Eckert, Rebekah

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 25Issue 2 The Arts and the Church Article 1011-1-1999The Shrewdness of GodRebekah EckertFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Sermons is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationEckert, Rebekah (1999) "The Shrewdness of God," Consensus: Vol. 25 : Iss. 2 , Article 10.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol25/iss2/10The Shrewdness of GodRebekah EckertPastor, Resurrection Lutheran Church,Halifax, hJova ScotiaText: Luke 16:1-13 (C — Pentecost 16/Proper 25)This is a very curious text! In order not to miss anything, let’sreview the story.The parable is about an absentee landlord who was collecting rentsfrom his property. He had hired a manager to do it, only the managermismanaged the property and ended up squandering the profits. At thisstage, nothing is said about illegal activity— the manager has simply notdealt well with his master’s property.The owner is going to fire the manager, and asks him to tidy up thebooks before handing them over. The manager knows he is going to beout of a job, and will be hampered with a bad reputation. He decides heneeds some friends, so he’s going to cook the books and commit fraud.According to debt practices in first century Palestine, the commissionand interest were added on to the principal to have one lump sum. Ab-sentee landlords and their managers were able to milk the renters in avariety of ways— interest rates (which were considered illegal accordingto the Torah and called usury), high commission fees, and preying onthe neediness of poor people who weren’t able to live without an imme-diate cash flow because then they couldn’t eat. The manager doesn’tseem to care what he is eliminating— he just starts cutting those debtsdown, willy nilly, commission, interest, principal, whatever. And the ten-ants are happy— they probably have their suspicions of the manager’smotives, but they’re relieved by the lower debt level.When news of the manager’s dishonesty reaches him, the master100 Consensushas to decide what to do. He can’t easily refuse the reduced rates andinsist his tenants still have to pay the original debt — after all, the man-ager is his representative, it’s the master’s fault if an employee is incom-petent. And what redress could he find? Sue the manager for goods hedoesn’t own?We don’t know what Jesus fully thought of the manager. On thenegative side, he called him the “manager of injustice”. In this wholesection, Jesus keeps referring to money as “mammon” — meaning dis-honest and corrupting wealth. There are plenty of other stories in Lukethat indicate Jesus thought money was very corrupting. He told storiesagainst hoarding, conspicuous consumption, unwillingness to share,refusal to use wealth to offer hospitality to strangers, preoccupation withmoney. He ends this section by saying that no slave can serve two mas-ters; you cannot serve God and mammon. But Jesus is not quoted assaying all money is rotten; rather, here he says, use it. Use it to makefriends. Be shrewd with it.What does that mean? The fraudulent activity of the manager ismildly rejected by Jesus: Jesus follows up the parable by saying that weare to be faithful with ail material possessions, and honest dealings areimportant if we wish to be dealt with honestly ourselves. The point ofmoney, Jesus implies, isn’t to have squeaky clean hands, to be able tosay, look. I’ve done all my dealings fairly and squarely, so don’t talk to meabout how 1 should use my money, it’s my money, 1 earned it, 1 get todecide how to spend it. Jesus instead seems to be saying, stop focussingon whether you got your money justly or not, because money isn’t just;no money is; it’s all mammon. The real point is what you do with thatmoney. Do you use money to serve God, or does money use you?The problem, though, is that Jesus really doesn’t give us a lot of helpin understanding that. We’ve been around money a long time — andyet we don’t know how to use money in serving God. We are too easilycorrupted by money, as Jesus says everywhere else in the Gospel of Luke.In this parable, Jesus says, “Make friends for yourselves by means ofmammon so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternaldwelling places.” Nowhere else in Luke’s Gospel— or the other Gospels— are we told how to do that. We’re flying blind with only one instru-ment operating — this parable.That’s the key question. How does one make friends using mam-mon so that one will be welcomed into heaven? Without being cor-JThe Shrewdness of God 101Irupted by it? Based on this passage of scripture alone, I came up withthree possibilities.!Maybe Jesus is talking about donating money— giving alms. Thishas been a popular possibility throughout church history. Giving to chari-ties or poor people. After all, the manager cut the debt of the renters—people who owed money. This is an interesting