Gospel Notes by Michael Whelan SM
Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’
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 for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 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” (Luke 16:1-13 – NRSV. The last paragraph of the text may be read as the Gospel, omitting the rest.)
Introductory notes
General
N T Wright sounds a warning: “The first thing to get clear about the ‘parable of the wicked mammon’ is that it is precisely a parable. It is not advice about financial management: Jesus is not telling people to cheat their bosses. It makes sense within Jesus’ Jewish context on the one hand and Luke’s on the other” (N T Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year C, London: SPCK, 2000, 106).
It is as well to note that Chapter 16 of Luke’s Gospel begins with this parable, continues mostly to focus on the right use of money and ends with the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The context for teachings on the Kingdom of God is the kingdoms of this world. This is where the Kingdom of God comes to birth – not in some separate “clean” world, but in and through the very human world where commerce is of the essence. So be careful! One commentator concludes that a reasonable interpretation is found by “treating the parable as an (imaginary) account of ‘how people behave’ rather than fit it to a lesson it may be supposed to convey” (W J Harrington OP, “St Luke” in A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, edited by Reginal C Fuller et al,London: Thomas Nelson, 1969, 783b, 1012).
“Further, the story must be seen against its background of contemporary Palestinian law and custom. Like the unjust judge (18:1-5), the steward is called dishonest because of his past conduct; it does not necessarily follow that his action in the parable is dishonest. In Jewish law, the agent or steward full represented his master, who was obliged to honour his agent’s business transactions. If the agent swindled him, dismissal was his only recourse. But before this took effect, the agent had to render an account of the state of the property and until this had been done he remained the master’s legal representative. Also of great significance is the law governing usury. This forbade the taking of interest on loans to Jews (Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25:36; Deuteronomy 23:19f.) but ways had been found of evading the law. It was argued that it only applied to the destitute and was meant to protect them from exploitation. If one could prove the borrower was not without some of the commodity he wished to borrow and was under no compulsion to acquire it, a loan could be allowed. In this way, commercial transactions were concluded, by a legal fiction, without infringing the letter of the law. Wheat and oil were especially liable to this kind of treatment, since most people could be assumed to have at least the minimum of both commodities – to light a lamp or bake a cake. But apart from the fact that oil could be adulterated, the interest on oil was greater than that on wheat., a point reflected in the parable, cf vv 6 and 7. Thus the steward, casting around for some way of earning the good opinion of people outside after his dismissal, realizes that his master has been evading the law and decides to rectify this situation with a view to gaining support for himself. He hands back to the debtors their promissory notes which undertook the payment of principal plus interest and tells them to write new ones specifying repayment of the principal only. His master opportunely decides to take to himself the credit for a just action which he did not initiate. The meaning then is one who knows his moral duty, but who has rejected it for worldly advantage may be forced by circumstances to change his conduct and seek the good opinion of those whom he has hitherto neglected. ‘Worldly people know how to utilize worldly goods to do righteous acts and to obtain the reward of righteousness while those who fancy themselves as the ‘Children of light’ are either narrow-mindedly refusing to soil their hands with tainted earnings or are devising means whereby service to God can be mixed with service to worldly purposes. They are carefully watering down the prescripts of God so as to enable piety and comfort, fear of God and prestige among men to go hand in hand’” (Wilfrid Harrington OP, op cit, 783b – 783c, 1012).
Specific
rich man: “The master is an absentee landlord and not a beloved figure in Palestinian or Greco-Roman society” (Robert J Karris OFM, “The Gospel According to Luke” in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond Brown SS et al, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989, 148, 708).
manager: The Greek word is oikonomos and may be translated as “steward”. He was often himself a slave (cf. 12:42) who managed the household or estate for the “master”.
charges: The Greek word is diaballō and it normally means “calumniate” or to bring false charges with hostile intent. The “master” believes the calumny and is prepared to dismiss the steward.
the master: The word kyrios – translated here as “master” – appears five times in our text. The first three times clearly refer to the “rich man” who owns the estate. There are diverging opinions as to the reference in v.8 – “his master commended the dishonest manager …”. Luke Timothy Johnson writes: “(T)he ‘rich man’ of verse 1 is also the ‘master’ of verses 3, 5, 8” (Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991, 243). Wilfrid Harrington writes: “The precise meaning of kyrios, ‘Lord’, ‘master’, determines the limit of the parable proper and affects the interpretation. The more usual practice has been to take kyrios in the parable as the steward’s master and then the v. 8 is part of the parable. In that case, v. 9 brings out the moral. But in Luke kyrios almost always means Jesus himself, and it seems preferable to take it in that sense here, cf Luke 18:6-8f: ‘The Lord said’ (6), ‘I tell you’ (8). The parable therefore, on this view, ends at 7 and describes a rascal who, faced with ruin, finds a drastic remedy. His method, though unscrupulous, is clearly effective. In 8a we have Jesus commending the dishonest steward for his resolute action and in 8b explain that the commendation is restricted to the cleverness of worldly men (‘sons of this world’) in their dealings with one another. …. Like the steward, the hearers of the parable are faced with a crisis which they must resolutely meet. It is significant that in v. 14 Luke numbers Pharisees among the audience and it is especially to such that the parable is addressed. In the person of Jesus the kingdom of God has come among them; it is the decisive moment and, in effect, they are being urged to take the bold step of accepting him before it is too late” (Ibid).
Vice needs virtue
In today’s Gospel – Luke 16:1-13 – we have a text that is one of the most difficult to interpret in all the Gospels. We hear Jesus tell the parable of a property manager who is thieving from the landowner, he is found out, then proceeds to do more thieving to ensure he is not destitute when he gets sacked. How can this possibly be part of the Good News?
When Luke earlier reports Jesus telling another parable – the parable of the sower – he concludes: “As he said this, he called out, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’” (8:8). The disciples are perplexed. They ask for an explanation. Before Jesus gives them the explanation, he says, “to others I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand’” (8:10). In other words, the parables conceal even as they reveal. Parables do not give answers, they give invitations. Parables are in fact subversive, they undermine our taken for granted worlds. In this way they open up new possibilities for us.
One scripture scholar notes: “The parables not only draw us into the center of Jesus’ proclamation; at the same time they point to the person of the proclaimer, the mystery of Jesus himself” (Eberhard Jüngel cited by Gerhard Lohfink, The Forty Parables of Jesus, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021, Preface). The proper outcome of a parable is not a moral project but an encounter with Jesus Christ.
The parables appeal first to the imagination, rather than the rational mind. They are stories. They invite us into a plot. From within that particular plot we can see ourselves and the world differently. We can thus be transformed in the deepest levels of our consciousness. This is the metanoia proclaimed by John the Baptist (3:3).
Another scholar writes of how Jesus’ audience might have heard the parable: “The hearers are invited to make the judgment: this man, scoundrel as he was, at least had the merit of taking a realistic and practical view of a crisis. They would then reflect that, as Jesus was constantly urging, they themselves stood before a momentous crisis. Surely, He would have them conclude, it was only common sense to think strenuously and act boldly to meet the crisis” (C H Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, New York, NY: Charles Scribners Sons, 1961, 17).
There can be no suggestion that the theft of the thieving manager is anything but immoral and therefore to be condemned. But he is intelligent and shrewd, capable of commitment and energetic action, even if these good attributes are wrongly employed by him. We can imagine a different plot, one in which the man admits his wrongdoing and courageously faces the consequences. He does seem like the sort of person who is capable of that. He had a choice. He made the wrong choice. What choice would you have made? Respond from within the plot!