusion over this dishonest servant who is stealing from his master in order to improve his own situation. The passage is troubling because in it Jesus seems to be praising dishonesty. If we aren’t angry, we are at least confused. How can Jesus be for anything like what this servant is doing? It doesn’t make sense. So we try all the harder to make sense of it. Living with this parable, which only appears in Luke’s gospel, is kind of like living with a scab on a skinned knee. It’s very presence makes us want to pick at it.....put it right.
A lot of biblical scholars have struggled to make this parable more user friendly. They have examined traditions of the time in which the story is set, they have made up possible extenuating scenarios, like maybe there really was a Robin Hood factor involved. Maybe the dishonest steward was helping out poor people who were saddled with unjust debt. Some have just come to the conclusion that Jesus never said anything like this, that Luke got it wrong. In a funny kind of way, trying to get this parable to line up with what we expect from Jesus leads us back to what is most likely the point of the parable.
We want this parable to work in a way we understand. We want its message to be one we can be sure of, one we can support. We want Jesus to give us lessons we can teach our kids. So we work at this parable trying to get all the moral teachings to fit into the puzzle just right. We want the accounts set straight, not just in the steward’s books, but in the moral teaching of this parable. We want teachings we can trust. Like numbers on a page, we want our religious teachings to be neat and tidy. Those sorts of teachings we can rely on.
In the parable Jesus seems to be telling us that when it comes to living into the realm of God, we have to learn to let go of some of what we are used to relying on. Carefully ordered accounts may not be the way to heaven. We may have to let go of some of what we think we can be sure of....understand...possess. Some of those things may actually stand between us and being able to open ourselves to eternity.
In this particular case, Jesus is talking about possessions....money, that much is clear. And nothing represents better for us an understandable, comforting system to rely on than money. This parable about the dishonest steward makes us uncomfortable because it threatens to wrench from us our safe understanding of who Jesus is and what he is about. Whatever else may be true of this parable, it comes in a part of Luke’s gospel where Jesus is trying to liberate us from our familiar ideas of what constitutes safety and security.
Do we trust our souls to a system of commerce where salvation has to do with all the pieces lining up as we think they should? Or do we trust our souls to the mystery of eternity? I don’t understand all of this parable, but I think I hear Jesus asking that question somewhere within it.
Money or a mystery? It’s a hard choice for people brought up to believe in sound investments. The steward in this story does seem to make that shift from trusting in the resources of an account book to trusting in something less tangible.
It seems to me this guy could just as easily have cooked the books and taken the cash he gave the debtors and put it away to see him through the hard times. Instead, he chose to cast his hopes on the gratitude of those he had helped. Even this “dishonest” steward made the shift from trust in cash to trust in relationships, relationships forged through the grace of debts having been forgiven.
This is actually beginning to sound pretty mainline Jesus to me. Oh, there are still a few kinks in the story, but I wouldn’t want to get too comfortable with my explanations of what Jesus and Luke are up to here.
So here is where I am left with this strange parable about the dishonest steward who is praised by Jesus for his questionable behavior. I don’t understand it, and when I hear it, it puts me in a bind. I kind of feel it in the pit of my stomach. I am caught between what I thought I knew about Jesus and some new understanding I can’t quite grasp yet. I am disturbed in the same sort of way I am when Jesus tells me I have to choose between possessions and following him. Maybe this parable is designed to speak to us more in the way it makes us feel than in the logical construct of what it says. Maybe the whole point of this troubling little parable is to put us in a bind where we have to wrestle with questions about what really matters.
If leaving behind comfortable ideas about how we get to heaven makes you feel a little queasy, then maybe that queasy feeling is a good sign. If you heard this gospel read a few minutes ago and said, “huh? that can’t be right,” well maybe that’s a sign that your are working on your lessons....that you are a disciple engaged in the business of figuring out what it means to follow Jesus.
Amen
JB