theory, but it doesn’t fitthe facts. The manager doesn’t cut their debts because he cares abouttheir poverty. In fact, nowhere does it say that the renters are poor— justthat they owe a lot. They could be sub-managers themselves, rentingland from the landowner which they sublease to others. Who would owea hundred jugs of oil, or a hundred measures of wheat? It would take ayear’s production of 150 olive trees, or a year’s harvest on 60 acres.That’s no small potatoes— you normally don’t rack up a debt like that ifI you’re really poor, because the owner wouldn’t let debts go so high thathe couldn’t possibly collect them. And the rich master doesn’t praise themanager for being altruistic — he’s praised for being shrewd. Jesusdoesn’t say give alms to abstract poor people— he said, make friends bybeing shrewd.So we’ll look at another possibility. What about creating relation-ships of equality? This has also been an historic interpretation. Themanager changes the relationships between himself and the renters —they aren’t on unequal footing any longer, a patron-client relationship,but instead the manager allies himself with those formerly his inferiors.He shifts his solidarity from the rich master to the group of debtors. Yet1 don’t think this works either. The manager doesn’t cut their debt out ofsome new-found commitment — he does it purely out of selfish inter-ests. He’s looking for a welcome. He’s looking for some help and sup-port when he’s out of a job. Jesus doesn’t say get in solidarity with ab-stract poor people; he said, make friends by being shrewd.And that’s the third possibility, that what Jesus said is actually whathe meant. The manager is praised for two things, and two things only:he is directly commended for being shrewd, and his example is held upfor making friends using money. Shrewdness is the method; makingfriends with money is the end. In choosing those, the manager rejectedisome other options. He could have tried to set up charity relationshipsjwith the renters — be a great philanthropist. He could have defraudedIthe renters, as well as his boss, and run off. He could have gone beggingIhimself. He could have tried to start up an armed rebellion.' He could102 Consensushave suffered through this new-found joblessness and poverty in stoicheroism. We have seen all of those options held up as the solution indealings with wealth throughout the history of the church. Being shrewd,however, has never made it into the top 10 list of Christian virtues.Shrewdness is practical, hard-headed cleverness and judgement. Thisparable of Jesus can be seen as one of his sayings out of the Wisdomtradition, like the sage advice of Proverbs or the realism of Ecclesiastes.Be as wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves. Be shrewd.That’s a workable emphasis, but the problem is that shrewdness perse still doesn’t resolve our central difficulty, which is the relationship be-tween serving God and using money. Even this minimalist reading of theparable provides no answers. Verse 9, “make friends with mammon sothey may welcome you into the eternal homes”, remains enigmatic.Given that the parable seems to be of no help in explaining Jesus’advice about how to use money, it’s tempting to reject the parable. Is ita joke? If it is, Luke didn’t get it. Maybe Jesus never expected us to takeit seriously, only Luke got all excited because it was on money, his favour-ite theme, and ended up trying to explain it with other advice about moneythat he tacked on at the end.Is it pure legalism? Elsewhere in Luke Jesus seems to have set rulesabout using money— get rid of it. Maybe Jesus expected people to usethe parable as an example of how drastic to be with our money, to be asdramatic in giving our possessions away as the manager was, and to dothis in order to get to heaven, as v. 9 implies.Is it incomprehensible? Jesus was having a bad day, and the way hetold it really made no sense at all, only Luke doesn’t want to admit thatJesus could tell a bad parable?Those possibilities can neither be affirmed nor rejected. All we cansay for certain is that the parable extols shrewdness. When you add inthe sayings at the end, we still have no explanation of the parable, we justhave some moralistic sayings which are echoed and better explainedelsewhere in Luke’s gospel.This is pretty frustrating! So what’s the point of this parable? Have 1just led you on a wild goose chase — a whole string of reasons of whatthis does NOT mean, only to leave you with no greater wisdom thanwhen we started?The Shrewdness of God 103I think there are two aspects that remain grace-filled moments forus, even in dealing with this troublesome text.One is that we have dealt honestly with what the text actually says.The history of interpretation around this text shows people tying them-selves into knots trying to prove Jesus didn’t like the fraud of the man-ager or that this parable is