For Sunday
Proper 20C
Collect
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Sometimes Jesus tells a parable that hits strange because it doesn’t sound like him. It sounds like Jesus wants us to cheat people to get along? Or to ensure we have a backup plan? But then says we cannot serve God and wealth? What is he really saying.
Remember that chapter 15 (which we read from last week) involves the tax collectors and sinners leaning in to hear what Jesus had to say while the pharisees and scribes grumbled. Well, the lost parables were for the former and this is for the latter. Jesus is putting up a mirror to the super-religious and saying “You are cheating your neighbors to curry favor with empire — which gains power by cheating. And you are rewarded by cheaters (who hate you, by the way) for cheating your neighbors. But those neighbors? They will be rewarded by God.
What might be easy to gloss over is the idea of wealth and survival, working and gaining, as some kind of personal endeavor. That, after all, is what the dishonest manager is thinking. I am in trouble. I have to get out of this. So he hatches a scheme to save himself. Except he isn’t. At no point is he alone. He is trying to game the system that holds him and all of his neighbors. And he is doing it with the full understanding that he is trying to curry favor with good people so he can be among them.
Jesus makes it clear that the Kin-dom is based on the company we keep; not by favors curried by backroom deals, but by being honest and decent with one another.