What's A Little Dishonesty Among Friends?

The scriptures referred to are Luke 16:1-13.

Every culture has an archetypal trickster character. In Norse mythology it's Loki. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, it's Odysseus. In European fables it's the fox. In Native American lore, it is Raven, or Rabbit, or Coyote. In England, it's Robin Hood. In the Bible, it's Jacob. Right now my favorite musical is The Greatest Showman, despite the fact that its take on P.T. Barnum is so very far from the truth. So I guess he would have loved it.

We enjoy tales of people achieving success through cleverness, even if they are thieves or conmen. But we rarely think of their victims. Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme cheated 37,000 people, including more than a dozen charities. His con harmed people to the tune of $18 billion. Jho Low passed himself off as a financial expert, took over a sovereign wealth fund wholly owned by the Malaysian Minister of Finance, stole $4.5 billion and put the whole country into deep debt. He is still a fugitive. And of course there's Charles Ponzi the collapse of whose scam brought down a half a dozen banks. His investors lost $20 million in 1920, worth well over $200 million in today's money. We have given his name to all schemes that pay off early investors with the money put in by later investors, rather than by, you know, actually investing the money.

So it is weird that we have Jesus seemingly praising a conman who cheats his boss after he gets fired for fudging the books. But I don't think that's what Jesus is doing, though I seem to be almost alone in my interpretation. Most commentators twist themselves into pretzels trying to make it look like Jesus is advising us to emulate at least some aspects of the conman's cleverness. But I don't think he is. And the problem arises for two reasons.

The first reason is that we usually examine this parable out of context. Several of my colleagues were complaining last week on Facebook of how our lectionary texts tend to be wrenched from their context, leaving us to supply it in our sermons before we can get down to our main points. Often by simply starting the passage a few verses before or ending it a few verses after the edited version we get, the scriptures would be clearer. In this case however, that would not work. The necessary context is too large.

The divisions of the Bible into chapters didn't happen for centuries. The Torah was broken up into sections to be read in the synagogues, an early form of lectionary. In Israel they divided it into 154 sections so as to get through it in 3 years. In Babylon they made it into 53 or 54 sections in order to read it in just a year. Similarly by the 4^th century AD, the New Testament was divided into parts for public reading during worship. However, the chapters we have today come to us courtesy of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury under King John.

Like the lectionary selections, we can quibble about some of the places Langton chose to begin and end the chapters but they are overall not bad and so are generally followed by most Bibles, including the Hebrew Bible. Oddly enough it took another 300 years for someone to devise the numbering of verses we use today. And that someone was Robert Estienne, a French printer who put them into his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament. Obviously this made it easier for people to find and make sure they are discussing the same verses.

Unfortunately it also make it easier to prooftext. Many a shaky theological argument has been buttressed by verses torn from their contexts and combined into a Frankensteinian body of Biblical “evidence.” And it makes us forget that originally the books of the Bible were meant to be read all the way through and not in bite-sized chunks. We are so used to thinking of scripture as an index of stories and verses that I remember how struck I was by British actor Alec McCowen's one man show, in which he recited the entire Book of Mark. The effect was like watching a whole movie that you had previously only seen in clips or on commercial TV, interrupted by ads. I had never felt the flow of the gospel before. And one of the reasons people have trouble understanding what Jesus is really saying in the first part of Luke 16 is that we have isolated it from the flow of the longer block of parables Jesus is telling.

This block begins 2 chapters earlier, either when Jesus is dining at the house of a prominent Pharisee or in Luke 14:25 when Jesus turns and speaks to the crowds traveling with him. First he tells them about the cost of following him. And then we are told, “Now the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and teachers of the law muttered, 'This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.'” (Luke 15:1-2) In response Jesus tells 3 parables: the one about the search for the lost sheep, the one about the lost coin, and the one about the lost son, better known as the parable of the prodigal son. If you remember, in that story there are 2 sons, the one who left and the one who stayed. And the son who stayed with his father resents the joyous welcome his returning, repentant brother gets. It's pretty obvious the lost son stands for the sinners and tax collectors coming to God through Jesus. That makes the resentful son the representative of the Pharisees and teachers of the law. And that resentful son says to his very forgiving father, “Look! All these years I have been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.” This works in the story but was that really how Jesus saw the Pharisees and scribes?

Not going by what Jesus says about them earlier in Luke 11. “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you. Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but your neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.” (Luke 11:39-42) Jesus is saying that the Pharisees paid more attention to the external rituals than to the moral laws God has given us. And that is a criticism that can be leveled at many religious people in every era. It is easier to do overtly religious things than to work for real justice and go out of your comfort zone to actually practice God's radical love and see that the poor are treated properly.

Jesus continues, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourself will not lift one finger to help them....Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” (Luke 11:46, 52) By adding rules that aren't actually in the Bible, they are making it harder for those who want to get closer to God and enter his kingdom. And instead of making it easier to understand what God says, they are making it more obscure, the way secular lawyers can make what should be a straightforward procedure impossible to navigate without a lawyer! Luke is giving us a shorter version of Jesus' condemnation of the religious leaders of his day. Matthew devotes a whole chapter to this speech. (Matthew 23)

So the upshot is that the brother who stays and obeys his father really isn't  a good stand-in for the Pharisees and law experts after all. They are hypocrites, more concerned with looking good than in actually being good. I want to point out one accusation Jesus makes in Mark. He says, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, 'Honor your father and mother,' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' But you say that if anyone says to his father or his mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.” (Mark 7:9-13) In other words, in an age where there is nothing like Social Security, if someone made their estate a gift to the temple in their will, they did not have to support their aged parents. Of course, the offspring could use the interest themselves during their own life. In other words, the Pharisees manipulated God's law to make deals with others that ultimately benefited them.

