Shrewdly
Luke 16:1-13
September 20, 2010
A long story thanks to the memory of Scott Hozee, though many of you saw it in The Godfather movies. Vito Corleone, father of Michael Corleone, and two Italian immigrant friends had begun to fashion a business - and attracted the attention of the local mafia boss, Don Fanucci, known as “the Black Hand.” Don Fanucci approaches Vito and says, “I hear you and your two friends were recently involved in some shenanigans which netted you $600 each.” The don demands some protection money, he needs to wet his beak - $200 from each of the three men. An offer they could not refuse.
Vito’s friends panicked and decided to pay up. But Vito has a different idea and tells his two friends to pay him $50 each. Vito, in turn, will give the don this money plus his own $50 and he will do it in such a way that Fanucci will accept the $150 instead of the $600. When his friends ask Vito how he’s going to pull this off, Vito tells them “Never mind that, but just remember I did you a favor once.” He tells his friends to go to Fanucci the next day, tell him they respect him and that Vito will pay the don his request. They go and do that. Later Vito meets privately with Don Fanucci but pays him only the $100 he had collected from his two friends. When the don demands to know where the other $500 is, Vito smirks, saying he needs some time being rather short of money at the moment.
Don Fanucci comes to believe that Vito has shaken down his own two friends. Based on what the two other men had told Fanucci earlier, the old don assumes Vito had already received $200 from each friend but is now pocketing most of it even as he courageously winks at the don, who becomes an insider to Vito’s little fake scheme. Surprisingly, the Black Hand turns velvet. He smiles approvingly, openly admiring Vito’s courage. “You’ve done well for yourself,” he says. He accepts the $100 as sufficient, offers to let Vito work for him, and even adds that if he can do anything for Vito, to let him know! Fanucci respected Vito as a fellow wheeler-and-dealer, a fellow sneak and cheat who knew how to work other people to his own advantage. Thank goodness we have just read Luke 16 or we wouldn’t know what to do with these kind of shenanigans.
Do we know what to do with Luke 16? Actually, no.
This parable drives its readers crazy. Some try to fix it because they can’t believe Jesus is really supporting shady economic dealings. Some insist that Luke heard Jesus wrong and it ended all twisted up, or that we are missing an important word or phrase that sends Jesus’ conclusion in a far different direction. Even Eugene Peterson in his American English version, The Message, can’t resist inserting a fix when Jesus offers his observations, “I want you to be smart in the same way - but for what is right.” Peterson adds to the Gospel text, ‘But for what is right,’ because he is afraid Jesus meant what he said.
Intentionally or not, this parable catches off guard all those who have decided the Bible reads only one way, and that they understand who Jesus is. It is good for the soul that we cannot understand completely everything that Jesus says. Human beings have this diabolical trait that if we believe we understand something totally we proceed to own it and control it to our own purposes. Few things are more owned and controlled than the text of the Bible.
Context is everything in the Bible, especially in the Gospels and where this story is found in the written text, right after the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is not coincidental. There is no hinterland between the Dishonest Manager and the Prodigal Son, but they connect. Whenever Jesus says something outrageous and even impossible in the midst of a story, that’s where you better start looking for the real sense of the story.
Everybody remembers the younger son demanding all of his inheritance, going off to the big city and “squandering” his money on all sorts of entertainment. Being forced during a famine to feed pigs, absolute disgrace for a Jew, he then came to his senses and made a plan to return to his father and beg to be taken on as a servant.
It is reported to the rich owner that his manager or steward was squandering the corporate money. It is the same verb in both parables, “squandering” - which carries the sense of the sower throwing the seed all over the place, squandering the seed on places it wouldn’t grow properly, as well as on good fertile soil. We can’t really say what the manager was precisely doing. He wasn’t necessarily embezzling the money and as the RSV translates it he was “wasting” the property only in the mind of the owner. One thing for sure, the manager was in deep trouble. Jesus did not say it, but when the manager “came to his senses,” he too came up with a plan so that he might eat and have shelter some day with his owner’s debtors, just as the younger son devised a plan so he could eat sufficiently as one of his master’s servants. Both men were willing to become equal to servants in order to eat and save their skin.
The manager calls in all the creditors and offers them a deal, up to 50% off what they owe to the rich owner is forgiven. Like Vito Corleone he expected that these grateful debtors would remember the favour he had granted them and offer him some grace down the line. Take notice of how much these fellows owed this master - Clarence Jordan translates all these “measures” of oil and wheat into modern equivalents, 900 gallons of oil and 1000 bushels of wheat. Who does that kind of business in the first century? They would not be able to accumulate this kind of debt in a lifetime, let alone trying to pay it back. An impossible figure, just like the enormous debt each human being owes God which we cannot repay. The only way out of this infinite burden is by grace, a free gift, by someone who offers us a deal. The rich owner is seen by many as God, and the debtors are you and me, so just who is this dishonest manager?
Any rate, back at the parable, the owner gets wind of all this and is really really pleased with his manager who he feels had managed well. That’s the way to do it, shades of Don Fanucci and Don Corleone. Jesus concludes that the children of this world are wiser in dealing with this unsavoury stuff, money, than the children of light. They use it to make friends when they really need to, even if by our best standards their methods are not on the up and up.
It is highly suspected that Jesus often retold stories already familiar to his audiences, but inserts little twists and surprises into the outcome. Nevertheless, he leaves the stories alone and some of them are kind of rough-edged and for many of his readers, un-Christian. Certainly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the situation here.
And the situation matters, the context in which his listeners were living. They were occupied and oppressed by the Roman Empire and really had little control over much of anything except their religious faith and practices. The Pharisees, the guys in charge of this empire without clothes, decided to take the strategy of tightening up the standards. It’s a brutal world and we can’t be wishy-washy in our faith, for that’s all we have for an identity. In the process, of course, they excluded perhaps more than they included. No tax-collectors and sinners allowed. These stories of Jesus often play the role of loosening the tight standards of the mainline religion. Did you ever read or see the Disney version of Uncle Remus? Uncle Remus is an older black servant, former slave, who told these innocent animal stories to the young son of the white plantation owner. Br’er Rabbit is always pulling tricks and stunts to annoy and foil Br’er Fox and Br’er B’ar and all the other more powerful and predatory animals. These were unapologetic parables of black folk in the midst of Jim Crow South, in which they had no power but their brains and cleverness and orneriness, and many times they outwitted and outmaneuvered The Man. Jesus’ parables were earlier versions of the same method. When everything is working against you, you have to think in ways that no one else is thinking.
Listen to the media, all the debates at church conferences, and those dramatic TV preachers, and you would think all Jesus talked about was sex. But he rarely did. What he did talk about a lot was money and how we use it. What the rich owner liked about the moves of his manager is that he did not let his money sit there, no talents moulding away in a hole in the ground. He used it to make friends for himself, something a lot more endearing than a full bank account. Keep in mind that like so many of the Gospel episodes, this one ends without us knowing whether the manager was rehired or not. There are no guarantees.
What is guaranteed for this mainline congregation, as for most of our sister churches, is that if we keep managing the way we always have, we are done for. We have to think differently about how we use money, not only so that we can eat and survive, but so that this church will be adopted by new friends. We need to learn to squander in a new way.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan