Saturday, September 18, 2010

Luke 16:1-13

. . . 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 . . . Whoever is faithful in a very little . . . If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth . . . And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another . . . No slave can serve two masters . . . 

              excerpts from Luke 16:8ff (NRSV)

Clueless Luke's Editorial Quandary

Greg Carey mentions in his commentary that, according to C. H. Dodd*, “even Luke seems clueless as to what to do with the parable, providing at least three interpretations as the parable's conclusion.” Some order comes to this confusion when we spot some thematic links that bind this parable to the prodigal son story of the previous chapter. I am using that link myself to preach this text Sunday. But not here. Here I am interested in clueless Luke's editorial quandary.

The opportunistic, self-serving world of the manager is hardly a vision of Christ's kingdom that we would expect. And yet, the ethical confusion brought on by the dishonest manager episode reflects the world we actually live in. There is nothing confusing in the least about the fact of dishonest managers reaping rewards for their cunning. People in the pew know him. Some are him. The ethos of the manager's behavior is fairly standard operating procedure in our own marketplace. Ivy League grads can pull seven and eight figure salaries for the smarts to fabricate value in investment markets. Other countries institutionalize such predatory behavior in different ways and we call it corruption. Like in Afghanistan where, as it came out this week, we sometimes pay off Taliban-linked protection organizations to get passage for supply convoys so that we can fight the Taliban. It's just another way of creating value and meeting payroll. Not all stake holders are high rollers: my wife once had a factory job where she made the mistake of seeing how much she could produce on the line in a day- a classic faux pas that got her snubbed by the entire shift. It's the way things work. Or, perhaps better said, the way things work out in their dysfunction. Our species is adept at camoflauging greed and sloth in the guise of value.

Another confusion lurks underneath our ethical dilemma: an editorial confusion is signaled in the whole series of stop/starts that tries to wrap the unsavory parable up with a clincher. A certain disingenuous odor hangs over this list. It just doesn't read right on Jesus' lips, which is why a lot of preachers skip to the “No slave can serve two masters” part and call it a day. (When is hermeneutical selection, as in, say, making texts accessible to the laity, just another way of "cooking the books"?) I would propose that this editorial confusion hits home in the church harder than the mere fact of dishonest success, for we are left with the task of justifying the commendation of the dishonest manager with the clear ethical imperatives of Luke's gospel. We have to come down somewhere. Write something. Say something for heaven's sake! What's more, this is personal: our life as we invest it depends on the system of the dishonest manager at the same time as our life as we pray it depends, at key points, on the contradiction of that system. The world of the church is not, nor should be, the world of the enfolding norm. We all, like poor "Luke", skip around looking for the one pious refrain that can bring the unsavory accounting practices of our public “household” into line with Christ's kingdom. In public discourse, this often means finding scapegoats. People grab at the same old tired “one liners” with each election cycle that try to realign faith with a failing world that they depend on for their livelihoods. New pundits try to rewrite the record, and end up only adding to the list.

But just as there is good faith and bad faith, there is good writing and bad writing. “Good writing” as I use it here does not mean being skilled with words so much as being skilled at letting the spirit of Christ form our words - honest words that refuse to circumvent the story that indicts us in our personal and social complicity in the whole debacle of mismanagement. It is hard editorial work, as surely as was that which produced Luke's gospel. Only this time, as readers, the ball is in our court. The only way we can unravel the problems of the parable so that it makes sense is by unraveling our role in the problem in our story of the dishonest manager. Until that happens, the parable stands in all its curious squalor on the lips of Jesus himself, leaving us stuttering in our testimony, caught like fools making sheep eyes while trying to take our hand out of the tiller.

*Parables of the Kingdom (rev. ed.; London: Nisbet & Co., 1936), 29-30.

© 2010 Andy Gay