And isn't that what the dishonest steward is doing in today's parable? If, as usual in the parables, the master represents God, who is the manager more likely to represent than the Pharisees and those who are supposed to be in charge of administering God's law? And when the master finds out his employee is not doing his job properly, he asks for an accounting and gives the man his notice. Not willing to do hard work or beg, the man decides to pull a scam in order to ingratiate himself with his master's debtors. He cuts 50% off the amount one guy owes and 20% off another man's debt. And then—plot twist!—the master commends him for being so shrewd! The Greek says, “his master praised [or “applauded”] the unjust [or “wicked”] manager because he acted sensibly.” Seriously?!?

Commentators try to explain this bizarre conclusion in various ways. For example, Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Commentary, which I usually find helpful, says that perhaps the steward used his own authority as manager to give such discounts. Or that he removed the interest charges, which were unlawful anyway according to the Torah. Or that he simply removed his own commission. All of which are plausible except that (A) Jesus nowhere says that is what he is doing and (B) he is not reducing prices but the amounts of goods. He is fudging the books as to how many actual gallons of olive oil or bushels of wheat they were sold by the master or which they promised to give his master. Elsewhere Jesus does use money that people owe to or manage for a master. But here it is stuff people eat or which can be sold for whatever is the going price at the time. This is fraud and theft. And Jesus is telling us this is good?

Which brings me to what Jesus says immediately afterward: “For the sons of this age are wiser in respect to their generation than are the sons of light. And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by using unjust money so that when it fails they might receive you into the eternal dwellings.” Is Jesus seriously telling us to use what he essentially calls “ill-gotten gains” to make friends on earth as worldly people do and their pull will get us into heaven? Again: seriously?!?

No. That is, I don't think Jesus is being serious here. The second reason I think we have a problem with this is that we forget Jesus' frequent use of irony. Just before this section begins we are told, “At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, 'Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.' He replied, 'Go tell that fox, 'I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day, I will reach my goal. In any case, I must keep going today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem.'” (Luke 13:31-33) You can hear the dripping sarcasm in that reply. And when a crowd is picking up rocks in preparation to stoning him Jesus says, “I showed you many good works from the Father. For which of them are you stoning me?” (John 10:31-32) Again Jesus is being sarcastic—and brave! And when the man born blind finally sees Jesus, our Lord, surrounded by Pharisees, says, “For judgment I have come into the world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” That last part is quite pointed and the Pharisees know he is referring to them. (John 9:39-41) In fact Matthew's whole chapter of woes aimed at the Pharisees is full of zingers and things not meant to be taken literally.

I think Jesus was deliberately causing cognitive dissonance with his conclusion of this parable. He wanted people to go “Wait! What?” when he says a master would applaud a conman who cheated him to make wealthy friends. What the master is more likely to do is throw the guy in jail. In the parable of the unforgiving servant that's what happens to the miscreant who owes his master a lot. (Matthew 18:23-34) Jesus' point is that the Pharisees, far from being the righteous ones who have been working hard for God and never disobeying him, have in fact been fiddling with God's rules to let influential people off and make powerful friends. (Gasp! Religious leaders excusing the rich and powerful? Unheard of!) And do they really think that God will praise them or that their clever use of filthy riches or their worldly friends will get them into heaven? No. Of course not.

The real moral of the story comes after the tongue-in-cheek one. “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.” Well, duh! Former writer for Sports Illustrated and ESPN, Rick Reilly, once voted NSMA National Sportswriter of the Year, did a whole book about a rich and famous man who owns a lot of golf clubs and not only cheats when he plays, often against professional golfers, but actually makes sure he is listed at his clubs as always having the best score in each, regardless of who really achieved that. Reilly was not at all surprised that his man was not honest in his businesses nor at his present job. He who is dishonest in little things can't be trusted with larger matters.

As Jesus says, “If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?” And in Jesus' parables, like those about the buried treasure and the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:44-46), riches usually mean the kingdom of heaven. In other words, if you do get up to funny business with money, you can kiss heaven, eternity with God, goodbye.

Jesus goes on: “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.” In reality it was rare for a slave to have two masters, unless, say, twin sons inherited one from their father. And there is a reason that would be a bad idea anyway. The slave will not likely be treated equally well by both nor would he feel the same regard towards both. But what Jesus is getting at is that you cannot put both God and money as your top priority. Try and you will have to betray one of them. And, humans being what they are, you will probably choose the security and power money affords over the uncertainty and lack of worldly power following Jesus gets you.

And as final evidence that this parable was not really about the wise use of ill gotten gains but about his critics, the very next verse, left out of our lectionary passage of course, is this: “The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.” They knew he was talking about them. His sarcasm did not go over their heads. And the passage continues, “He said to them, 'You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people hold in high esteem is detestable in God's sight.” He is identifying them as the ones the parable is about. God is not like the master in the story. He doesn't admire dishonest cleverness; he sees it as an abomination. That's literally what the Greek says. It's interesting that some people seize upon that word when describing certain acts but not cheating, lying, arrogance and stirring up dissension, which the Bible tells us are abominations before God. (Proverbs 6:16-19)

Money is built on trust. Otherwise it's just paper or, today, lines of code in the cloud. That's why the Stock Market falls: when investors no longer trust that what they put their money in is worth what they thought it was. The word “worship” is a contraction of “worthship.” You worship what you think is of ultimate worth. And how you use your money reveals what you really value.

What value do you put on God? Is he worth more than money? Than possessions? Than the other things you spend most of your time or talents or treasure on? When this life is over, and you can't rely on the transient things of this world, when you have to give account to God, how will you look to him? Did you squander your life? Did you sell God short? Or will he truly commend you for the way you've used your gifts, not to make friends for yourself, but for him? Did you bring him people he could make into children of light?