Text: Luke 16:1-13
The scripture passages we hear in the readings each week are chosen by a committee. A big committee, with representatives from the many denominations that use what is called the Revised Common Lectionary. The lectionary is a list of selections from the Old and New Testaments—the Hebrew and Greek portions of the Bible—and the psalms. The lectionary lists readings for three years, called imaginatively years A, B, and C. We are now in year C. In this book are all the readings for year C, and we have similar books for years A and B.
You might ask whether the lectionary readings cover the whole Bible. That would make sense in a way. After all, for Lutherans the Bible is the final source of authority. But if we did read the whole Bible in three years, we would have to allocate five times the amount of space in worship than we do, because (by my informal reckonings) the lectionary readings cover a little less than a fifth of the Bible. And it actually is smaller than that, because some readings are repeated.
There are two main reasons for a lectionary or list of readings. First, the list is supposed to contain a lot of the important readings, as judged by the committee. So we won’t miss them. And second, the list disciplines the preacher, who cannot just get up and say “Hi, here’s some interesting things that I was thinking about this week, and I’ve picked a few Bible verses to beef up my argument.” That is, we are supposed to start with the Bible.
The problem with a lectionary is that, if you don’t read the Bible on your own, you’ll miss 80% of the Bible even if you attend worship every week.
Often the lectionary readings simply reinforce things we already know. They are familiar passages, or they state the scriptural basis for some theological position, or they tell the central stories of Christianity that all Christians need to hear to keep in touch with Jesus. But some days I think the readings are chosen just to keep us honest, you and me, to keep us on our toes. And to remind us that there is some pretty weird stuff in the Bible. And that we should not discount it. Some days, and today is such a day.
The reading from the Gospel of Luke today is a parable. Parables are never straightforward. They come to things sort of sideways. They are designed to surprise you, to shake you up and get you thinking. The story of the Good Samaritan, for example, is surprising because a man in troubled is rescued by an unlikely helper. Or the parable of the Mustard Seed is surprising because Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like this tiny seed.
Parables are not allegories. That is, things and people in them do not stand for other things. The father in the story of the Prodigal Son does not stand for God, though the way he welcomes his lost son might make us think of the relationship between God and sinners. Us.
The parable for today in Luke is certainly surprising. It is supposed to make you think. But maybe all it makes you think is: “Huh? What’s with this? What is going on here?” There are a lot of strange parts to it, and it raises a lot of questions. As one scholar said, a many “interpreters have struggled to make sense of this parable.” Parables like this one make pastors want to suggest a hymn sing in place of the sermon.
The parable tells a story of a steward—like the site manager or operations officer—who is accused of cheating his boss, who is rich. The boss fires him. But first, the steward cheats the boss some more in a clever scheme in order to gain favor with the boss’s debtors. The steward is called both dishonest (he’s a bad guy) and shrewd (he’s a good guy). But there is so much here we don’t know.
Like, for example, who calls the manager shrewd? In our translation it says “And the master commended the dishonest manager.” But the word for master and the word for lord (as in Lord Jesus) is the same in Greek. Could it be Jesus who is commending this guy? And if so, why? And if the master is, why is he praising the man who cheated him? And is the master telling the steward to make friends by dishonest wealth, or is Jesus telling the disciples to (which is how most scholars read it)? And why would he say that? Is this good advice for Christians?
Who are the children of light? Why aren’t they so shrewd? Is that good or bad? What are eternal homes (a phrase which appears nowhere else in the Bible)? Why should your handling of wicked wealth (and why are you messing with wicked wealth in the first place)—why should that affect your handling of true riches? What does Jesus mean by true riches anyway?
Many interpreters of this text try to answer all these questions in a sensible way. They try to make what looks like a broken puzzle fit together to make a nice picture. But I’m not sure it can be done. They have to trim the pieces to make it work. They have to add a little notion here and ignore a little word or two there. There is a lot we do not know in this parable.
But there are some things we do know.
We know that this parable sits with a bunch of others in this part of Luke, and that most of them have to do with the way things will be, are, or ought to be in God’s kingdom. We know that some of them have to do with money. We know that Luke thinks that possessions are a problem for those who profess to follow Jesus.
We know that there are some things this parable of the steward have in common with some of the others near it in Luke. This parable, and the parable of the man who has to build extra barns to hold his extra stuff, and a parable that we’ll hear next week about a poor man named Lazarus, all start out “there was a rich man.” The parable of the man with the barns, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and this parable all have a main character in trouble or crisis of some kind. And when they are in trouble, they all mutter, trying to figure out what to do. And they all talk to themselves and make a decision. “I will do this: I will build larger barns,” says one. “I will get up and go to my father,” says another. “I have decided what to do,” says the third. I, I, I. None of them turns to God.
You cannot serve God and wealth, Jesus says. Why all this attention to money? Because wealth is incredibly attractive. It is also incredibly distracting. The complications of wealth make it hard to manage, but they also make it interesting to manage. The problems that wealth presents are just hard enough to be intriguing but just easy enough so that very clever people—shrewd people, you might say—can solve them. Rich people like to solve them, and like people who like to solve them, l suppose like the steward who is commended, in my reading, by the boss he cheated.
The Bible is the story of God’s relationship with us. It is often complicated because our relationship with God is often complicated. The Bible has weird parts because we have weird parts.
You cannot serve two masters, Jesus says. But we in our lives feel like we have many masters, not just two. And we make not just one permanent decision about whom to serve, but many daily ones.
God draws us near. We long to be drawn near. But God is not the only thing pulling us. There are lots of distracting attractions. When we are in crisis, when we are not sure where to go, how to deal, what to do, to whom do we turn?
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