Year C

Luke 16:1-13

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Vision of God

The parable just read in our midst about the dishonest steward is a strange gospel. Whichever way you read it, it can be confusing. For centuries, commentators and scholars have struggled to make sense of this outrageous tale. Luke obviously decided that the parable is about attachment to wealth, so he put it with another story in this chapter about the dangers of money, but I can’t help but get the feeling that somehow Luke must have missed some of what Jesus said or misunderstood what he was saying. It’s hard to believe that Jesus would tell a story like this especially when you put it into the context of the rest of the gospels. Several of Jesus’ parables were clearly funny in their original context and maybe this is how we should read the story of the dishonest manager for it to make more sense.

Luke begins the fifteenth chapter of his gospel, by telling us that Jesus is preaching to a large crowd. Scribes and Pharisees object that he spends too much time with the “sinners and tax collectors.” As the religious authorities of the time they have the responsibility of monitoring what Jesus is teaching and then reporting back to the Temple authorities. The religion police are upset that Jesus is so welcoming that he actually eats with sinners. Jesus responds by telling the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. Chapter 15 concludes when Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees the Parable of the Prodigal Son, a story that continues the theme of God’s risky love and radical grace.

Now in chapter in 16, Luke opens by indicating Jesus has turned his attention away from those who were trying to undermine his ministry, the scribes and Pharisees, toward those who support him, his disciples. They have just heard the story about the kid welcomed home after wasting the family’s money and his father surprisingly giving him a party, to Jesus immediately telling the parable of the dishonest steward. The central character in this story cheats both his customer and his boss but when he gets caught and is about to be fired, he is ingenious enough to save his own skin. He insures his own future by ingratiating himself to others, and in the language of today’s business world, he has procured a “golden parachute” to guarantee a prosperous landing when it is time to bail out.

The plot revolves around fraud, embezzlement, and creative accounting. And we hear Jesus commend him for his dishonesty. Can it be that Jesus suggests a shady ethical stance, all too well known to us in the worlds of politics and commerce today? Certainly not! And I don’t believe that Jesus is suggesting dishonesty. What I do believe is; we need to remember is that this story is a parable. Parables are seemingly simple stories yet have a multifaceted view into inner truth and reality. The parable is not advice about financial management: Jesus is not telling people to cheat their bosses. The truth Jesus is trying to commend the steward for is for taking an interest in the future. The steward foresees his future, and provides for it. He understood that, in order to be where he wanted to be in the future, how he handled today counted.

Solomon wrote in his proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The parable today speaks especially to Christians or communities who have lost the vision of who they are and what they have been called to do. When we have no idea where we are going, the treasures in front of us are simply things that have no larger value beyond our own need for them. They become easily used and misused. The Pharisees and scribes, leaders of the chosen people, who are in the crowd that Jesus is addressing, had lost their vision of who God had called them to be. Controlled by wealth, by money, even complacency, they had blended into society and lost their vision.

To these and the disciples Jesus says, to paraphrase verse 13, “You can either serve this present age and love its treasures, or you can love God and serve God in this present age. But you cannot do both. One leads to death. The other leads to life. The prophet Jeremiah understood this as he looked at the future of his people and cried out in his grief. Greed and dishonesty abounded in the land. The wealthy exploited the poor, and justice was in shreds. He knew that no society could survive long under such conditions. The people were sealing their doom in the not-so-distant future by their shortsighted view in the present.

Unlike the steward in the parable, the people of the land did not look ahead and foresee what was about to happen unless they took drastic action. So Jeremiah rose up and argued against the values of his generation which is the task of the church in every age. We are to ask; “What are the unrecognized consequences of our actions today”? If the consequences are grim, then it is the task of the church to call for repentance, which rarely makes the church very popular. We are in the business of saving souls but also to question current problems of poverty and violence, hatred, racism, the rights of woman and minorities or care of the earth. We do this because we believe that the future which ends in heaven begins now and should shape today and tomorrow.  

Consider the phrase we pray every time we gather for worship: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This means that whatever we believe heaven is to be like; we work to achieve that now. Is heaven a place of unity and peace for God’s people? Is it a place where righteousness reigns and all who seek to enter are welcome? Then here and now we are to set right all injustices. This is the kind of concern for the future that Jesus addresses in his parable. The parable warns that the children of God have lost that eternal perspective of who God is and who we are in relationship to God. Somewhere along the way we have forgotten that Jesus died and was resurrected to bring us new life. Somewhere along the way we have lost the vision and stopped hearing God’s voice and buried our treasures.

It is easy to grow complacent about the responsibilities God gives us. Yet, for us the future is now and we are summoned to care about it, so that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. The parable is a call to reclaim who we are and to renew our vision today for the kingdom of God beyond us and among us because the master loves the world and wants stewards who will focus not on earthly wealth but on the heavenly abundance of grace, forgiveness of debts, and love. These are the wealth of God.