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Proper 20: The Joke's On Us: Piety vs. Covenant 2
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 79:1-9; Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
For arcane reasons, probably long forgotten by the Elves who put together the modern Revised Common Lectionary, the readings for this Proper 20 echo the agricultural wheel of the year in the Northern hemisphere. September 23 is Mabon/Fall Equinox. It is a time of balance in the Earth’s eco-system, as the Sun appears to rise due East, and set due West. This is the time of the second harvest, which lasts until November 1. It is the time of reckoning, of tallying, of accounting, and of balance sheets.
The parable of the shrewd manager is baffling, and Luke apparently was the only one to record that bafflement, as he once again tries to interpret Jesus’s outrageous joke in terms of conventional piety. The second meaning of “pious” in the American Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is “hypocritically virtuous.” How else to describe the attitude of Luke’s “children of light” (the Christian community Luke was writing for), who take worse care of their own than do the “children of this world,” who lie, cheat, and steal? Luke works hard at twisting the story around to some kind of “Kingdom of God” metaphor, but it sounds more like honor among thieves: “So if you couldn’t be trusted with ill-gotten gain, who will trust you with real wealth?” The Five Gospels, p. 358.
The sanctimonius writer of the letter to Timothy is long lost to the ransom theory of the atonement. Jesus’s story about the shrewd manager has nothing to do with ransom, nor with atonement.
Suppose Jesus is not talking about the nature of the Kingdom of God, but is making fun of the patronage system that the Roman world participated in? The Jesus Seminar scholars end the actual words of Jesus with verse 8a. “The master praised the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” Luke’s tortured attempt at clarification follows, until verse 13, which the Seminar agreed Jesus may have said at some time, but was probably not originally attached to the story: “No servant can be a slave to two masters. . .”
Let’s lift verses 1-8a out and imagine the scene as Jesus and his followers and friends lounge around a fire on the beach, finishing off the last of the fish they poached from the lake. Maybe one of them just got sacked from his job as a steward for one of the land-owners, who then awarded his job to the nephew of a local Roman official in exchange for a contract on the soon-to-be harvested wheat crop. The cascade of contracts stemming from the wheat crop that the unfortunate steward had already arranged for are now all null and void. His family now has to rely solely on his wife’s skill as a weaver to supply the means for food, clothing, and shelter, and the wool she was to have acquired was part of that whole fabric of deals. The steward is looking death in the face.
Jesus’s joke points out the corruption and injustice in the whole system of patronage when the master – rather than prosecuting the manager for fraud – rewards him: A 1st Century version of the 21st Century Enron scandal, which left hundreds of employees out of work, out of savings, and out of luck. The difference is, in the 21st Century it’s not a joke, it’s a crime.
Jesus would not have left our unfortunate wayfaring steward stuck in a painful irony. Perhaps he reminded him that God showers rain on the grass that is here today and tomorrow is tossed into the fire, or quoted Psalm 113: “Who is like the Lord our God . . . who . . . raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap?” After all, Jesus might have said, “You can’t be enslaved to both God and a bank account.”
Meanwhile, back in the Old Testament Covenant with God’s distributive justice, Jeremiah laments: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” The people continue to reject God’s distributive justice and instead follow the gods of the exile. Jeremiah knows that even though the harvest was good, the people will be destroyed. They are too ready to trade justice for security, and false morality for personal gain. Amos confirms: “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, ‘when will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain and the sabbath so that we may offer wheat for sale? . . we will . . . practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat’ . . . but the Lord will not forget any of their deeds.”
Recently, lenders in the U.S. housing market have played fast and loose with credit, luring the unwary and the marginally qualified with low “teaser” interest rates, then bundling these higher-risk loans into packages that have been sold in the global financial market place. When the poorly-secured loans began to default, the effects were felt world-wide. We don’t need an interventionist “god” to crook a finger and send the U.S. economy into pre-recession panic. When humans act unethically, the consequences are not always immediate, but they are certain.
The choice is ours: Empire, with its shallow piety, war, victory, and then an uneasy peace based on the capriciousness of the whole system; or participation in Covenant with the order of the Universe, which for humanity, works in a context of nonviolence and distributive justice-compassion, leading to the kind of secure peace that is not dependent on economic or political conditions.