about concern for the poor. People have triedto prove that Jesus really didn’t say use money to make friends; we’dexpect that more from How to Win Friends and Influence People thanthe New Testament! Presently, a common avoidance technique is to sayJesus didn’t say this, it’s all been added in by Luke with his obsessionabout money. But if we allow the parable to stand as written, we areallowing Jesus to be more than simply a religious figure, whose messagewe already know, whose importance we have already decided. Jesus’speech has been so badly used through the centuries, the least we cando is let his words speak for themselves. Either Jesus or the writer ofLuke came up with this parable; if we explain away the parable, we areprotecting our images of either Jesus or Luke, and, therefore, we areengaged in protecting ourselves from the truth. At one level or another,somebody said something very strange. And we need to live with that. Alovely quote by that prolific writer. Anonymous, says that “Christology isa pack of tricks we play on the dead.” This parable invites us to stopplaying games with our image of Jesus, and instead be honest. Authen-ticity, they say, is one of the traits the age-group known as Generation Xis looking for. If we as the Church want to be true to Jesus and honestwitnesses to the world so that the world will hear us, we need to becomemore honest about the ambiguity of some of what our tradition holds.After all, what does Jesus unambiguously say to us here? “Whoever isdishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.”But there is also a second point of grace in this parable, and it is sosubtly beautiful, it almost slips by us. It is a bizarre parable. The man-ager is a non-heroic figure, an anti-hero, even, who is an incompetentbungler, a fraudulent thief, and a self-centred boor. His one redeemingquality, being shrewd, is done purely out of self-interest. But by praisinghim, Jesus pulls him out of the shadows and says look, even here onecan see qualities of God. God deals with humanity as we are, with all ofour mixed motives, deceit and self-deceit, ambition and despair. As wellas being loving and accepting, God is also shrewd. The manager, in hisshrewdness, represents God. Jesus commissions him, asks him to speak104 Consensusfor God, to be God’s representative even in his sin. Jesus values him—and us? Yes, do we see ourselves in the manager?— that much. Jesusvalues him that much. Even an incompetent, deceitful selfish managercan speak for God.Amen.

The Shrewdness of God

Scholars Commons

Consensus
Volume 25
Issue 2 The Arts and the Church Article 10
11-1-1999
The Shrewdness of God
Rebekah Eckert
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus
This Sermons is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Eckert, Rebekah (1999) "The Shrewdness of God," Consensus: Vol. 25 : Iss. 2 , Article 10.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol25/iss2/10
The Shrewdness of God
Rebekah Eckert
Pastor, Resurrection Lutheran Church,
Halifax, hJova Scotia
Text: Luke 16:1-13 (C — Pentecost 16/Proper 25)
This is a very curious text! In order not to miss anything, let’sreview the story.
The parable is about an absentee landlord who was collecting rents
from his property. He had hired a manager to do it, only the manager
mismanaged the property and ended up squandering the profits. At this
stage, nothing is said about illegal activity— the manager has simply not
dealt well with his master’s property.
The owner is going to fire the manager, and asks him to tidy up the
books before handing them over. The manager knows he is going to be
out of a job, and will be hampered with a bad reputation. He decides he
needs some friends, so he’s going to cook the books and commit fraud.
According to debt practices in first century Palestine, the commission
and interest were added on to the principal to have one lump sum. Ab-
sentee landlords and their managers were able to milk the renters in a
variety of ways— interest rates (which were considered illegal according
to the Torah and called usury), high commission fees, and preying on
the neediness of poor people who weren’t able to live without an imme-
diate cash flow because then they couldn’t eat. The manager doesn’t
seem to care what he is eliminating— he just starts cutting those debts
down, willy nilly, commission, interest, principal, whatever. And the ten-
ants are happy— they probably have their suspicions of the manager’s
motives, but they’re relieved by the lower debt level.
When news of the manager’s dishonesty reaches him, the master
100 Consensus
has to decide what to do. He can’t easily refuse the reduced rates and
insist his tenants still have to pay the original debt — after all, the man-
ager is his representative, it’s the master’s fault if an employee is incom-
petent. And what redress could he find? Sue the manager for goods he
doesn’t own?
