The parable of the dishonest manager is one of the more difficult parables of Jesus to understand. Only Luke includes it in the Gospels. At a very early stage, the parable seems to have been separated from the context in which it was said. One wonders if the sayings after the actual parable were not added on either by later disciples or Luke himself, in frantic hope of making some sense of it, in a similar way that some trial lawyers name in a law suit everyone even remotely related to a case, hoping that if you throw enough stuff up in the air, something will stick.
The original story appears to center around a certain manager who was caught embezzling his owner’s property. After the owner discovered the embezzlement, he demanded the manager conduct a final audit of all the property before he fired the dishonest manager. Of course, the manager didn’t stop his pattern of behavior just because he had been caught. He knew that his old way of life was coming to an end, so dramatically and swiftly he reacted to what was in store for him, and tried to ensure his future security. The owner finally catches on and realizes one could hardly expect an embezzler to conduct an honest audit of what he is embezzling from, and that the manager acted very predictably for the crook he was.
Perhaps Jesus uses this example with a wry sense of humor to observe that if an embezzler, who had lived day by day with no real thought of the future consequences and totally had forgotten the substantial tabs he was running up, could react so shrewdly to the drastic moment of accountability that was about to take place in his life, how much more should people of faith perceive the changes a life of discipleship calls for and how critical it is for people of faith to model radically different behavior than that praised by the world. If a person with so little regard for either the past or the future can recognize an imminent crisis and react to it, how much more should people of faith respond decisively to God’s call and take it seriously?
Perhaps this parable was originally tied to Jesus’ teaching on reading the signs of the times. A few chapters back in Luke, Jesus tells the crowds, “When you see a cloud looming up in the west you say at once that rain is coming, and so it does. And when the wind is from the south you say it will be hot, and it is. You know how to interpret the face of the earth and the sky. How is it you do not know how to interpret these times?” Later, after Jesus enters Jerusalem and right before his arrest, he adds the parable of the fig tree. “When you see the fig tree and indeed every tree bud, you know that summer is now near. So with you, when you see these things happening: know that the possibilities and potential of the Good News, for God’s commonwealth to counteract the hopelessness and heal the nastiness in the world is near.”
There is no reason to believe that our society reacts any wiser than society of ancient Jerusalem. We are presently in an economic hole and many people are mad about it. Yet it was readily apparent that our so-called prosperity was built on crass speculation, not honest production of goods and services to make life better, that the housing bubble was built on the premise of the children’s game of musical chairs, where the last person to look for a chair when the music stopped would be the only loser, and that much of our so-called wealth was merely a journal entry based on finding a new sucker to bail us out. The true increase of wealth never existed and now, of course, people are furious at the consequences and look to place blame on anyone but themselves. Repentance of profligate ways and sacrifice to build a firmer and honest future are never mentioned, except to point the finger at someone else.
I am not so sure that our society is not at a crucial crossroads and the world needs the church to act like yeast in a loaf of bread, even if the world will never acknowledge that. Without the yeast, the bread always will be disappointing, flat and unpalatable.
Christians are often called to provide balance and to get on the seesaw of a society that usually is wildly out of balance. Sometimes we need to get on one end of the seesaw, sometimes on the other end, and sometimes in the middle. Today the world defines the good life rarely in terms that reflect any of the balance of Biblical wisdom. The theory goes that if everyone pursues his or her own interest, if our educational institutions train everyone for the race to be first, if religion mainly supports the race and urges everyone to run harder, and if our leaders live up to our expectations to adjudicate everyone's race of self-interest, we will have the perfect society. Well, of course, we won’t. When there is no sense of serious sacrifice for the welfare of the larger good, we will have, at best, stalemate and paralysis,
People of faith know that sharing is a positive force and hoarding a negative one, and that the welfare of others, especially the poorest and least in society, is directly linked to the welfare of all of us. Musical chairs is a children’s game, period, not a wise economic or social policy. Our God is a God who offers visions of a new society where everyone will have enough to eat, where God seeks to remove greed, and a God who expects people of faith to be foresighted stewards of future generations of the living creatures and resources of the earth, not compulsive and desperate gamblers.
The signs of the times tell us how much the words of the prophets, the promises of God and the message of the Gospel are needed as leaven in the world. Maybe the difficult parable of the dishonest manager is really one of the parables to energize us for the challenging mission of the church in the decade ahead.
