Is this about the unjust economy of the world, about idolatry, or the ability to put myself above them?
Gospel Reading: Luke 16:1-13
For Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010: Year C - Ordinary 25
Can we agree to have a Hardest Question holiday? We could piggyback on Labor Day. Let’s skip the hard stuff and go straight to the end of this reading. Verse 13 can preach—easily. No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and wealth. Okay, go! We might not even need notes for this one.
But it seems to me that hard is the point of this parable and Jesus’ interpretation of it. Jesus builds a trap for his hearers based on common notions of narrative expectations, identifications, justice and self-justification.
Harder for Some
Verse 1 says that Jesus’ audience is the disciples, but verse 14 tells us that the Pharisees heard all this, and they ridiculed him. I’m thinking this whole pericope is the biblical version of a stage whisper: Jesus addresses the disciples, but it is all meant for the Pharisees.
The parable is set up so the audience(s) thinks they know what is coming. There's a master and a steward. The master accuses the steward of cheating him and summarily tells him to turn over the books, and he's fired. In a class-based, patron/client culture, the wicked master and the unjustly accused servant are stock characters. The hearers will be expecting the bad man to get his comeuppance and the good victim to be justified by the end of the story. But the character of the good victim shifts when, by his own admission, he is more like master than they would like. I am too weak to dig and too proud to beg -- what will I do?
Where is the Good Guy?
Our underdog hero, in need of justice, is too lazy to do an honest day's work and too arrogant to ask for help. The hearers shift their feet looking for solid narrative ground—what kind of story is this? The steward helps them out, a little. He comes up with a scheme that will help him get over on the master and get paid himself. Oh, this is a coyote/trickster tale, they think. But when the master finds out what the steward has done, he isn’t left looking red faced and foolish, he is impressed and praises the steward. And just to confuse the audiences more, the text makes a point of calling the steward "dishonest." It is his shrewd criminal mind that the master is impressed with.
The hearers are left confused, wondering, who is the good guy, where is the justice? And then Jesus takes it to a whole other level of WTF, when he seems to hold the dishonest steward up as an example of how one should behave if they want to be welcomed in to eternal homes, presumably the Kingdom of God. Jesus goes on to explain, in a somewhat logic-challenged way, that if you can’t get over and get paid in the economy of the world, then you don’t deserve true riches in the world to come. And then the non-sequitur conclusion: "No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and wealth."
I can feel the Pharisees throwing up their hands and looking at each other. What did he just say? Didn’t he just say….then he said….I don’t get it.
The Hardest Question
I’m with the Pharisees. Is this some kind of prefiguring of Kierkegaardian indirect communication? Jesus seems to kind of like the master and the steward, the way explained the story. Where is the justice? Here is the hardest question for me (and my Pharisee brothers): Is this about the unjust economy of the world, about idolatry or the ability to put my self above them both?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
