The Shrewd Servant
This sermon was preached by Tommy Belgum in response to the lectionary passages assigned for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Luke 16:1-13.
Jesus tells this parable while he is on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows he is going to die. He has been telling stories along the way. He just finished telling one where a son chose to waste his father’s wealth instead of being in a relationship with him. In the end, the father welcomes his son home with no talk of a repayment plan. Instead, he throws a party at his mansion. The setting for our parable picks back up at a mansion but the cast has changed. We still have a rich man but now we have a few lowly characters: the manager to the rich man and those who are indebted to him. After getting fired for wasting money, the manager tries to set himself up well for life post-income. He forgives part of the loans owed by his master's debtors. He does this so that they will owe him when he is out on the streets. When the outstanding loans are partially repaid, the rich man commends his manager for going out in style. And then Jesus does too, saying “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.” He wraps up by commending loyalty, which clearly was not demonstrated by the manager On its face this passage is saying that it is better to be smart than to be honest. Does this parable even sound like one Jesus would tell?
Which of these characters am I supposed to identify with? My gut reaction is to see the manager as the bad guy. First because in some translations they call him the Shrewd Servant. Shrewd is the same word used for the deceptive and crafty snake in the Garden of Eden, so I am already teed up to be skeptical of this character. And second, because he is stealing from his employer. If I were to leverage my knowledge of my company's financial situation, that would be called insider trading and I could go to prison. On the other hand, if I imagine that the master was an evil man who was cheating and exploiting his workforce, I would begin to feel differently. And what if the servant was originally caught for giving away his master’s money out of generosity - a robinhood situation. Now I am fully rooting for this servant.
Lastly, who are these debtors? On one hand they seem all too eager to accept dishonesty for their own benefit. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say no to a loan cancellation.
Jesus just told a story about the generous grace of a father, so why would he tell a story about an unforgiving master? There seems to be a continuity problem, not just from the last story, but from the last 7 chapters where he has been preaching about lastness, lostness, death and resurrection on his way to his own crucifixion. He’s been pounding the point home: The days of moral accounting are over. Jesus is not interested in being a bookkeeper who gives you a point for being nice and a ding for your missteps. At this same point in the journey, Matthew tells a different story. One where the servant owes $10M and is forgiven after begging for his life. He then goes and demands the $5 that a fellow servant owes him. He short-circuits the workings of forgiveness. For grace only works on and through those it finds dead enough to be raised. In our story, the roles are reversed but the point remains the same: The Shrewd Servant is freed by death to start thinking differently and become an agent of life to everyone else. This parallel leads to a surprising question: Is Christ the Shrewd Servant?
He brings life to others through his own death and resurrection. He was hanged as a criminal by the church leaders for breaking their rules and for hanging out with the underbelly of society. Like the Shrewd Servant, he knew that taking Account and being Respectable would only keep him alive long enough to die some other way. No, Grace does not come to the world through respectability. Jesus saw the world for what it is: One of shrewdness and of complex motivations. He’s the only advocate for us in a world like ours. Not because of his righteousness but because of his dishonesty. In Robert Farrar Capon’s book “Kingdom, Grace, Judgement”, he says “Religion…remains unqualified bad news: it traps us in a game we will always and everywhere lose. But the Gospel…is precisely Good News. It is the announcement, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, that God has simply called off the game…. How sad, then, when the church acts as if it is in the religion business rather than in the Gospel-proclaiming business. What a disservice, not only to itself but to a world perpetually sinking into the quagmire of religiosity, when it harps on creed, cult, and conduct as the touchstones of salvation. What perversion of the truth that sets us free when it takes the news that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, and turns it into a proclamation of God as just one more insufferable bookkeeper” (Capon, pg 177).
As an accountant myself, lately I have been feeling like it really doesn’t matter. Bookkeeping isn’t fun or lifegiving. This orderliness has saturated every part of my life, not only making it feel predictable but also inadequate when my life does get messy.
Back in June, Lizzie and I decided to take a spontaneous trip. We picked a weekend and told ourselves we wouldn’t pick a destination until the day of. This is not how I travel. I spend hours agonizing over the location, the activities, and where to stay. Planning is my least favorite way to spend time and yet I have a compulsion to make sure that nothing goes wrong. This experiment completely upended that paradigm. I felt utterly free from the expectations I typically place on myself because without a bookkeeper, there is no failure, and without failure there is freedom for me to live into the grace that Jesus has brought.
