Jesus loved bad guys. Over and over in the gospels, we hear echoes of this; the good guys constantly grumble that he \u201ceats with sinners\u201d. Who are these sinners? Well they are people who have jobs that make them unacceptable: undertakers, tax collectors, and so on. They include guys who are just a little sketchy and guys that don\u2019t always do what is conventionally the right thing. This is a story about a guy like that. He\u2019s not a good guy; he\u2019s a bad guy. He\u2019s a bad guy who finally does the right thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To understand this story, it\u2019s important to understand something about life in Jesus\u2019 time. The whole country was ruled by a foreign power, Rome, and most of their economy is agriculture. Wine from Palestine was sent to Rome, so were figs and dates and olives. These are crops that take a lot of individual effort. Plant a potato, and it just sits there in the ground until it\u2019s time to dig it up. Plant grapes, and you have to tend them all year long. You have to make sure they are up on stakes off the ground, you have to make sure they have the right amount of water. Olive trees take a generation to bear; you reap a crop your father or grandfather sowed. But most of the people doing all this work don\u2019t own the land they farm. Just like rich people are buying up homes today and renting them out, Judah in Jesus\u2019 time was full of landlords. Some of them were rich men from Rome; they bought up a vineyard or some acreage. They wanted the money from the crop but they weren\u2019t about to go out and work for it. So they hired people or they had slaves. Somebody had to supervise all this of course, so they also hired managers. Managers could act with the force of the owner, we call that power of attorney today, it meant that they were in charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s what Jesus is asking us to imagine: a manager. A guy who runs the farm. He hires people, he fires them; he makes sure they put in a full day\u2019s work, he makes sure everything is done on time. Even today, most farms run on credit. You go to the bank in the winter and borrow the money to buy the things you need to put the crop in, seed, tools, whatever it\u2019s going to take. Where does that money come from? Today it comes from a bank but in Jesus\u2019 time it came from someone like the manager. Farm managers took a cut of this and we know from documents archaeologists have found that they charged huge interest rates, often 50% or more. This makes you a lot of money; it doesn\u2019t make you popular. This lets you get ahead financially; it doesn\u2019t make you many friends. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the people around Jesus are peasants; they know all about this system. They know all about managers who squeezed them for interest, they know all about being forced off the land when a crop didn\u2019t come in and they couldn\u2019t pay back a loan. I\u2019m guessing they don\u2019t much like managers; I\u2019m guessing they see them as very bad, awful guys. I suspect some of them might have been cheering inside when the story starts out with the manager being fired; \u201cGot what he deserved,\u201d I hear them thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is actually the second in a series of three parables about bad, awful guys. The first one is what we often call \u201cThe parable of the prodigal son\u201d. Remember that one? A kid goes off and squanders part of his dad\u2019s property but the really bad, awful guy is the older brother who refuses to welcome him home. Next week we\u2019re going to hear about a really bad, awful guy in hell but I\u2019ll save that for next Sunday. So here between those two stories is this one about this manager and I think he qualifies as a very bad, awful guy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For one thing, when the story starts, we\u2019re told that he\u2019s been fiddling the accounts. He\u2019s been fired for embezzlement. That is to say: he was stealing from the company, from the man who owned the farm. That\u2019s bad. Now he\u2019s got a problem: he\u2019s lost his job, and he lives with people he\u2019s been cheating for years. He says, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.\u201d In other words, he\u2019s not about to go work like any common peasant. What else can he do? And then he has an idea: he\u2019ll fiddle with the accounts again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One by one, he calls the debtor farmers in. He asks them how much they owe. Now loans in this time were written differently than ours. If you owe say, $10,000 on a car, the loan says, \u201c$10,000\u201d and then it gives you an interest rate separately; your payment is some part of the loan and the interest. But in this time, the loan as quoted as the amount borrowed plus the interest. So a loan amounting to 50 jugs of oil is written down as 100 jugs; a hundred containers of wheat might be a loan of just 80 or so. What the very bad guy is doing is knocking off the interest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine these people for a moment. They\u2019re laboring under harsh, exorbitant loans. When they\u2019re summoned, surely they\u2019re scared: what if this man who controls their livelihood is going to make some new demand? What if he wants a bribe, what if he wants more interest? Imagine being summoned to the bank and told they\u2019re going to cut your mortgage in half. Imagine getting a letter from a credit card company saying, \u201cWe\u2019ve decided to cut what you owe us in half.