|
15th Sunday After Pentecost
Luke 16:1-13
Sometimes Scripture is hard to understand. It can be hard to swallow and hard to apply to our lives. But this morning, Jesus outdoes himself in that department with the parable we just heard! He tells the story of a manager who is about to be fired for squandering the property he was charged with managing. We don’t know exactly what this manager did but we do learn that he is not done yet. Before he is let go, he cooks the book further. We might like to think he did this for the sake of the people who owed money – that would certainly be easier to hear in church! But, no, he reduces their debt to feather his own nest. So that when he is jobless, those debtors will owe him a favor.
Shrewd guy. The rich man whose property he was managing is impressed. He recognizes a fellow wheeler-and-dealer and he commends the manager for his wisdom. In the cutthroat world of business this isn’t entirely surprising.
What IS surprising is what Jesus has to say about it. We expect him to say, “Don’t be like this guy.” But instead he says, “…make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
What? “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth?” That doesn’t sound much like the Jesus we know who says it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Or the Jesus that tells the rich young man to give up all his possessions to become a disciple. Or the Jesus who just a few verses later in this same passage says, “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
So what is going on here? Honestly? I am not sure. Turns out, I am not alone in that. Scholars and theologians have struggled to make sense of this passage since the beginning. And that struggles continues today. AJ Levine, a preeminent Jewish New Testament scholar, writes that this passage, “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.”
And I wonder if that is the point.
We want to leave here with clear instructions. We want a game plan for salvation. Easy to follow rules that make sense based on the world we know. But today we leave with more questions than answers.
Our charge this morning may be to admit that we don’t really get it. We don’t know the mind of God. Just when we think we have God figured out, Jesus throws this wrench into it. This doesn’t fit neatly into the story we know. The one where we mess up, God forgives, and all is well. The one where there is a clear winner and loser. A good guy and a bad guy.
This parable challenges us to keep looking, keep wrestling, keep asking God to help us to understand.
Who is the good guy? Maybe not who we think.
Who is the bad guy? It’s not so clear.
What is the point? Murky at best.
The only way to get some feel for this parable is to step back and look at the larger picture of Luke’s Gospel. In light of that long view, we can rest assured that today’s story has something to do with those dinner parties Jesus disrupted by inviting the sinners and the lowly, the wrong people.
We can be certain that it has something to do with what has been called “the great reversal” in Luke’s Gospel. In the words of Mary, the mother of Jesus, early on in Luke we hear:
“…(God) has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”
Undoubtedly it has something to do with this alternative vision of God’s reign. A vision that includes restoring the integrity of human life, revitalizing human communities, inviting to the table people and groups who have been side-lined or deemed unworthy.
It takes courage to keep asking ourselves: Who is the good guy here? Who am I in the story? Who is to be included in the heavenly banquet right here and right now? We are all enmeshed in political and economic and social systems that are more complicated than we can understand. We take for granted the way things work. Just as the people of Jesus’s day did. What is Jesus trying to get us to understand here? We have to keep asking the questions.
Certainly, Jesus is trying to tell us something about the Kingdom of God. I don’t think it looks like Wall Street or the NASDAQ, or the Nikkei. I don’t think it excludes those but maybe the more challenging question is how to make them work to build up the world for all of God’s creation.
Luke included this story for a reason. I don’t think it has to do with upholding the political and economic and social systems we put our faith in. I do think it’s about disrupting business as usual to challenge us to dig deeper. This parable doesn’t make sense to us. And maybe that is the point.
Following Jesus is not neat and tidy. It is messy and challenging and disruptive. It asks us to consider an alternative vision to the one we take for granted. It asks us to admit that we are not God and to turn to God for wisdom and courage. It asks us to trust that there is another way, a way that honors God’s desire for all of creation to flourish and a way for us to be a blessing to one another.
It’s uncomfortable to sit with not knowing exactly what this all means . But Jesus didn’t promise comfort. He promised abundant life. Abundant life for you and for me and for the ones we call the least among us. What does that mean for us in our day-to-day lives? This is a dangerous question. It might disrupt business as usual. It may lead to cracks in our certainty. But cracks are where the light gets in.
| 
