1 Timothy 6.6-19, Luke 16.1-13
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 25 September 2022
Austwick, Keasden (Harvest)
This is The Parable of the Prodigal Manager. The one who had taken his boss's instructions a little too lightly and squandered his profits. I picture him as an estate manager who was never very good at collecting debts from the tenant farmers, and whose landowner boss, feeling his reputation in the business community to be threatened, one day counted his losses and having had enough, told the man to get ready to clear his desk and leave. For the Prodigal Manager this was a moment of desolation, for, facing the sack he asked himself, "What will I do now? I'm not strong enough to lift and I'm too proud to beg." It was a moment of desolation that became for this Prodigal, an epiphany. For, realising that he had nothing to lose, he gambled on a plan which, if it worked, would make his boss look good again and would make the poor tenant farmers feel even better.
So the desperate Prodigal Manager forgave a portion of the amount owed by his master’s debtors. It turned out to be a win-win scheme; for on the one hand, with people assuming that the manager was acting on the landowner’s orders, this debt-release made his boss look generous and charitable in everybody’s eyes. And on the other hand, the Prodigal facing financial ruin sent out a lifebuoy to those tenants who he could see were drowning in debt.
I’ve called this The Parable of the Prodigal Manager for good reason. For immediately before it in Luke’s gospel is the familiar Parable of the Prodigal Son; and Luke must have put these two stories together for a reason. Their similarities are obvious and threefold:
First, the men who let down their seniors by squandering money entrusted to them: the Prodigal Son his father’s inheritance, the Prodigal Manager his boss’s profits;
Second, their both reaching a moment of desolation, a lowest ebb when all seemed lost and their choice was either to despair and accept ruin, or to swallow their pride and take a gamble on a course of action which might just end in their being rescued and restored;
And Third, in both cases the acceptance of the senior men when the Prodigals returned bowed, bruised, but in the Prodigal Son’s case absolutely forgiven, so much so that the father threw a party for his squandering wandering son; and in the landowner’s case this surprising turn where instead of reprimanding the Prodigal Manager for further diminishing his shrinking profits, he praised him for his innovative loss-leading scheme, commending him, we’re told, because he acted shrewdly.
There is a difference between these two stories, for in the Parable of the Prodigal Son there is a third main character, the other brother who never put a foot out of place on the farm, and was fiercely jealous of the fuss his father made over his squandering sibling on his return. In the Parable of the Prodigal Manager no such character appears - but I would venture to say that perhaps that person has instead taken the form of everyone in Jesus’ audience on that day, and every reader of Luke’s gospel ever since, you and me today included, who has struggled to come to terms with the way that not only the landowner, but also Jesus himself, seems to commend what looks like dishonesty with money, an act of financial deviance.
Why did Jesus affirm what he calls ‘the children of this age’ for being ‘more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than … the children of light’? Why would he say that it was admirable to ‘make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth’? If these questions torment us it’s because Jesus wants us to take this crucial point to heart: ‘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.’ He’s challenging us to work out our own position.
The uncomfortable reality which may begin to dawn on us is that if we look at the Prodigal Manager’s act of financial chicanery and judge it to be immoral then maybe that’s because that’s the way that people who serve wealth would see it: if you’re wrapped up in a worldview which revolves around the acquisition of wealth then you’ll be horrified by this tale of a juggling act with someone else’s money which in business terms looks imprudent or even immoral.
However - and this is Jesus’ underlying message - if instead we look at the Prodigal Manager’s action as being an imaginative gesture which brought benefits to his boss and his fellow debtors, a juggling act which somehow made diminished returns end up enriching everybody - then maybe that’s because that’s the way that people who serve God would see it: if you’re wrapped up in a worldview which revolves around the ethics of grace, embracing forgiveness and committed to actively loving both enemy and neighbour, then that’s how you would see it.
Consider how this might play out in our own world… and often does. In charitable giving which brings no financial benefit to the giver but blessing to everyone involved in that transaction. In communities creating their own local ways of barter and exchange of food and services, or their own localised energy production and distribution. In farming co-operatives which bypass the supermarkets. On every initiative which might follow a vision of a larger economy but is first and foremost inspired and driven by a vision of a better society. [2]
Consider how this may come into the trickier ethical issues of our time, as we ask: do we use for good purposes, money which we know has been gained through bad practices? Do we fund the care home from a charity set up by a slave-trader? Scholars who look closely at the language of Luke’s gospel point out that it’s inaccurate to call this The Parable of the Dishonest Manager, and more accurate to call it The Parable of the Manager of Money Gained Dishonestly, or unethically. Luke is uncontroversially assuming that as a matter of course the landowner in the story would have been using every trick in the statute book, every profit-making tactic however underhand, to squeeze the most money he could from his struggling peasant tenants.
Jesus seems to affirm the practice of using Money Gained Dishonestly, or unethically, to bring blessing and win friendships with others. Which raises questions like these which I know some communities have faced in the past: should we use gambling profits - National Lottery funding - to set up our church coffee shop? Should we let the arms trade fund our youth centre? And taking Jesus’ teachings seriously should influence our approach to disinvestment, a current challenge of our day.
These questions contribute to the work of those people Jesus calls The Children of Light: those who want to serve God not money; those who want to put community before personal gain; who want to put the health of the good earth and its creatures before surplus yield; those who are convinced that it is possible to use the resources of ‘this present age’ - however tainted and compromised they may be - to put them to good use, to begin to shape ‘the age to come’ - which is already beginning, and will continue to grow into an age of grace, peace, and equitable love for all.
Notes
[1] This sermon owes everything to the detailed reflections on this parable of Paul Nuechterlein in his Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year C, Proper 20C, in particular his summary of David Landry and Ben May, “Honor Restored: New Light on the Parable of the Prudent Steward (Luke 16:1-8a). For another approach to this parable see also my previous sermon (2016, 2019) Forgive anyway! which is an adaptation of Paul Nuechterlein’s 1998 sermon The Reign of Compassion.
[2] Leader: Liz Truss has misread the times. New Statesman, 21 September 2022: “After a decade of austerity that has frayed the public realm, and an unprecedented period of wage stagnation, voters are craving security and an active state. Ms Truss’s free-market, small-state individualism is ill-suited to the temper of these times. She has little or nothing to say about the improvement of public services, the UK’s regional inequalities and the common good. She is not a bridge-builder; she does not aspire to reach out across difference in order to build a new cross-class coalition. Even the Union between England and Scotland – which the Queen so cherished – seems of little concern. The Prime Minister may have a vision of a larger economy but she has no vision of a better society. This creates an opening for Labour and the opposition parties, ideally working together, to forge a new settlement.”
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