An unjust steward and unconventional grace - Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 16: 1 - 13
What a story! A story in which Jesus seems to applaud what on the face of it was a very shady steward indeed. And not surprisingly we are left uncomfortable for we have associated Jesus with such sterling qualities as honesty and integrity.
We can easily identify with St Augustine in his observation;
“I can’t believe that this story came from the lips of our Lord.”
And so it is that down through the ages, this has become probably the most hotly debated of the parables of Jesus. Interpretations have included the idea that this is an example story. One version of this is that Jesus is suggesting that his disciples should imitate the actions of the dishonest manager. An easy conclusion to come to from a first reading of the parable yet a conclusion that is surely repugnant and inconsistent with all that we know of Jesus.
Another interpretation based on this parable as an example story is that Jesus is encouraging his followers to be shrewd like the steward was in his use of possessions even though the possessions are not his to control. Less repugnant for surely there is much virtue in shrewdness but still inadequate for such an interpretation could be used for example to defend Robert Maxwell’s raiding of the pension funds of his employees in a vain effort to hold his commercial empire together.
So it seems that we would do better to see this as a parable told by Jesus to explain something about the Kingdom of God. But first of all, we need to be clear as to how we seek to interpret parables. A real temptation is to see them as allegories in which each character represents someone or something. Please take care to discard that way of thinking because in the main the parables of Jesus were quite simply not allegories. To suggest that they are is to ignore the intentions of Jesus and accordingly to arrive at what can only be seen as distorted conclusions.
An example of this is the character of the landowner in this parable. He is an absentee landlord who lives in luxury whilst enjoying the fruits of the efforts of those who work on the land. Such landlords were well known in Palestine at the time of Jesus - cold grasping profiteers. The listeners to Jesus and the first reader of Luke’s Gospel would recognise the type at once.
Now an allegorical interpretation of this parable would see the landlord as representing God. And here, we encounter a massive problem. For God is absolutely nothing like the landlord whose only purpose in engagement is to punish. The sort of nonsense that sees God as rather like the big foot which comes down on little people in the old Monty Python introduction, is a total misrepresentation of God. God is not a distant ogre . On the contrary God has been lovingly involved with the struggles of humanity from the beginning of time. Far from being absent, we see God present in the journey of the people of Israel. And in Christ, we see not a departure but God entering into human experience in a way that shows us the very real loving and caring nature of God. No greater nonsense exists that that which views God as severe and harshly judgemental whilst somehow the Son is welcoming and loving. Jesus reveals to us the nature of the Father and to separate Jesus from God the Father is indefensible theology which serves only to deny the essential truth that God is three in one.
Anyhow let’s get back to our parable. News reaches the absentee landowner that the steward is making a right hash of his job. The landowner’s unearned income and his capital are being squandered and so the landowner decides to dismiss the steward. No longer can the steward act for his former boss. But things are even worse than we might at first appreciate. For this steward is short of friends to help him in his time of crisis. After all why should the nearby farmers help him when he has by working for the landowner allied himself with a system that was rooted in exploitation, a system which was at that time driving many farmers in the direction of poverty and dependence on the likes of the landowner.
And so, the steward begins to think creatively. He gathers together the farmers who owed the landlord money and he begins to reduce the debts that they owed to the landlord. In this, he rather keeps the farmers in the dark. He doesn’t tell them that he has been fired. Neither does he tell them that he has been given no authority to reduce these debts.
We are not told how the local farmers reacted but given the struggles that many of them would have endured to keep themselves and their families going on the land, we can only imagine that delight would have entered their souls. And possibly, very probably, there would have been something of a change in how they saw the landlord. I would think that they would be feeling very grateful, even grateful enough to give the landlord the mother of all greetings when next he came to visit to collect his debts..
