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The Middle Man
September 19, 2010 Luke 16: 1-13
Rev. Catherine Purves
Some Fridays are easier than others. Friday is sermon-writing day.
Planning for sermon-writing day begins on Tuesday when I read the suggested
texts, think about sermon titles, consider hymns, and prepare the bulletin.
Usually, I look forward to Friday when all of the week’s reading and
reflections come together and a new sermon is born. But, as I said, some
Fridays are easier than others. And some weeks I anticipate Friday with more
eagerness and confidence than others. This week I was not looking forward to
Friday. This week right up to and including Friday morning I had absolutely
no idea how I was going to explain this passage from Luke’s Gospel.
I was not encouraged to read that many commentators judge this parable of
the dishonest steward or manager to be the most difficult of all Jesus’ parables.
One 20th century theologian and one 16th century scholar agreed that it is
impossible to recover what the parable originally meant. Great! Apparently, it
was used by Julian the Apostate in the 4th century in his efforts as a heretic to
prove the inferiority of the Christian faith and its founder, Jesus. Wonderful!
Ever since, this story, that seems to commend a scoundrel, has been an
embarrassment to the church. Oh my! I was not looking forward to Friday.
It is probably a feature of my own stubbornness that I decided to try to
preach on this text at all. But, having survived Friday, having struggled with a
very difficult text until I felt it spoke to me, and hopefully to you as well, I
want to testify to the importance of sticking with the Bible even when making
sense of it is just plain hard work. The labor that is long and hard often leads
to a birth that is well worth the effort. And the text that shocks us and
challenges us can have surprising power to change us.
No one is better able to explain inexplicable parables, I think, than Ken
Bailey, a highly respected scholar not just of the New Testament, but of the
culture of Palestine which was the backdrop for all of Jesus’ parables. [By the
way, it is Ken’s 45 year old son, David Bailey, who is now on our prayer list
because he is in hospice care with brain cancer.] Ken Bailey lived and taught
in the Middle East for over 20 years, and the title of one of his books, Through
Peasant Eyes, expresses his belief that 21st century Americans cannot properly
understand what Jesus was saying in his parables unless we can begin to see
them and hear them as a 1st century Palestinian peasant would have.
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The parables, and Jesus’ teaching in general, is meant to have shock value.
At the very least, almost all parables have a surprising twist at the end of the
story, an unexpected turn of events that makes an unforgettable theological
point. Over the centuries, the church has grown used to some of these prickly
and shocking elements that would have stung the original listeners. We are not
surprised, for example, that the father in the parable of the prodigal son ran
through the village to embrace his child who was returning home, but that act
would have horrified Jesus’ listeners.
In the same way, some things that now shock us would have delighted
Jesus’ original audience. Someone who cleverly tricks a rich man and secures
his own future is a hero to peasants whose hard labor usually only results in the
rich getting richer. We tend to think that we have a more developed sense of
justice and are baffled by Jesus’ apparent praising of someone who was
dishonest. But when seen through 1st century peasant’s eyes, this parable looks
and sounds quite different.
It is the story of a middle man, a guy who is trying to play all of the angles.
He is crafty and he is a survivor. If this fellow bothers your refined
sensibilities, how do you cope with Jacob stealing his brother’s birthright, or
David having Bathsheba’s husband murdered, or Joseph’s brothers selling him
to a passing caravan. Perhaps we have just grown used to their treachery. But
we are appalled by a shrewd middle man. Could that be because we are
focusing more on the money than on what Jesus was trying to say? As in
almost all of his parables, Jesus was talking about God, but are we perhaps
more interested in money, property, and worldly wealth?
Let’s get back to our middle man. As steward or manager, he would have
handled the estate of his master. That involved overseeing the lands and
collecting the rents (in the form of produce) from the tenants who farmed the
properties. Now, our middle man was a crook. He was definitely in the
wrong, and he was accused outright by his master. The fact that he did not try
to defend himself or claim innocence would have surprised Jesus’ listeners.
The steward’s silence was a clear admission of guilt. He was not a good
steward and he knew it. He had not been faithful to his master.
