Forgive By Any Means Necessary.

Luke 16:1-18

I.

            After Jesus gives his parables about the lost sheep, coin, and son, he keeps speaking to his disciples.  And he tells a rather difficult story about a rich master and his hired manager.  It’s difficult because not only is the manager either crooked or incompetent, which is why he gets fired, but the manager also gets rewarded for doing something we think is rather underhanded and sleazy.  Not only is Jesus okay with this, he lifts up the manager as a shining example of how disciples should act! 

            So: we should steal from our boss, and when we get fired, we should steal even more from our boss.  Got it.

            But to learn that from the story implies that we are looking at it from the wrong perspective.  We tend to see it from the perspective of the one stolen from, or the one doing the stealing.  But there are other people in the story.  What if we interpreted it from their perspective?  These are the debtors who have their debts partially forgiven.

            From that perspective, I suggest that this parable is really about forgiveness.  It is no accident that it follows immediately the Parable of the Lost Son, which features the astoundingly forgiving father.  Here, the boss does not seem to be particularly forgiving at first.  When he hears about the manager squandering his property, he demands that the accounts be produced and he fires the manager.  The manager was ripping off the master for selfish gain, we presume.

            Then it is the manager who, still acting as the master’s agent, and still acting out of remarkably selfish reasons, proceeds to approach on his own some of the master’s debtors, offering them a one-time-only opportunity to get out from under some of their debt. 

            Now debt is one of those terms that should get our attention.  What do we all pray daily?  “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”  What does Jesus say at the beginning of his ministry?  That he has come to proclaim “the acceptable year of the Lord,” which means the Jubilee from Leviticus 25, which means a wall-to-wall forgiveness of all debts.  Then, as now, debt is a major problem faced by most people.

            Once again, Jesus doesn’t seem to be bothered by how or why good things get done, like forgiving debts, only that they get done.  He is concerned exclusively for the debtors here.  If the manager is doing good for a bad reason, Jesus is okay with that.  As long as he’s really doing good.  It is even fine with Jesus if the manager is getting something out of it for himself!  The manager calculates his debt-reduction scheme so that he will have people who owe him some hospitality while he is unemployed.

            So, at first the manager squanders the property of the master, just for his own benefit.  But after he is fired, he still loses the master’s property, but now it is by helping others.  He gives away the master’s assets… and the Master… rewards him.

II.

            It is almost like what the Master wants is for his assets to be distributed.  He is unhappy with the manager who stole from him for his own benefit.  But the manager is commended when he gives some of the master’s wealth away to indebted people.  Perhaps the master does not really want them feeling tied to him out of duty and debt, like the older brother in the former story.  Perhaps the master realizes that he gets a share of the goodwill gained by the manager’s action.

            The manager inadvertently and as a kind of last resort, actually builds community.  He creates places where he will be received and welcomed, and he does this by forgiving part of their debt to the master.  And it is of this that the master approves.    

            Jesus says that the 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.  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.”

            In other words, go out there and be a debt forgiver, in every sense of the word, which is what Jesus teaches in the Lord’s Prayer.  Don’t even beat yourself up imagining that you are somehow indebted to God.  In one sense, we are, of course, indebted to God… but God does not want debtors, people who are always thinking that they have to pay God back, and maybe if they do pay God back then they won’t owe God anything anymore… which is ridiculous.  Walt Whitman once complained about people who “sweat and whine about their condition,” who “lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,” who make him “sick discussing their duty to God.”  Jesus is with Whitman on this.  God doesn’t want our forced duty.  God wants our love, that is, our generosity towards others and our forgiveness of their debts.  

            It is precisely because we can never repay our debt to God that we have to forget it.  God has forgiven it.  It is this basic fact of forgiveness that Jesus’ disciples have to embody all the time.  Our lives are about forgiveness by any means necessary. 

            All wealth is to some degree dishonest; it is about humans attaching value to this piece of paper or metal, value that fluctuates wildly and bizarrely.  Jesus says to make this and everything else a tool for mission, a way of spreading the good news.  A means of reconciliation, in which the lowly are lifted up, their debts forgiven, their lives restored.

III.

             Jesus goes on to say that if we trust him in how we manage the little things, like money, we will be able to trust him in the big things, like love and justice, truth and beauty, goodness and wisdom.  If we can’t do what is right with our wealth, don’t expect God to bless us with these important things.  If we can’t serve God with all the things God has given us, how can we expect God to bless us in such a way that these things somehow belong to us?  Seriously, if your teenager has wrecked your car, who would give her her own car?  Do we expect to be rewarded for destroying God’s planet?  The whole reason the planet is as wrecked as it is has to do with people following, serving, loving, and worshiping money.