And certainly, that would put the landlord in a qaundry. How could he not enjoy the change in how he was perceived - a case from zero to hero! What could he now do? He could say it was all a mistake in which case he would be lucky to get out with his life. Or he could take the applause and the credit for the actions of the steward. Well, as we know he takes the second option and as a result, we find him commending the steward whom any accountant would tell you, had done the landlord wrong.
So what are we to make of what has happened? Look at the steward. From a legal point of view, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He is guilty of a breach of trust against his employer. Oh sure, we might argue that his actions have had moral benefits. He has helped those whose need was greatest. And some of us would contend that there are times when an illegality can be defended on grounds of morality. But let’s be clear. This is no Mother Theresa. He may have done good through his illegality but his real motive has not been the welfare of needy farmers about whom he had not previously cared. His motive has been quite simply about his own self interest. The act of forcing generosity upon his former employer, has been about his plotting to get himself a place in society. He has been about self interest and the rest is to adapt a phrase from the US military “collateral benefit.”
And yet it has been argued by Robert Farrar Capon amongst others that the unjust steward is a Christ figure in this story. At first, this notion strikes us as distinctly blasphemous and there are of course dangers in taking this argument too far. But look and you will see that there are indeed some connections.
The first of these is that respectability is by no means everything. Nobody can say that the steward is respectable. After all he has been dismissed by his employer because of the poor quality of his stewardship. He has squandered the property. And now he has behaved in a somewhat squalid manner in order to protect his own interests. Now, while I wouldn’t wish to equate the conduct of Jesus with this man, it is undeniable that there were many amongst the religious leaders and possibly beyond, who felt that Jesus was anything but respectable. After all, the type of company he kept was anything but respectable. Time and again, he was criticised because he spent time with “”Sinners” and tax collectors, the very people whose company gave you a bad name. And then there were the times when he failed to keep the ritual law of Israel, the times when he behaved in a scandalous way on the Sabbath. No respectability there at all! And of course, this would be proven with his dying a criminal’s death upon the cross.
But just as Jesus and the unjust steward are short on respectability, is there not here a reminder that sometimes we place far too much emphasis upon respectability. Respectability does not liberate people as demonstrated by the unjust steward and Jesus. Life, status, success and winning are the things that matter to respectability. Oh we need more! We need grace and you won’t find a grace that liberates in respectability.
The second of these connections is that both offer a forgiveness. Poor as his motives would seem to have been, the unjust steward offers a forgiving of the debts that virtually enslaved many a farmer, debts that were rooted in a cruel economic system. With Jesus, the forgiveness that we are offered is the forgiveness of sins which facilitates a harmony with God. But for Jesus, forgiveness is about more than just the spiritual. It is also about the physical. Look to Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer and you find;
“And forgive us our sins,
For we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”
And if you look to the Greek, you can clearly find that the words used of our forgiving clearly refer to monetary debt.
And is that not so contemporary to our world? For the supposed economic miracle of our country is built on the sinking sands of ever increasing levels of personal indebtedness whilst across so much of the world, debt levels serve not just to deny education and health care but to literally kill.
How relevant that Jesus like the unjust steward offers us a release from the past, a forgiveness, a writing off, that enables us to experience life with abundance.
And thirdly, like the unjust steward, Jesus experiences the very worst that there is and rebounds to the good of others. For the steward this is shown in experiencing the dole, except in those days there was no dole. He has experienced the real prospect of lonely penury and yet he rebounds and others share in the good news of his rebounding through the cancellation of debts.
Jesus experiences public torture and death on a cross yet his story also does not end. Resurrection bring him back to his followers and all who have followed on from the, And the consequence of God’s Yes to Jesus which is seen in resurrection, is to enable us to be able to have a closer relationship with god than we could have envisaged otherwise. As with the steward, the raising of Jesus brings a new hope into the world.
So “Unjust Steward Sunday” is a Sunday when we encounter the most perplexing of parables. But within that parable, we are able to see displayed something of the unconventional grace that God in Christ offers to the world.