\u201d Joy hardly describes it, does it? This very bad, awful, guy, this manager who is losing his job, has a great plan in this crisis: he\u2019s going to create joy right here, right now, and hopefully it will carry over to relationships that will sustain him. That\u2019s his plan, after all: \u201c\u2026when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is flagrantly dishonest. There\u2019s no way around it: what he\u2019s doing is wrong according to the standards of any society. So it\u2019s a tough parable. In fact, all week long, listening to the podcasts that help me think about texts, I\u2019ve been hearing pastors complain about having to preach this parable. This is a very bad, awful guy but at the end, his dishonesty works. \u201cHis master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly,\u201d the parable ends. This is a joke; this is funny. We all know that no master is going to commend his kind of dishonesty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can see in what comes after how hard people struggled with this story. Generally, scholars tell us that parables end with the story and the applications were added on. We see this in various places but this is the only one where we have not one, not two but four different interpretive comments. Three of them contradict the plain sense of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? [Luke 16: 10-12]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of these really catch the story\u2019s meaning which is revolutionary. All of them seem to be a way to restore the conventions of the time. So, why does Jesus tell this story? What does he have in mind? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have to go back to the beginning of the parable to see that. It begins with the bad guy worried about relationships. He\u2019s facing a crisis; his whole way of life is about to fall apart. He\u2019s going to have to depend on people. In this crisis, he acts in a way that goes against the rules of his time and his job. In the same way, Jesus is asking people to understand the coming of the Kingdom in him is a crisis that calls for new relationships, for changing how they\u2019ve been living. We\u2019ve heard his parables about the ultimate value of finding the lost; we\u2019ve seen him welcome the lost to his table. The point is back in the parable of the prodigal son, right at the end, when the father tells the older brother who is pouting about the welcome of his lost brother, \u201cThis brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.\u201d [Luke 15:32] Against the value of finding the lost, the value of good accounting is nothing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recognizing the crisis of finding the lost is the point here. That\u2019s how Christianity spread in its first years. We hear stories in Acts of mass conversions but the truth is, historians believe Christian faith spread little by little and largely because of the example of people of faith. About the middle of the 200s AD, for example, a massive plague spread through the Roman Empire. Scholars believe it might have been something like measles. People were dying everywhere; Rome itself, the city, was collapsing. We\u2019ve all been through a horrible pandemic, we know what that\u2019s like. The basic response of people in that time was to flee and they fled family, friends, communities. But Christians didn\u2019t flee; they cared for the sick. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage said,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
bring yourselves to the sick and poor, and help them. God said love thy neighbor as I have loved you [“Litany for a pandemic”. It was recognizing that relationships of care and love meant more than anything that spread Christianity. It still does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now we live in a time of crisis, also. We\u2019ve been through a plague caused by a virus, we\u2019re in the midst of a plague of gun violence. We\u2019re a small church and of ourselves we may not be able to solve these problems. But we can live our faith every day; we can remember that even the very bad, awful guy, finally got it; the question is, will we. Jesus started with a group about half the size of the people who worship here most Sundays; 300 years later, his way was the official religion of the whole empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to know how seeds will grow. Jacquelyn and I drive over the I-83 bridge almost every week, headed to her work. She drives, so I get to look around. The other day, I looked at the river, at the still standing pillars from the bridge that collapsed and I noticed something amazing. On the top of one of them, a tree is growing. Some time in the past, a seed landed there, I guess. There was enough dirt to let it germinate, start growing and so far the winds and the rain and the storms haven\u2019t been able to push it aside. It\u2019s right there, it looks to be about three feet tall. It\u2019s small: a sapling. But it\u2019s there, it\u2019s doing what trees do, taking in some nutrients, taking in water, taking in sunlight, making oxygen, growing taller. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What about us? We\u2019re small but we\u2019re here and every Sunday we come together to strengthen each other, pray, remember the way of Jesus. I hope, like that little tree, we\u2019re growing up in Christ too. God hopes this. What do you hope? What will you do about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a92025 Luke 16:1-13 Jesus loved bad guys. Over and over in the gospels, we hear echoes of this; the good guys constantly grumble that he \u201ceats with sinners\u201d. Who are these sinners? Well they are people who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53,371,3,2,32],"tags":[24,237,98,26],"class_list":["post-1904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afterpentecost-c","category-luke","category-sermon","category-worship","category-year-c","tag-forgiveness","tag-grace","tag-hope","tag-parable"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1906,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions\/1906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
America Magazine<\/em>. 222<\/strong> (10): 18\u201325.] ttps:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plague_of_Cyprian#:~:text=%22Litany%20for%20a%20pandemic%22.%20America%20Magazine.%20222%20(10):%2018\u201325.<\/p>\n\n\n\n