The Hardest Parable…

Every three years the lectionary lands this odd parable on our laps, and when I see it coming I always wonder if maybe this would be good Sunday to invite someone else to preach. It is what Robert Capon calls “the hardest parable,” and as you go through any number of biblical commentaries it is quite evident that no one is inclined to disagree.

You have these two main characters—the rich man and his manager—along with a little handful of characters who are deeply indebted to the rich man, and if you’re looking for a “God character” in the way that the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son is very clearly meant to signify God, I think you’re chasing down a blind alley. Some readers might instinctively want to cast rich man as the God character, as he’s the one who is in charge. However, as N.T. Wright notes,

It looks as though the master in the story had himself been acting in a somewhat underhand manner. Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, but many people got round this by lending in kind, with oil and wheat being easy commodities to use for this purpose. It is likely that what the steward deducted from the bill was the interest that the master had been charging, with a higher rate on oil than on wheat. If he reduced the bill in each case to the principal, the simple amount that had been lent, the debtors would be delighted but the master couldn’t lay a charge against the steward without owning up to his own shady business practices.

So maybe Jesus isn’t trying to line up characters here so much as say something to the disciples about the times in which they were living? Those were not easy times, with the Roman empire rattling its swords in the streets, and the Pharisees attempting to draw the lines of holiness as tightly as they could, all the while turning a blind eye to some of the practices that had become common; things like skirting around the law when it came to the prohibition on the taking of interest. Again and again Jesus had said that a crisis time was coming—that the very temple itself would not last, and that persecution was imminent. We don’t necessarily feel the tension in the air when we read these texts from a distance, but Jesus’ own followers would not have been likely to miss that tension.

So is this as basic a thing as some survival instructions in extraordinarily tense times?

Listen again to the lines with which the parable concludes, this time from the translation by N.T. Wright:

So let me tell you this: use that dishonest stuff called money to make yourselves friends! Then, when that gives out, they will welcome you into homes that last.

So yes, there may well be something in that, but then the teaching continues beyond the parable, and strikes at something deeper than survival tactics in a harsh age.

Listen again:

‘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.

Now that sounds almost like a proverb, describing the core difference between the faithful and the dishonest. But then there is another odd turn, which puts a bit of a crick in the neck:

If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 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.

On this Kendra Mohn comments, “[T]he final verse is clear, even if the intricacies of life’s choices are not.” And that final verse again? “You cannot serve God and wealth.” And then she continues,

Devotion to God, faithfulness in stewarding God’s gifts, is the priority for a follower of Jesus. But it is never easy in a world full of negotiation where wealth demands our loyalty. Recognition of this challenge drives us again to our need for Christ to reconcile us to God and to one another, and the response of mercy and forgiveness at the heart of the Gospel.

“So many biblical texts,” she comments, “have been tamed by time and repetition. Perhaps this one is still an exception,” to which I’d add a very hearty “yes, this one has clearly not been tamed!” To this Kendra Mohn adds, “A sermon on this text may not have the resolution or clarity common to others.” No doubt! “Instead,” she comments, “it may capture the attention of otherwise disengaged hearers and prompt new energy of discernment.”

Or it may just send you home with a furrowed brow, which perhaps isn’t the worst thing of all. If it has called us to think again about our relationship to money, that’s a good thing. If it has stretched us to reflect more deeply on the times in which Jesus and the disciples lived—times very different from our own—that’s also significant. If it has brought us to a place of confessing that we don’t always understand Jesus, and that there is always more to wrestle with, that’s a grand bonus.

And here’s something else to ponder. Jesus is speaking into crisis times under the Roman Empire, while in our first reading Jeremiah was speaking into crisis times under the Babylonian Empire. If you step back and consider how much of the scriptures are actually born of crisis times, it can be a bit sobering. Sure, there was the united monarchy under David and then Solomon, but if you step back and look at all that is described in the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1st and 2nd Kings, you have to admit that even the time of a prospering monarchy was marked by enormous division and conflict.

If you were living right now in the war-torn Ukraine you might hear something very different in this Gospel. If you were a Nigerian Christian who had fled from the incursions of Boko Haram in your region of that country, you might hear these lines from Jeremiah quite differently than we do:

My joy is gone, grief is upon me,

my heart is sick.

Hark, the cry of my poor people

from far and wide in the land.

Then again, you might just discover a remarkable turn in your grip on such biblical texts. I think here of the enslaved African Americans living in the deep south, who cultivated an extraordinary faith that their slave-owning, slave-abusing masters could hardly begin to fathom. You heard this line from Jeremiah today: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” Well, from that question, “Is there no balm in Gilead,” that enslaved church generated a song that dared to answer, and to answer with striking resilience:

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.

Sometimes I feel discouraged,
And think my works in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again.

(Because) There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.

So as you go from here this evening, go wrestling with what Jesus’ odd parable might have to say to you about how you think about money, and go with a deep sense of the assurance that comes when even an enslaved people can dare to hear Jeremiah, and then sing back to him, “There is a balm in Gilead.” There is.