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William Allberry 23rd September 2007 ‘The Unjust Steward’ – or, The Crafty Manager |
| The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. |
| The parable of the crafty manager is one of my favourites, because it’s so unexpected. It’s one of those where you can imagine Jesus with his tongue in his cheek, watching the money lenders and the tax gatherers he was so often spending time with, showing that despite their wrongdoing, he actually had great affection for them. |
| It’s only Luke who includes the parable in his gospel, and there was a fashion, I’m told, a few years ago for thinking that Luke himself wasn’t quite sure of the meaning of it, and that after the main story, and the comment about the children of this generation he offers different interpretations: use your wealth to buy friends; show that you can be faithful in small things, and you’ll be trusted with greater; and finally, no slave can serve two masters (you can’t serve both God and money). |
| Some Bible scholars also thought that perhaps Luke was telling the story without properly understanding the background – actually the manager wasn’t acting improperly, because the interest he was letting off was due to him, not to the master. |
| Well, there are lots of ways of explaining the story. It’s not easy to understand why the master commends the manager – but you could equally say, creditors are often glad to receive part payment – better that than to receive nothing, to see the debtor go bankrupt. Discounting debts is common practice. The banks may treat us harshly as individuals, but they seem ready to write off huge corporate debts. It’s an unfair world! |
| But there are other aspects of the parable which aren’t concerned so much with what actually happened as with the people in it. The parable is typical of the way Luke tells the stories of Jesus, and it has a lot in common with other parables that only appear in Luke. The manager might be compared with the unjust judge, or the man who’s unwilling to get up in the night to help his neighbour: none of them is an obvious model for discipleship. The manager asks himself, What am I to do?, and this again is typical of the parables in Luke. He says he’d be ashamed to dig, and being aware of shame is again typical of Luke. |
| So if it’s a typically Luke-ish sort of parable, it seems quite possible that the gospel writer understood very well the situation in the story, and that he fully intended to describe someone acting in a downright criminal way, by making sure the debtors altered their accounts in their own handwriting so that he wouldn’t be found out. |
| The problem is, why did the master commend him for doing something that was plainly wrong? The answer could be that it wasn’t his master, the manager’s master, who commended him (how could he, he was being swindled?), but what Luke wrote could mean is: the Master commended him, that is, Jesus himself praised the man in his parable for being astute. But we don’t need to be too clever in explaining away the difficulty, let’s stick with the manager’s master commending him. Clearly the Master, then, is a more complex character than we thought at first. He’s not so consumed with the love of riches that he can’t appreciate the foresight and sheer cleverness of his manager. He praises him as one who’s been beaten at his own game. We might imagine Sir Alan Sugar having been deprived of millions through a business deal that went against him, but nonetheless respecting the business acumen of his competitor. Both manager and master exhibit a sort of detachment from money: the manager reduces people’s accounts; the master appreciates how astute he is. |
| Ultimately, Jesus is saying, money is not important. Yes, play the game while you can. Involve yourself in the financial world, follow the money markets, buy your lottery tickets if you must! The twinkle in Jesus’s eye shows his affection. We are caught up in this world, we live in a capitalist system, and we can’t avoid the fact. Just being part of a financial system doesn’t make us ungodly. It’s when things go wrong in our relationship with God (and that’s what Amos the prophet was going on about) – it’s when we behave as if the things of this world are important in themselves, when we take them too seriously, it’s then that there’s a danger of idolatry. An idol is whatever comes between us and God, and we can make idols of anything. But the things of this world are given us to make use of, - and we’ll be thinking about that soon when we come to give thanks to God for the riches of the world in the harvest. We can make use of them, and enjoy them, as long as they don’t become too important for us. And when Jesus says “the children of this generation are wiser in their generation than the children of light”, he is reminding us that we have to make the distinction between the present and the future: between the time when money, and all that, can be used and enjoyed, and the time when all those things will be past. Dealing wisely and fairly with the things of this world trains us for the age to come. |
| The Pharisees who heard Jesus’s parable, I suppose, laughed it off. ‘What does he know about the financial world!’ As people might do today if Jesus preached his parable on a street corner of the City of London – they’d laugh it off. Our society loves money, and finds it difficult to understand the indifference of the master in the parable, and we’re very ready to condemn the dishonesty of the manager. Those who watch the lottery draw so avidly, or so desperately buy the scratch cards, they laugh it off, or try to. But Jesus is telling us that there are things that are more important than money – namely relationships with other people. If you’ve got the opportunity, Jesus says, use this wealth that’s so important to you to make friends for yourself, because human relationships are far more important than finance. Be part of the world - but don’t let it distract you from what is ultimately important in the longer term. You cannot serve God and Mammon! |
| And now to God who gives us the riches of this world to use to his glory, be all might, majesty, dominion and praise, now and always. Amen. |
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