            How we act depends on whom we love and what we serve.  If we serve wealth, if we dedicate our lives to doing whatever is required to increase wealth, we will live in a certain way.  But if we love and serve God, we will live in a rather different way.  “You cannot serve [both] God and wealth.”  You have to choose one or the other.  In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, you can’t glorify God by making money; and you can’t make any money glorifying God.

            And it is the Pharisees who happen to be listening in who say, “Now wait a minute!”  They ridicule Jesus and what he is saying.  They, like everyone else, are “lovers of money.”  They, like everyone else, and no doubt like us, do not really agree that we can’t serve God and wealth.  Because, well, how is the church supposed to survive?

            We have buildings and property, we have investments, we have salaries to pay, we have mission to support.  This can’t be done for free!  Don’t we know it!  Jesus himself knows his group can’t survive without some involvement with money.  He has several wealthy women underwriting his ministry.  He even has a disciple appointed treasurer.  So he can’t mean that his disciples are supposed to live without money at all. 

            Jesus says that what people prize, what people value, what people use to measure their own success, that is, money, is an abomination in the sight of God.  And if something is an abomination, we should get rid of it as quickly as possible.  And if that abomination is something humans value, we should take advantage of that fact and translate its perceived value into real value by giving it away and making it serve human needs.  That way we gain welcome into God’s eternal household.      

            I am not going to fall into the trap of diluting or equivocating on Jesus’ words here.  There is no sense in which “well, it’s okay to have a lot of wealth as long as we’re not ‘serving’ it.”  Or: “I can possess it, but it I can’t let it possess me,” or some such nonsense.  God is not fooled by this kind of self-justifying, hypocritical doubletalk.  God sees the heart. God also sees the chasm between people with wealth and the poor neighbor… a topic he will address in the parable for next week. 

IV.

            No doubt the Pharisees were pointing out passages of the Torah that appear to indicate that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing.  Jesus says, in effect, that “Yeah, well, you guys are the experts on the law and all, so use it anyway you like, even to justify your own greed and selfishness.  I don’t think that’s what the Torah is really about, but that’s just me.

             “The law and the prophets were in effect until the coming of John the Baptizer; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and that is the deeper Spirit of the law.  I have always strongly urged everyone to enter this new relationship with God and each other, even if you have to force your way in past your own reluctance and the resistance of your family.  But, properly understood, every insignificant detail of the Torah and the prophets will last until the end of time.  And the spirit of the Torah and the prophets is always towards justice, no matter how many verses you can dig up to justify your own self-serving position.

            “I will give you an example of the way you guys mess up the Torah so that it means something the opposite of what God intends.  The Torah says divorce is allowed in some cases and according to a specific procedure.  It does this to give rights to wives and children, and to the community itself.  But you take that grudging and limited permission and turn it into a rationalization allowing men to ditch their wives on the least pretext, as long as they follow the letter of the law, which you manipulate.  In this way you use the law to break the law, and do harm to innocent women, letting men throw unwanted wives into poverty, the very thing the law wants to prevent.

            “I am speaking flat-out in the Spirit of the Torah when I say therefore that anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.  That’s because the deeper meaning of the Torah is the protection of the weak against the predations and violence of the strong.  And if even my words in this case should be twisted again into a ruthless letter that victimizes the weak, it is again the Spirit, blowing where she wills, that will correct our practice.

            “The Torah does not go away.  We just receive an ever deeper and truer interpretation of it.  Now it is about the Kingdom of God, which I have come to proclaim and enact, and into which I invite others.”

V.

            So there is a certain creativity, and kind of wildness, and s single-minded focus as well, to discipleship.  Jesus would have us do justice, love kindness, and walk with God no matter why or how or with whom.  Jesus would have us follow the Spirit of the Torah that he embodies, even if it means breaking the letter of the law and going against the law’s self-sppointed guardians, the Pharisees. 

            If it’s our selfishness and fear that is making us forgive people, that’s fine.  People are being forgiven.  Debts are being canceled, or at least reduced.  If money is confusing the issue, Jesus says, “So use money to enact the values and practices of God’s Kingdom by giving it away to people who need it more than you do.  If even the law, that is, Scripture itself, is apparently getting in the way of our mission to do the Kingdom, Jesus says follow the deeper Spirit of the Bible, and act on behalf of the weak, the victims, the destitute, and the vulnerable.  Jesus is the Word of God.  If we think the Bible contradicts him then we are reading it wrong.

            We can take dishonest wealth, an abomination, and transform it into something that does good in the world in Jesus’ name.  We cannot serve both God and wealth; but we can make our wealth serve God. 

            And I guess in this season in which we are talking about stewardship and the importance of giving of our time, talents, energy, and resources to God in the church, this is all good to remember.  Hopefully, this church is a place where we find forgiveness, acceptance, blessing, and peace.  Hopefully this is a place where we can show that we can be faithful with a little, and so receive the true riches.  Hopefully this is a place where we can show how even things valued by people can be transmuted into things that serve God.

+++++++