This sermon was preached at Bideford Methodist Church on Sunday 23rd September 2007
What a story! A story in which Jesus seems to applaud what on the face of it was a very shady steward indeed. And not surprisingly we are left uncomfortable for we have associated Jesus with such sterling qualities as honesty and integrity.
We can easily identify with St Augustine in his observation;
“I can’t believe that this story came from the lips of our Lord.”
And so it is that down through the ages, this has become probably the most hotly debated of the parables of Jesus. Interpretations have included the idea that this is an example story. One version of this is that Jesus is suggesting that his disciples should imitate the actions of the dishonest manager. An easy conclusion to come to from a first reading of the parable yet a conclusion that is surely repugnant and inconsistent with all that we know of Jesus.
Another interpretation based on this parable as an example story is that Jesus is encouraging his followers to be shrewd like the steward was in his use of possessions even though the possessions are not his to control. Less repugnant for surely there is much virtue in shrewdness but still inadequate for such an interpretation could be used for example to defend Robert Maxwell’s raiding of the pension funds of his employees in a vain effort to hold his commercial empire together.
So it seems that we would do better to see this as a parable told by Jesus to explain something about the Kingdom of God. But first of all, we need to be clear as to how we seek to interpret parables. A real temptation is to see them as allegories in which each character represents someone or something. Please take care to discard that way of thinking because in the main the parables of Jesus were quite simply not allegories. To suggest that they are is to ignore the intentions of Jesus and accordingly to arrive at what can only be seen as distorted conclusions.
An example of this is the character of the landowner in this parable. He is an absentee landlord who lives in luxury whilst enjoying the fruits of the efforts of those who work on the land. Such landlords were well known in Palestine at the time of Jesus - cold grasping profiteers. The listeners to Jesus and the first reader of Luke’s Gospel would recognise the type at once.
Now an allegorical interpretation of this parable would see the landlord as representing God. And here, we encounter a massive problem. For God is absolutely nothing like the landlord whose only purpose in engagement is to punish. The sort of nonsense that sees God as rather like the big foot which comes down on little people in the old Monty Python introduction, is a total misrepresentation of God. God is not a distant ogre . On the contrary God has been lovingly involved with the struggles of humanity from the beginning of time. Far from being absent, we see God present in the journey of the people of Israel. And in Christ, we see not a departure but God entering into human experience in a way that shows us the very real loving and caring nature of God. No greater nonsense exists that that which views God as severe and harshly judgemental whilst somehow the Son is welcoming and loving. Jesus reveals to us the nature of the Father and to separate Jesus from God the Father is indefensible theology which serves only to deny the essential truth that God is three in one.
Anyhow let’s get back to our parable. News reaches the absentee landowner that the steward is making a right hash of his job. The landowner’s unearned income and his capital are being squandered and so the landowner decides to dismiss the steward. No longer can the steward act for his former boss. But things are even worse than we might at first appreciate. For this steward is short of friends to help him in his time of crisis. After all why should the nearby farmers help him when he has by working for the landowner allied himself with a system that was rooted in exploitation, a system which was at that time driving many farmers in the direction of poverty and dependence on the likes of the landowner.
And so, the steward begins to think creatively. He gathers together the farmers who owed the landlord money and he begins to reduce the debts that they owed to the landlord. In this, he rather keeps the farmers in the dark. He doesn’t tell them that he has been fired. Neither does he tell them that he has been given no authority to reduce these debts.
We are not told how the local farmers reacted but given the struggles that many of them would have endured to keep themselves and their families going on the land, we can only imagine that delight would have entered their souls. And possibly, very probably, there would have been something of a change in how they saw the landlord. I would think that they would be feeling very grateful, even grateful enough to give the landlord the mother of all greetings when next he came to visit to collect his debts..
And certainly, that would put the landlord in a qaundry. How could he not enjoy the change in how he was perceived - a case from zero to hero! What could he now do? He could say it was all a mistake in which case he would be lucky to get out with his life. Or he could take the applause and the credit for the actions of the steward. Well, as we know he takes the second option and as a result, we find him commending the steward whom any accountant would tell you, had done the landlord wrong.
