Making Friends by Means of Mammon--Luke 16:1-13

"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. 2 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.’ 3 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. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 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.’ 8 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. 9 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. 10 “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. 11 If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13 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.”

I. Introduction

This parable is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult of Jesus' parables to understand. The difficulties of the passage, like the spirits cast out from the Gadarene Demoniac, are legion. But the central issue is whether the conduct of the steward or manager is something which Jesus wants to commend or criticize in this parable. All our interpretations flow from our answer to this basic question. If, for example, Jesus is criticizing him, then Jesus' words about making friends by means of unrighteous mammon (v. 9) are sort of "tongue in cheek" statements and the verses in 10-13 are the "real" point of the story. Then the story is about fidelity in service and in possessions. But, on the other hand, if we conclude that the steward is commended not simply by the master but by Jesus (and there is an ambiguity in the Greek text of v. 8--the "kurios" commends the steward. In Greek the word kurios can either be "the Lord" or the "master"), we go down a different, and more difficult, path. The path is more difficult because the teaching that results from this interpretation, where the steward is commended, is in tension with some of Jesus' other teaching earlier in Luke's Gospel. If we go down this path, we have Jesus teaching us that we are to "calculate" or "plan for" the future when need hits. This is seemingly in tension with his approach in ch. 6 where one is to practice what one might call reckless, or at least, heedles (of the consequences) love and service to others.

In answering this question, a basic principle of text criticism comes to our rescue. It is the idea that the more "difficult" reading is probably the original and that the "easier" reading is one inserted by a scribe or someone later to try to "clean up" the difficulty posed by the harder reading. I would argue that here one should apply this kind of reading to the parable at hand--the more "difficult" reading is that Jesus appears to be commending people for their questionable activity. If this is the message of the passage, what is really at stake? What is at stake, as the following exposition shows, is that Jesus here teaches something that is in tension with the major point he has been making all along--about not being concerned for the economic consequences of one's actions, about not laying up treasures here on earth, about doing things in a "non-calculating" way. Rather than worrying about Jesus' possible inconsistency, I think this shows a wonderful realization on Jesus' part of the complexity of life and the difficulty, indeed, the impossibility, of living life according to ideology and instead of according to practical demands. Let me unfolk what I mean by looking at the text.

The Parable of the Steward and its Confusions

We are throw into a bit of confusion immediately as the parable opens because it is about a rich person and a steward. Normally in Luke's Gospel we have warnings about rich people ("Woe to you rich"), and we may be expecting to interpret this parable similarly. But there is a sort of transition here in Luke's or Jesus' self-presentation about wealth. We will have a "bad" rich person later in this chapter, but then, in ch. 19, we have a "good" rich person. So, we don't know how to take this rich person. Then, again, we don't know how to take the steward. He is accused of squandering money (the same word as used for the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:13), but allegations don't mean a conviction. Later he is called a "dishonest" steward, but is his dishonesty because of the conduct lying behind v. 1 or because of the scheme he develops in vv. 4-7? And then, we have the steward being commended. But by whom is he being commended? The master? Jesus? And, if he is being commended, is it sincere or rather tongue-in-cheek?

Then, we don't really understand the scheme that the steward develops for repayment in vv. 4-7. We don't know, for example, if he is asking the debtors to pay the master only what they truly owe (less the steward's "cut") or whether the steward is doing something in law we call accord and satisfaction--where you agree on a lesser payment now to settle an outstanding debt in full. There are just too many uncertainties in this passage to know exactly what the story is about.

Then we are confused about the "lessons" of the parable. Not only don't we know who speaks v. 8a, but, assuming that Jesus speaks v. 8b and later verses, what does Jesus mean? Is he just making an observation that worldly people are shrewder in dealing with worldly things than "kingdom" people? Or, is he giving advice to become sort of like the steward so that kingdom people, who are naturally less able to live shrewdly in the world will not be cut off from access to some of the world's goods? I suppose these questions led earliest readers of this parable to uncertainty, because the verses added to it (vv. 10-13) then draw back from the specifics of the parable to utter general statements about fidelity with little--leading to fidelity with much. I think, however, that the parable makes most sense if we see Jesus "supplementing" his earlier teaching on possessions by encouraging "kingdom" people also to be shrewd in their financial dealings. Let me explain.

Jesus and Financial Shrewdness

My interepretation of this parable, then, is that Jesus is encouraging his followers to "imitate the steward" in his concern for taking care of himself when he is in a tough situation. You go to people who will be indebted to you because of what you can offer them, and then they will receive you when you are in need. You will be setting up your own system of "patronal ethics" (to quote Joel Green's commentary on Luke) and making sure that you don't end up "out on the streets" when hard times come. In other words, I contend that in this passage Jesus is teaching his disciples to "calculate" about the future, which is seemingly opposite to what he has said in the Sermon in the Mount/Plain ten chapters earlier. But why look at it as a contradiction, rather than as an attempt to "balance" or "supplement" what was stated earlier? We all know that we don't live as Jesus urged us to live in ch. 6. We do calculate when we make financial decisions; we do decide on who we will invite to our parties based on whom we like and who can repay us. That is, Jesus' teaching in ch. 6 had an air of extremity to it, a sense of unreality to it, and now he is "balancing" it by saying this.

I have illustrated another example of this "balancing" in the previous two chapters of the Gospel of Luke. For example, in 14:25ff. Jesus seemingly gives the most rigid, serious ultimatum about discipleship you can imagine. You have to "hate" all those who are closest to you or you will not be a disciple of Jesus. But then, in the essay I wrote for 9/16, I showed how in Luke 15 the "hardness" of counting the cost in Luke 14 was "softened" by the reality of the mercy of God. The same thing is at work here. The seeming "harshness" or "unreality" of Jesus' teaching in Luke 6 ('give not expecting a return') is now balanced with the attempt to teach 'calculation.' We go from an emphasis on living heedless of the consequences to one which commends prudence. Actually, I think that both approaches together probably produce a more full understanding of the Gospel and how we actualy live our lives than a sole emphasis on one or the other.

Conclusion--Fidelity

When we learn that we can also "calculate" as we live our lives, that we can "leverage" our "contacts" and financial shrewdness, and that this is commended by Jesus, we have a great way of complementing the earlier lessons we learned from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is an elusive teacher, however, and is really not an ideologue. In fact, this Jesus not only draws us in to listen to him even more closely, but he partakes of some of the complexity which we know characterizes life. One thing we should be convinced of now is that Jesus will not fit in any of our little boxes, try as we would like to put him there.

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