We don’t know what Jesus fully thought of the manager. On the
negative side, he called him the “manager of injustice”. In this whole
section, Jesus keeps referring to money as “mammon” — meaning dis-
honest and corrupting wealth. There are plenty of other stories in Luke
that indicate Jesus thought money was very corrupting. He told stories
against hoarding, conspicuous consumption, unwillingness to share,
refusal to use wealth to offer hospitality to strangers, preoccupation with
money. He ends this section by saying that no slave can serve two mas-
ters; you cannot serve God and mammon. But Jesus is not quoted as
saying all money is rotten; rather, here he says, use it. Use it to make
friends. Be shrewd with it.
What does that mean? The fraudulent activity of the manager is
mildly rejected by Jesus: Jesus follows up the parable by saying that we
are to be faithful with ail material possessions, and honest dealings are
important if we wish to be dealt with honestly ourselves. The point of
money, Jesus implies, isn’t to have squeaky clean hands, to be able to
say, look. I’ve done all my dealings fairly and squarely, so don’t talk to me
about how 1 should use my money, it’s my money, 1 earned it, 1 get to
decide how to spend it. Jesus instead seems to be saying, stop focussing
on whether you got your money justly or not, because money isn’t just;
no money is; it’s all mammon. The real point is what you do with that
money. Do you use money to serve God, or does money use you?
The problem, though, is that Jesus really doesn’t give us a lot of help
in understanding that. We’ve been around money a long time — and
yet we don’t know how to use money in serving God. We are too easily
corrupted by money, as Jesus says everywhere else in the Gospel of Luke.
In this parable, Jesus says, “Make friends for yourselves by means of
mammon so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal
dwelling places.” Nowhere else in Luke’s Gospel— or the other Gospels
— are we told how to do that. We’re flying blind with only one instru-
ment operating — this parable.
That’s the key question. How does one make friends using mam-
mon so that one will be welcomed into heaven? Without being cor-
JThe Shrewdness of God 101
I
rupted by it? Based on this passage of scripture alone, I came up with
three possibilities.
!
Maybe Jesus is talking about donating money— giving alms. This
has been a popular possibility throughout church history. Giving to chari-
ties or poor people. After all, the manager cut the debt of the renters—
people who owed money. This is an interesting theory, but it doesn’t fit
the facts. The manager doesn’t cut their debts because he cares about
their poverty. In fact, nowhere does it say that the renters are poor— just
that they owe a lot. They could be sub-managers themselves, renting
land from the landowner which they sublease to others. Who would owe
a hundred jugs of oil, or a hundred measures of wheat? It would take a
year’s production of 150 olive trees, or a year’s harvest on 60 acres.
That’s no small potatoes— you normally don’t rack up a debt like that if
I you’re really poor, because the owner wouldn’t let debts go so high that
he couldn’t possibly collect them. And the rich master doesn’t praise the
manager for being altruistic — he’s praised for being shrewd. Jesus
doesn’t say give alms to abstract poor people— he said, make friends by
being shrewd.
So we’ll look at another possibility. What about creating relation-
ships of equality? This has also been an historic interpretation. The
manager changes the relationships between himself and the renters —
they aren’t on unequal footing any longer, a patron-client relationship,
but instead the manager allies himself with those formerly his inferiors.
He shifts his solidarity from the rich master to the group of debtors. Yet
1 don’t think this works either. The manager doesn’t cut their debt out of
some new-found commitment — he does it purely out of selfish inter-
ests. He’s looking for a welcome. He’s looking for some help and sup-
port when he’s out of a job. Jesus doesn’t say get in solidarity with ab-
stract poor people; he said, make friends by being shrewd.
And that’s the third possibility, that what Jesus said is actually what
he meant. The manager is praised for two things, and two things only:
he is directly commended for being shrewd, and his example is held up
for making friends using money. Shrewdness is the method; making
friends with money is the end. In choosing those, the manager rejected
i
some other options. He could have tried to set up charity relationships
j
with the renters — be a great philanthropist. He could have defrauded
I
the renters, as well as his boss, and run off. He could have gone begging
I
himself. He could have tried to start up an armed rebellion.' He could
102 Consensus
have suffered through this new-found joblessness and poverty in stoic
heroism. We have seen all of those options held up as the solution in
dealings with wealth throughout the history of the church. Being shrewd,
however, has never made it into the top 10 list of Christian virtues.