So what are we to make of what has happened? Look at the steward. From a legal point of view, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He is guilty of a breach of trust against his employer. Oh sure, we might argue that his actions have had moral benefits. He has helped those whose need was greatest. And some of us would contend that there are times when an illegality can be defended on grounds of morality. But let’s be clear. This is no Mother Theresa. He may have done good through his illegality but his real motive has not been the welfare of needy farmers about whom he had not previously cared. His motive has been quite simply about his own self interest. The act of forcing generosity upon his former employer, has been about his plotting to get himself a place in society. He has been about self interest and the rest is to adapt a phrase from the US military “collateral benefit.”
And yet it has been argued by Robert Farrar Capon amongst others that the unjust steward is a Christ figure in this story. At first, this notion strikes us as distinctly blasphemous and there are of course dangers in taking this argument too far. But look and you will see that there are indeed some connections.
The first of these is that respectability is by no means everything. Nobody can say that the steward is respectable. After all he has been dismissed by his employer because of the poor quality of his stewardship. He has squandered the property. And now he has behaved in a somewhat squalid manner in order to protect his own interests. Now, while I wouldn’t wish to equate the conduct of Jesus with this man, it is undeniable that there were many amongst the religious leaders and possibly beyond, who felt that Jesus was anything but respectable. After all, the type of company he kept was anything but respectable. Time and again, he was criticised because he spent time with “”Sinners” and tax collectors, the very people whose company gave you a bad name. And then there were the times when he failed to keep the ritual law of Israel, the times when he behaved in a scandalous way on the Sabbath. No respectability there at all! And of course, this would be proven with his dying a criminal’s death upon the cross.
But just as Jesus and the unjust steward are short on respectability, is there not here a reminder that sometimes we place far too much emphasis upon respectability. Respectability does not liberate people as demonstrated by the unjust steward and Jesus. Life, status, success and winning are the things that matter to respectability. Oh we need more! We need grace and you won’t find a grace that liberates in respectability.
The second of these connections is that both offer a forgiveness. Poor as his motives would seem to have been, the unjust steward offers a forgiving of the debts that virtually enslaved many a farmer, debts that were rooted in a cruel economic system. With Jesus, the forgiveness that we are offered is the forgiveness of sins which facilitates a harmony with God. But for Jesus, forgiveness is about more than just the spiritual. It is also about the physical. Look to Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer and you find;
“And forgive us our sins,
For we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”
And if you look to the Greek, you can clearly find that the words used of our forgiving clearly refer to monetary debt.
And is that not so contemporary to our world? For the supposed economic miracle of our country is built on the sinking sands of ever increasing levels of personal indebtedness whilst across so much of the world, debt levels serve not just to deny education and health care but to literally kill.
How relevant that Jesus like the unjust steward offers us a release from the past, a forgiveness, a writing off, that enables us to experience life with abundance.
And thirdly, like the unjust steward, Jesus experiences the very worst that there is and rebounds to the good of others. For the steward this is shown in experiencing the dole, except in those days there was no dole. He has experienced the real prospect of lonely penury and yet he rebounds and others share in the good news of his rebounding through the cancellation of debts.
Jesus experiences public torture and death on a cross yet his story also does not end. Resurrection bring him back to his followers and all who have followed on from the, And the consequence of God’s Yes to Jesus which is seen in resurrection, is to enable us to be able to have a closer relationship with god than we could have envisaged otherwise. As with the steward, the raising of Jesus brings a new hope into the world.
So “Unjust Steward Sunday” is a Sunday when we encounter the most perplexing of parables. But within that parable, we are able to see displayed something of the unconventional grace that God in Christ offers to the world.
This sermon was preached at Bideford Methodist Church on Sunday 23rd September 2007
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