Now, just on face value, what does that sound like? Because often in his
parables Jesus was not talking about what he was talking about. A master, a
king, a father, or a lord in Jesus’ stories was often a stand-in for God. And who
was God’s steward, or God’s middle man in the world, the one entrusted as the
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go-between who would serve as caretaker on God’s behalf? Broadly speaking,
humanity, or specifically, Israel, was given the task of being God’s servant in
caring for God’s world and in honoring God’s name. But humanity, in general,
and Israel, in particular, had failed to be good stewards. And their indisputable
unrighteousness gave God just cause to judge and to punish them.
So, in the parable, the master called in the unjust steward and told him to
hand in his books because he was dismissed. Fair enough, we think. That’s
what we would expect to happen. But Jesus’ listeners would have been
surprised that the master was not going to punish his steward severely. By
rights he could have demanded full reparations from the steward, and Jesus’
audience would have expected the master to have his steward thrown into
prison. Instead, he just fired him. This was an unusual master, and our shrewd
middle man figured that out almost immediately.
In his little scheme to safeguard his tenuous future, the steward was
counting on the fact that his master would forgive him not only his prior
behavior, but what he was about to do as well. The only way that he could be
saved was if the master allowed him to juggle the books so that he would be a
hero in the community because he reduced the fees that the tenants owed. The
master would have to pay the price for that. The middle man was counting on
the master’s grace (completely undeserved), and grace is what he received.
Keeping in mind that the master is meant to represent God, perhaps the moral
of the story is: It is a wise man who bets on the grace of God.
You see, this puzzling little story makes more sense than we might have
thought. If we are all like the unjust steward, having failed in our calling to
live as faithful servants of God, and if the day of judgment when our sins will
have to be dealt with is upon us (as it was in the parable), then our best bet is to
count on the grace of God. That grace, Jesus is saying, will pay the price for
us, assuming the debt, and saving even the most undeserving crooks and
reprobates who throw themselves on God’s mercy. Jesus, surely, was the
living proof of that. That’s the good news.
But we’re not done yet. Because it might be easy now to jump to the
conclusion that we can continue to live our lives as shrewd middle men who
think that they can forever play the system. Based on the surprising success of
the unjust steward, we might think that there is room for a basically
unrepentant and self-serving sinner to perpetually count on unconditional
mercy from God. That was not what Jesus’ parable was about, and the
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warnings that follow, beginning at verse 10, confirm that. [By the way,
troublesome verse 9, which recommends making friends through dishonest
wealth so that you are welcomed into an eternal home, may well be a comment
on the parable that follows about the Rich Man and Poor Lazarus. It actually
makes some sense in that context. Certainly it serves to link the two parables.]
But the rest of our reading, from verse 10 onwards, makes it clear that you
can’t really be a middle man with respect to God and the things of this world
that are so important to us. You cannot play the system by wearing your Godhat on Sundays and your man-of-the-world hat every other day of the week.
God still wants GOOD stewards to live faithful lives. The fact that fallen
stewards are forgiven doesn’t mean that God likes or tolerates people who
stubbornly live out their lives as BAD stewards. Remember that in the parable
the unjust steward was fired.
So Jesus is coupling the good news of God’s surprising grace in the parable
with a stern warning to those who rely on God’s grace. Ultimately, you can
only serve one master, and that master is God. Our tendency – and this has led
us to misunderstand the parable – our tendency is to think that it’s all about the
money and the things of this world that we serve so faithfully. As stewards we
are to serve God, not the things of this world that have been entrusted to our
care. We cannot serve God and wealth. No one can serve two masters, and
our master is God.
But knowing that and living in terms of that are two different things. Who
can be a GOOD steward, really? That is why we need a different kind of
middle man. We need someone to make good our relationship with God when
the best of our efforts fall short. We need more than just a blueprint for living
right. We need someone who is righteous to be our middle man, our mediator,
our Savior. And that is Jesus Christ. Jesus’ willingness to stand in for us, to
bear the burden of our sin for us, and to make us good stewards through our
life in him - that is what infuses even these warnings with hope and promise.
We are fallen stewards, one and all. We are perpetually tempted to serve
another master. But, thanks be to God, we have a middle man to save us, and
his name is Jesus.
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