Shrewdness is practical, hard-headed cleverness and judgement. This
parable of Jesus can be seen as one of his sayings out of the Wisdom
tradition, like the sage advice of Proverbs or the realism of Ecclesiastes.
Be as wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves. Be shrewd.
That’s a workable emphasis, but the problem is that shrewdness per
se still doesn’t resolve our central difficulty, which is the relationship be-
tween serving God and using money. Even this minimalist reading of the
parable provides no answers. Verse 9, “make friends with mammon so
they may welcome you into the eternal homes”, remains enigmatic.
Given that the parable seems to be of no help in explaining Jesus’
advice about how to use money, it’s tempting to reject the parable. Is it
a joke? If it is, Luke didn’t get it. Maybe Jesus never expected us to take
it seriously, only Luke got all excited because it was on money, his favour-
ite theme, and ended up trying to explain it with other advice about money
that he tacked on at the end.
Is it pure legalism? Elsewhere in Luke Jesus seems to have set rules
about using money— get rid of it. Maybe Jesus expected people to use
the parable as an example of how drastic to be with our money, to be as
dramatic in giving our possessions away as the manager was, and to do
this in order to get to heaven, as v. 9 implies.
Is it incomprehensible? Jesus was having a bad day, and the way he
told it really made no sense at all, only Luke doesn’t want to admit that
Jesus could tell a bad parable?
Those possibilities can neither be affirmed nor rejected. All we can
say for certain is that the parable extols shrewdness. When you add in
the sayings at the end, we still have no explanation of the parable, we just
have some moralistic sayings which are echoed and better explained
elsewhere in Luke’s gospel.
This is pretty frustrating! So what’s the point of this parable? Have 1
just led you on a wild goose chase — a whole string of reasons of what
this does NOT mean, only to leave you with no greater wisdom than
when we started?
The Shrewdness of God 103
I think there are two aspects that remain grace-filled moments for
us, even in dealing with this troublesome text.
One is that we have dealt honestly with what the text actually says.
The history of interpretation around this text shows people tying them-
selves into knots trying to prove Jesus didn’t like the fraud of the man-
ager or that this parable is about concern for the poor. People have tried
to prove that Jesus really didn’t say use money to make friends; we’d
expect that more from How to Win Friends and Influence People than
the New Testament! Presently, a common avoidance technique is to say
Jesus didn’t say this, it’s all been added in by Luke with his obsession
about money. But if we allow the parable to stand as written, we are
allowing Jesus to be more than simply a religious figure, whose message
we already know, whose importance we have already decided. Jesus’
speech has been so badly used through the centuries, the least we can
do is let his words speak for themselves. Either Jesus or the writer of
Luke came up with this parable; if we explain away the parable, we are
protecting our images of either Jesus or Luke, and, therefore, we are
engaged in protecting ourselves from the truth. At one level or another,
somebody said something very strange. And we need to live with that. A
lovely quote by that prolific writer. Anonymous, says that “Christology is
a pack of tricks we play on the dead.” This parable invites us to stop
playing games with our image of Jesus, and instead be honest. Authen-
ticity, they say, is one of the traits the age-group known as Generation X
is looking for. If we as the Church want to be true to Jesus and honest
witnesses to the world so that the world will hear us, we need to become
more honest about the ambiguity of some of what our tradition holds.
After all, what does Jesus unambiguously say to us here? “Whoever is
dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.”
But there is also a second point of grace in this parable, and it is so
subtly beautiful, it almost slips by us. It is a bizarre parable. The man-
ager is a non-heroic figure, an anti-hero, even, who is an incompetent
bungler, a fraudulent thief, and a self-centred boor. His one redeeming
quality, being shrewd, is done purely out of self-interest. But by praising
him, Jesus pulls him out of the shadows and says look, even here one
can see qualities of God. God deals with humanity as we are, with all of
our mixed motives, deceit and self-deceit, ambition and despair. As well
as being loving and accepting, God is also shrewd. The manager, in his
shrewdness, represents God. Jesus commissions him, asks him to speak
104 Consensus
for God, to be God’s representative even in his sin. Jesus values him—
and us? Yes, do we see ourselves in the manager?— that much. Jesus
values him that much. Even an incompetent, deceitful selfish manager
can speak for God.
Amen.


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