Summary: Wait. Say that again, Jesus? You tell a story about a dishonest manager who gets fired and then cooks the books so his former boss gets cheated of even more money, and you tell us to act like that? Slow down. What exactly are you saying? Seriously.
It's hard not to love a good caper film.
You know, like Ocean's Eleven. After being released from prison on parole, Danny Ocean recruits a band of oddballs and misfits, each with a special, illegal skill, for an impossible task. The goal? Rob hundreds of millions of dollars from three Las Vegas casinos - and in the process settle some scores.
Of course, there's no hiding the fact that this is a criminal activity. So why is a caper film like this -- as well as the sequels Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, and the final film in the series (so far), featuring an all-female band of thieves, Ocean's Eight -- so much fun?
Because the victims of the crime are rich, crooked and deserve, at least in our minds, to get fleeced of millions of dollars.
The fun is possible because it's all fantasy. None of this really happened. No one could pull off a job like this, right? Not in the real world, right? Although if somebody could, wouldn't it be cool? Just a little?
All the same: Kids, don't try this at home.
Why bring this all up? Because Jesus tells a very puzzling story in what is often called, "The Parable of the Dishonest Manager." It too involves a caper in which a wealthy person is fleeced, and the thief comes out on top. And we have to wonder -- why does it seem like Jesus wants us to root for a thief?
In the parable a "rich man" discovers his financial manager has been cheating him, so he fires him. The dishonest manager, too weak for manual labor and too proud to beg, responds by calling in the rich man's debtors and instructing them to alter their bills so they only owe a fraction of their former debt. What makes this story astonishing -- and puzzling -- is that Jesus tells us the rich man praises his dishonest manager for having made friends through his chicanery, noting that "the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light." And if that weren't bad enough, Jesus concludes the story by encouraging his listeners to "make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes."
What? I'm sorry. Jesus praises whom? And he wants us to act like whom?
First things first -- let's remember this is a story, not journalism. And it's not just any kind of story -- it's a parable. The Greek word parabola is not only used for this kind of story, but it's also the term for the mathematical arc known as a parabola - something that travels a long way out, then makes the same journey back to its starting point -- like a boomerang! And parables are stories that start in the real world -- a woman looking for a lost coin, dough rising thanks to the yeast, and farmers scattering seed this way and that -- go way out there, then come back to get our attention by giving us a whacking.
That means out of an ordinary situation -- someone getting fired -- the ridiculous happens: The fired employee ingratiates himself with his former boss's clients by changing the amount they owe, thus earning the praise of his boss and a commendation from Jesus that this is the way we ought to live.
Whack! That last line knocked us silly. Once we get back up on our feet, let's brush ourselves off and figure out what we were actually seeing and what lesson we're supposed to get from it.
First things first, however. Let's look at this story a little closer.
The first clue about how we should react comes from a phrase in the very first sentence of the story: "There was a rich man who had a manager ...."
You see? You ran past the key word without realizing it: rich. We may be used to thinking that a business owner who is rich worked hard to earn the wealth, but most fortunes were hereditary in the ancient world, and very few people were rich. Most people lived day to day, always uncertain of what the future held. When Jesus began a story with the words "There was a rich man ...." His audience already knew this was not to the hero of the story.1
Not only that, but in the Roman world, rich people didn't work. That's what slaves did. Those slaves might handle the equivalent of millions of dollars, but they didn't own their own bodies.
The story claims that this man, in the Scholars Version translation, was "maliciously accused of squandering" his master's wealth. So is this even true?2
But the rich man believes the worst about this slave in charge of his books and does not investigate to find out if this is true. The listeners to this story would be familiar with this kind of injustice.
Think about the tenant farmers and the day laborers who couldn't get a job that day and so had time to listen to Jesus tell stories. Who do you suppose they identify with in this story? These are people who never get ahead in life. What was it that Tennessee Earnie Ford said about the poor laborer? "Don't call me St. Peter, I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."3
Don't forget that the earliest written languages, such as cuneiform, were invented not for writing poetry or history, but for keeping accurate accounts for the purposes of taxation. And the person who could read and write, which was not a universal skill, had the same power as Ferris Bueller in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when he hacks into the school computer and changes his number of absences that school year from one that will prevent him from graduation to perfect attendance.4
So maybe this slave accountant is a hero because he calls in the clients, one by one, and does not cancel their debts but makes them more equitable, closer to something they can manage.
This still leaves us with the puzzle of why the rich man would praise him? Witherington and Levine wonder if perhaps the rich man became more popular because the steward has done him a favor by lowering the clients' debts.5 He's still rich beyond imagining, But his reputation is better. It's kind of like when Terry Benedict, the villain of Ocean's 11, is recruited by Danny Ocean in Ocean's 13 to be part of the team that steals great wealth from an even more disgusting individual. He insists on fleecing the criminals who fleeced him, but his revenge is thwarted when Danny Ocean channels Benedict's payout into an orphan's home, which ends up making him look like a hero. After a while he gets to liking his new, better reputation. Maybe the rich man in this parable started to enjoy being liked instead of reviled.
This could be a win-win-win situation. No wonder the steward was welcomed into the homes of people who had been saddled with crushing debt. No wonder the rich man praised him. No wonder people laughed at the story as Jesus told, perhaps enraging the powerful to whom no amount of wealth is enough, and to whom the fate of other people matters little.
Let me say once again, Jesus was telling a story, a story that delighted his listeners, challenged his opponents and no doubt caused people walking away later to say, "But I'm not supposed to do that, right?"
Don't do that. Erasing people's debt after you're fired from an IT job is like picking the Chance card in Monopoly that says, "Go to Jail. Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect 200 Dollars." I can't imagine telling a judge or jury that you were just following the Bible and expecting that to get you off the hook. Try it, and the parable following its parabola will boomerang back on you and whack you head over heels.
What we should hear is the delight of those who are glad the extremely rich got what the audience imagines the rich had coming -- and their delight in debts being eased if not erased, in cheering on the audacity of those who do something positive for those on the underside of society.
And to remember there are serious disparities in wealth in our society and anything positive -- positively legal, that is -- to work for equity is precisely what the gospel is calling us to do.