September 18, 2022
All of Jesus’ parables are challenging, but this one is surely the most difficult. It has my head spinning. I can’t seem to make sense of it.
First, there is this manager who was squandering his boss’s money. He was caught and about to be fired. He brainstorms and comes up with an idea. I will cook the Account Receivable books. In order to gain favor with the people who owed his employer money, he cuts their debts in half. Now if these debts were owed to him, the story would make more sense. But they weren’t – they were owed to his master. Whom I might add he hadn’t bothered to consult before he did it.
I can only imagine as a State Store Manager, or postal supervisor what would happen to me if I discounted Licensee liquor orders 50%, or sold postage for half price. MacDade House, your $800 order is only $400 this week. Alpine Inn, we are only charging you $600 for your $1200 order. Villanova Law School, we put $1000 postage on your meter but are charging you only $500. Auditors from the Auditor General office, the State Police, and the Postal Inspection Service would join forces to track me down with handcuffs, and I would spend the rest of my days in a dark cell somewhere without a window.
Am I missing a point?
In most cases, scripture stories demand context. So often, we hear preachers on TV or even politicians quote a verse from the Bible, to validate their point. And many in their audience are thinking: The Bible is the Word of God! This verse is in the Bible. Therefore, it is God’s will? Well not always. Or sometimes people will say “Money is the root of all evil”. It’s in the Bible! You can look it up! When the verse the are trying to quote from 1st Timothy actually says For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Timothy 6:10).
There is a difference.
Saying that money is the root of all evil assigns it a property, that things do not have. Things are neither bad or good, but they may be used for good OR evil. Opiates for example may be used to relieve the pain of someone on their death bed and that is a good. However, when opiates are over prescribed or overused, they may lead to an addiction. Jesus frequently used parables to teach his followers spiritual truths.
They are usually simple stories, and in this case in Luke’s Gospel, the Shrewd Manager parable is prefaced by the Parable of the Prodigal son. By looking at each of these stories in context of the other, it might help us see Jesus’ lesson. In each of these parables, money seems to be a problem.
The Prodigal Son story is about someone who squanders money and is eventually rewarded by his father with a party, while the other son, the faithful one was never acknowledged. The shrewd manager in today’s Gospel is commended by his master for his ingenuity. At first neither result sounds fair.
I would like to offer an idea about the lesson of these 2 parables. And it isn’t my idea. But the Internet is a wonderful source to learn insight from other preachers. The lesson or moral of the prodigal son story isn’t for us to go out and spend our inheritances on loose and immoral living, but rather it is a lesson about forgiveness. I know I often felt bad for the faithful brother, who stayed home and was a support to his father, and understood his angst, but if I am honest, I also experienced forgiveness at times when I had done something very wrong and hurt people. And likewise, the manager in Luke’s Gospel today. At the core of this story is the forgiveness of a debt. The manager forgives. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, for personal gain and to compensate for past misconduct. But that’s the decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself.
So, what’s the moral of this story?
It’s a moral of great emphasis for Luke – forgive. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all. Whether we apply this principle to student loans or to someone who’s sinned against us, we don’t have to do it out of love for the other person – if we’re not there yet. We could forgive the other person because we are convicted by the line from the Lord’s Prayer. And it is significant that Luke translates the line, “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us” (Luke 11:4).
We could forgive because we want to be deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus’ power to forgive and free sinners like us. Or we could forgive because any other reason. There is no bad reason to forgive. Extending the kind of grace God shows us in every circumstance can only put us more deeply in touch with God’s grace. The Manager traffics in what is, by definition, unrighteous currency – money.
We are called to traffic in righteous currency. And the currency of God’s kingdom is forgiveness. The One currency we should spend freely