Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘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. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
“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. If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
Luke 16:1-13
Our gospel reading today is one of those elephant-in-the-room passages and among the most confusing in the Gospels to us. The elephant is that it seems like Jesus is commending dishonest behavior, partly because of translations. Rather than “the dishonest manager,” as some title this parable, the manager is more like “shrewd,” “prudent,” or “wisely strategic.”
The scenario is strange, with a manager who is on the brink of losing his job until he adeptly forgives part of the debts of some debtors, allowing him to win some goodwill and secure his future. No matter how you slice it, this shrewdness is still strange because the lesson seems so at odds with the idealistic Jesus we usually hear.
So why is Jesus telling a story like this?
I wonder if to reach our cold, calculating hearts, Jesus sometimes has to speak the language of our cold, calculating hearts. Sometimes we need to hear the beautiful ideal that is so unlike our pragmatism, but sometimes he will speak to us in the very language of pragmatism; God uses sin to subvert sin, and he will use our cold, calculating hearts against themselves, just as he defeated death by dying—not for his own power, but because he so loved you.
If this is still confusing, perhaps a simpler way to think of it might be how priest Fr. Aaron Burt compared this to other similar teachings of Jesus, like the widow who annoys the unrighteous judge into forgiving her (Luke 18:1-8), or the friend at the midnight door (Luke 11:5-13), where he uses examples of worldly wisdom to encourage us to be wise in our spiritual matters. Per Burt, it’s something like this: take the practical worldly wisdom you have, like this shrewd manager who knows his livelihood is at stake and acts urgently, and be practical in your spiritual life with great urgency.
If we are still confused or unsure about this, just focus on that last helpful line as the bigger point: “You cannot serve two masters…you cannot serve God and money.” Got it—thank you for clarifying, Jesus.
…But what do we make of that?
A feature of sin’s pervasiveness is that we tend to try to fix sin in yet more sinful ways. The state of sin means we are not fully enmeshed with God and his will, but separated from God, and we often try to close the distance by inadvertently creating more distance. Perhaps what addicts us to money is that it seems close the gap of our tiny power with God’s almighty power, even if it's hopelessly small, so that we can have a little more power—even to do good, to survive.
Money itself is undoubtedly as spiritually confusing as our parable. It is one of the primary targets of our sin because it feeds into our basic needs, until, without realizing it, we keep compromising more and more of ourselves to try and fix more and more of our fundamental powerlessness. One dollar at a time, needing a little more security because I'm fundamentally insecure, a little more influence because I'm just not very influential. None of us are secure, influential, or powerful compared to God, but money gets us just a little more taste of that power.
It’s also hard because of the reality of money’s impact on our world. I’ve had large financial losses in my life, and I know many of us have. I know that the need for financial security is real, and the pain, fear, and shakenness are real when we take a significant hit or don’t know how it’s all going to work out financially. A financial disaster can feel like we’ve lost everything. Jesus, of course, reminds us that as long as we have him, this is never the case, for he will never be taken away from us, one reason among many that Christ alone is worthy of serving. He tells us to serve, in turn, by helping others financially who need it.
So another spiritually confusing part is when our addiction to money feels like a service to God, because, “Well, to serve God, I’ve got to get some money.” That’s hard because that’s true; to serve God, we may need to provide for others, to have power so that we can redistribute it. Calvin and other Reformers would say that we ought to work hard to make money so that we can, in turn, steward it back for our families, community, and especially those in need. But the line between this and worshipping money can be perilously thin; it needs our honest examination. It is our sin that twists our good intentions into evil, and then the next thing you know, you’re serving money and imagining you're serving God. This isn’t just a dig at the televangelists, for in our modern society, there are wide varieties of holy grifting.
Maybe that’s why I find this parable of the shrewd manager—however confusing it is—to be a helpful example. Instead of the real-world priests devouring widows of their money (Luke 20:47), the parable’s manager is acting clear-eyed in an unholy enterprise. In a way, the “dishonest” manager is actually more “honest” about being focused on bottom-line money matters than pretending he is doing a spiritual thing.
I have some strange experience with this. In my twenties, I worked in IT for a hedge fund for a few years, basically being a digital janitor for the money managers. It might seem funny, but there was something refreshing about the cold pragmatism; there was no pretense that we were on a higher calling mission to make the world a better place. No, we existed to make money for the people who gave us their amoral, value-neutral money. In some respects, this made decision-making easier. And in my experience, it was a pleasant and professional place to work. Banalities of evil aside, I liked a lot of the people there. Some of them were people of faith.
But—and I promise I am not saying this for anyone to feel sympathetic for any hedge fund—there was something actually sad in the hidden costs of that situation for those of us there, which reflects the sad state of human nature in general. That place existed to serve money, and not to serve God. We also knew that’s what we were there to do, at least while on the clock, whether for 40 hours, or the crazy 80+ hour weeks that some worked. Yes, you can still use that money to serve God, but I suspect for most of us, it was from a more common lie that sin tells: if you can just make enough money, then you can really be free to do what you want.
But the joke was on us, and the joke is on any of the millions (if not billions) of us who serve money: that is not the true freedom. The spiritual freedom God wants us to live in is so much greater than this. And so, in this parable, I hear Jesus saying, “You are all so naturally wise, adept, and feel the stakes of using our money because of how it relates to our worldly freedoms. So why not be just as wise, adept, and act like you understand the stakes of your spiritual freedom?”
The things that we want from serving money are what we actually get by serving God, by participating where he is in the world, by joining in the work he is doing in uplifting those who need help, by participating where his power, security, creativity, provision, all as great fruits of his love, are acting. And so, to truly have a pragmatic and shrewd attitude towards money is to fully believe and remember that money is not a god worth serving.
We still need it to survive, and it is a unique cruelty of society that so many are without it, which Jesus and the prophets point to. All the more reason not to serve it, but to use it in service to God as an expression of his love.
So what else do we do with this besides general generosity? I think we are all invited to truly discern what is truly wise in our spiritual life and to approach it practically. For instance, if I want a stronger relationship with God, but I’m not praying, well, shouldn’t I pray? And if I’m worried that I might be serving money instead of God, shouldn’t I take some time to look at the balance sheet and see? Is our instinct to be generous, or to hoard? Are we spending not just our money but our highest levels of energy on ourselves or others? Are we supporting sin and evil in the world because there is truly no other option, or where might we be called to repent and return closer to the prophetic wisdom of God?
And with all these and other spiritual matters, can we act with the same urgency we have around getting our paychecks?
And can we trust that the hard part has already been taken care of by God? And can we trust that Jesus tells us this not primarily from a place of guilt that we’re not doing enough, but to fully internalize that we are completely and totally loved by God, and his mercy wants not what money can give us, but wants us to be truly free?
Fellow sinners, let us remember that the blood has already been spilt. Let us listen to Jesus when he says we don’t have to give up that next piece of our souls to get the security we want; we can just follow him. That is far more practical than our practicality, far more rational than our rationality. Because he so loves you, the freedom we’re looking for has already been won. Amen.
