Jesus keeps teaching us about the limits of transactional thinking — and the life-giving beauty of sacrifice in his way of love.
How we squander our most valuable resource
Proper 20C
Luke 16:1-13
If you’re having trouble making sense of Jesus’s point in this parable, then you’re not alone. This simple-sounding parable is one of the most argued-about parts of scripture.
Partly because it doesn’t really sound very Jesusy. It almost sounds like an encouragement to be dishonest, or to take advantage of someone else’s deception. That doesn’t match with Jesus’s earlier critiques of dishonesty!
This doesn’t sound right. So maybe we need to dig into what Jesus is wrestling with.
What we know for sure is that Jesus is telling a story about money and about power. That is clear. How these two things (money and power) get used…that gets a little more difficult to parse.
Let’s start with what is directly on the minds of the hearers.
Jesus just left the house of a rich man. And it was there that Jesus confronted the other guests about feeling superior to the other people in the room. And he confronted the host for only inviting powerful people to this little soiree.
Jesus confronted the religious leadership over their exclusive nature, saying what if we invited everyone to this party?
Then once he leaves, he’s surrounded by giant crowds hanging on his every word and he says to them what if we took discipleship more seriously?
It’s almost as if Jesus tells the elite that they’ve raised the righteousness bar so high that only rich people can get over it. Maybe with carbon alloy polls to vault over or flying private helicopters. Don’t think too hard about this image. It’s a high bar, but only the rich and powerful can get over.
And then he tells the crowd, but the bar isn’t laying on the ground, either. This isn’t everything goes. You gotta make an effort here.
The point is that we’re making something together. And some of us are trying to keep a bunch of people out and some of us don’t think we have to lift a finger or change our behavior.
This is an old question!
It’s a conundrum, really. God loves us exactly as we are AND God desires for us to change.
And we make this into a paradox—as if these two ideas (loved as we are and encouraged to be better) are incompatible states of grace.
And we’ve fought over this as if these simultaneous loves and joys are political divisions: Party A is for love us as we are and Party B is for changing everything about our sinful nature.
But that’s just a human construct—a distraction, really. These aren’t opposites or flip sides.
What parent doesn’t love her child as she is and hopes for awesome grades? Or wishes they could just settle down for a few minutes? A parent’s love isn’t contingent on good behavior. And, nevertheless, we hope for peace and joy in our children’s lives.
God’s love and God’s hope for us are completely compatible.
But notice what happens in the story.
Jesus is speaking to crowds and inviting them to sacrifice and give up themselves and follow him. He says:
“So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
Instead of scattering the masses, something else happens.
This challenging message resonates with the outcasts more than anyone else! They come near, longing to hear more, eager to give up everything. So Jesus tells them three parables about things that are lost: a sheep, a coin, and a son.
Then he tells the disciples this parable about a dishonest manager.
Losing Two Sons
Look at the flow of this wider story. Jesus confronts all the people who know stuff about faith already. All the here’s-what-you-should-dos of being religious: they’ve got that junk memorized. And he says to them, open the door to a bigger possibility. Stop trying to get into the righteous world—make it so we all get in. Don’t just build it around yourselves. Instead, build it around all these people showing up. [Which, of course, includes people they’d rather not invite.]
So Jesus tells them three parables. We heard the first two last week. And the third is a parable we call the Prodigal Son. It is a famous story of a young man running away, squandering his wealth, and returning home. He hopes his Dad will have an ounce of mercy for him, but instead, his Dad wraps him in his arms and brings him back into the family.
But this parable is really a story about two sons. One who squanders his inheritance (notice that word!) and a second who is jealous when his family is restored.
At the root of this story is an economics we take for granted. We shouldn’t.
The Economics of the Loss
The younger son goes to his Dad and demands that he get his inheritance now. What this would require is for his Dad to sell 1/3 of his land, livestock, slaves, and everything else. And then hand over a big sack of cash.
That’s the logistics. But the emotional payment is even bigger. The son is quite literally excommunicating himself from his family and in his own mental frame, emotionally killing off his father to gain now what he would get after his father dies.
The offense is about as big as one can get. So when he comes home and is welcomed as a son by that same Dad, that generosity is as big as one can get.
But Jesus doesn’t just tell a story of a jerk son coming home and being welcomed with open arms.
When he tells of the elder brother, we see that he has never gotten over that offense. He too has squandered his inheritance. Not in spending it, but in not appreciating all this time he has had with his father. Time his brother lost. He has come to see his Dad as the estate itself—an estate he has been enslaved to as long as his father lives.
The elder son is literally using the same dehumanizing metric the “bad” son used years before. Only he is still using it.
Squander
So these other parables of rejoicing over the finding of the lost further engage that economics of exclusion and squandered relationship.
Jesus told those parables to the outcasts drawing near and the religious leaders who cast them out. This parable he tells the disciples who have been there from the beginning.
It’s a way of saying
Remember the thread. And don’t get seduced by the world’s economics. God has different ideas.
And I think that’s one of the reasons this parable is tricky. We’re not entirely sure which “master” Jesus is speaking to. The rich man from the beginning? Or is it Jesus who says “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Who is commending this manager? And for what? Being shrewd in dishonesty? Or in spite of his dishonesty?
What truly is squandered? The rich man’s wealth? Wealth which, in his culture was considered the result of extortion? So every penny is made dishonestly? Or perhaps his relationship to the people he taxes is squandered?
Remember, the manager is not paid by the rich man, but exclusively from what he taxes the people. The manager is an outcast because he is an instrument of exploitation. The rich man’s system forces him to exploit his own people.
The Way of Love
With our economics in mind, this parable makes little sense to us. At least prescriptively and directly.
But to those Jesus commands to invite people in, widen the circle, and relieve the burdens on the powerless, who just heard about a son who rehearsed his apology, his begging for forgiveness, looking to find a place to land {sound familiar?} and his father welcomed him in before he could even say a word {ah!}, then those functions of economics change.
We see that this is really about relationship and debt and forgiveness. It provokes questions about what we’re willing to do to keep a job or what we’re willing to condone to keep things smooth. Jesus is a smart dude! He knows us!
Jesus tells a parable from the other side. Not from the side of forgiving someone else who squanders, but so we can see what we are squandering.
Time.
Relationship.
Hope.
Connection.
Beauty.
Gratitude.
Life.
The tragedy in these parables isn’t a lost job or hypothetical division. It’s a man so stuck on someone else he can’t live his own life! It’s the grinding toil of amassing wealth and exploiting our neighbors. For what? That is tragic!
We widen the circle and invite others to share in what we have. Not because we get anything out of it. But because this is the way. Jesus’s way of love. It brings to us the most valuable resource in the world: time spent in love.
That’s a resource worth sacrificing all that other junk for.