Reflection by The Rev'd Dr. Deborah Broome

An unlikely tale of grace 

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

Let’s just admit up-front – this is a strange parable and we don’t quite know what to make of it.  What are we supposed to think?  Whom do we identify with – the rich man or the manager?  We’re tempted to take sides – except that we’re not sure which is the right side to take.  A story that starts “There was a rich man who had a manager” sets up expectations about what sort of people these were and what was probably going to happen.  In most stories like this – especially in Luke’s Gospel – the rich man is the villain, because if you’re a poor villager, that’s what life is like.  And if the rich man is the villain the manager must be the hero – so we get ready to sympathise with the manager.  Except that the story says that he’s dishonest – and surely we’re not supposed to admire someone like that? 

We tend to look for the God-character in parables – and we make two assumptions here: the master is God, and the economics system is capitalism.  And so we sympathise with the master who’s been defrauded by his corrupt employee and we condemn the manager.  We forget how, in that society, he can’t just go looking for another job but is now homeless and without any means of earning a living.  And thinking that the master is God, we can’t understand the way he commends the dishonest manager.  This all seems seriously weird.

Often in life, we find ourselves in a situation we don’t know what to do with and we’re not sure how to react.  Whenever we feel like that, a good thing to do is to ask: where is God in this?  Where do we discern love, justice, compassion, and grace – the values that Jesus proclaimed, and for which he died?

There’s a lot of grace in this story.  The manager doesn’t get what he deserves.  He’s allowed to draw up his accounts, instead of being fired immediately and thrown into prison.  The debtors have part of their debt cancelled: undeserved good fortune, a glimpse of the hoped-for coming of God and God’s reign.  Imagine if you were one of those debtors, suddenly having what you owed cut in half!  Imagine if some official somewhere decided to halve your student loan.  The rich man ends up with the good will of his clients who rejoice in their reduced debt, and the manager is praised for his shrewdness, and possibly keeps his job after all.  No-one gets what they deserve.  Everyone gets grace.

Does that remind you of anything?  That’s how God deals with us.  We could never repay everything we owe God.  Even if our account was swapped for one for a lesser amount, it might be like having a bill for a billion dollars reduced to a mere million.  We still wouldn’t be able to repay it all.  God’s love and God’s grace does for us even more than the shrewd but dishonest manager does for the master’s clients.

And yes, that manager is “shrewd and dishonest.”   There’s quite a few people in the Bible like that: Jacob gets away with cheating his older brother, David’s a shining example of kingship in spite of his misuses of power and lack of personal morality, and so on.  And maybe the manager isn’t too different from us – because we’re all a mixture of good and bad qualities, and yet God loves us.

It’s an untidy story – but then, it’s an untidy world.  So how do we live?  Maybe like this: when we feel we have to take sides, let it be on the side of compassion.  When something happens and we need to react, let’s choose the most loving response, one that leaves most room for God’s grace to flow in.  And if that means that some people get something good when they don’t deserve it, well, that’s how grace works.