10September2017 at Emmanuel URC, Cambridge

Sermon preached

10September2017 at Emmanuel URC, Cambridge

A Parable of what to do in a Crisis

Deuteronomy 30 11-20

Romans 8 31-39

These two readings, one from the Hebrew scripture, the other from the Christian epistle by Paul, represent the high points, the culminations of two different approaches to the Law of Moses. For Deuteronomy salvation by obedience to the Law was a matter of Life and Death, while for Paul salvation was by the grace of God, justification by faith. So there is a huge transition of thought and theology going on here, between these two Biblical signposts, and it was inspired by the life and ministry of Jesus. But we do not have a great theological thesis developed and left to us by Jesus; instead we have stories and parables, giving us insights into what he thought, and how he taught his disciples about what was important in life and faith. He would draw attention to the demeaning ways they did businessas well as the hypocrisy of humanity as they approached their religion in a literalistic and box-ticking fashion, rather than a relationship with the living God. So let us hear the gospel, conscious of this massive transition from Law to Grace, and see if it can inform our understanding of one of the most difficult parables for us,because it looks on the surface as if it is commending dishonesty by a most disreputable character.

Luke 161 – 9

I would like to achieve two objectives in my sermon today. Firstly, I want to rehabilitate the reputation of one of the most unfairly treated people in the Bible; and secondly I want to explain why I think Jesus told this parable and how it applies to us.

The parable we have read is called traditionally ‘The Parable of the Unjust Steward’ but it was given that name by people who did not understand the context of what was going on in the story. I am going to suggest to you that this parable, when Jesus first told it, caused a huge amount of hilarity amongst the disciples and the ‘poor’ followers of Jesus. We would call it a funny story, with a twist in the tail.

On the surface the story is about a steward (or business manager) who is thought by his master to be cheating him in some way, certainly not making him enough money. So he asks for an account of all his dealings before he intends to dismiss him. The steward knows this could be the end of his career, he may never get such a position of trust ever again. The word “incompetence” or even “dishonesty” would forever be attached to his name. So what can he do? He goes round to all the debtors to whom he has offered credit on his master’s behalf, and he tells them to reduce the amount on their receipt of the transaction that the steward has kept. Well, the master will surely be even more angry at receiving less. But no, the master commends him for reacting in such a far-sighted manner and making good friends for the future crisis when he has no job.

There is not much funny so far, I grant you, but we are hearing the story as people for whom debt and credit are normal adjuncts to life. It looks as if the steward is cheating the master for his own gain. But listen to the story as if you were a first century Galilean. To do that you must know this one thing that has been overlooked for centuries. A Jew was not allowed by the Law received from Moses to make any interest by lending to another Jew, for fear of profiting from his destitution. Let me read you some verses laying this law down, one from each of the legal codes in the Bible, the Deuteronomic (Ex 22 v 25) and the Priestly (Lev 25 vv 35-36a) codes.

Exodus 2225 says:“If you advance money to any poor man amongst my people, you shall not act like a money-lender: you must not exact interest from him.”

And Leviticus 2535 reads:“When your brother-Israelite is reduced to poverty and cannot support himself in the community,….you must not charge him interest on a loan, either by deducting it in advance from the capital sum or by adding it on repayment.”

So, your average Galilean would have heard this story as a criticism of what goes on down south in Jerusalem amongst the moneyed classes. They knew that this story represented a scam in order to avoid the Law of God for them. And the clue is this; the debts were all written in terms of commodities, oil and corn. The scam could have used other things, but these were the most common. The loans were in shekels, of course, but the receipt noted the oil or corn equivalent, with an extra bit added on top, which we would call the interest. The reasoning behind using the commodities as money equivalent was that it was always likely that someone would have a little corn in their meal tub, or a little oil in their lamp, so therefore if they borrowed more they were not destitute technically. The scam was a way for business to proceed, to rationalize injustice, with credit and debt in play, but avoiding the taint of usury.

Given that we know about this scam now, who is the one person who does a righteous act in the story? The business manager, the steward. Who is the chief villain? The master. It’s his money that is being lent out; he knows how it is earning money; he is party to the scam, but more than that he is the driving force behind the scam, to avoid obeying the Law; and he is critical of the steward for not making enough, that he is inefficient at least, dishonest quite possibly. The debtors have to play along; it is their only source of funding, yet the master implied that the steward should have squeezed even more from them when they were already hard up.

So, here is my interpretation of the parable that is endorsed by more recent Biblical research. The steward may be disturbed by the business ethics he is forced to practice on behalf of his master and he doesn’t drive the hardest bargains with the debtors. The master thinks he should be getting a better return, and resolves to employ a more hard-hearted business manager. On hearing of this the steward goes to the debtors and offers them a deal which is exactly what the Law of Moses requires, that is absolutely no interest built into the commodity owed. Of course they accept, and remain friends with the steward from that moment on. So the steward in this story is the hero not the villain; he has a sense of justice for the less well off, he is obedient to the Law, he brings in a year of Jubilee all by himself, he forgives other peoples’ debts and he is mindful of the value of friendship for the future. He became a child of God, by grace, but unemployed.

Meanwhile, the master is hopping mad with anger. He immediately recognizes what has gone on. He has just lost a year or two of interest, and all his capital is tied up. Just imagine what you would feel like if your pension or salary was suspended until 2019, and you had no other savings. Anger, anguish, fear, uncertainty, revenge must have overwhelmed him. He couldn’t repudiate the revised promissory notes because there were no witnesses to the transaction and the steward was still technically in his employment. So what did he do? He commended the steward.

Now, that is the punch-line of this funny story, and if you were first century Galileans in Jesus’ company you would see the point immediately. These were poor people by and large, not like some of the rich southerners in Jerusalem, the Sadducees perhaps who controlled the nation’s purse-strings, that this rich master represented. Even in his anger and rage, he commended the steward. Why? Because he was left with no option. There may have been an element of schadenfreude in the disciples’ delight at his discomforture. We would say the rich man was in a Catch-22 situation. Even though, privately, he might have liked to murder the steward for putting him in this position, publicly he had to commend the steward. Why? Because if he did not then he could not enjoy the reputation for piety and righteousness, which he did not deserve, but his commendation gave him. He chose to look good, rather than be good. He preferred to loose a bit of money than loose his credibility for piety. The scam could live on as long as he did not reveal his real involvement.

It was a win-win-win outcome. The debtors won an honest loan for once, the steward won friendship after doing business in a lawful way, and the master was publicly hailed as a model of rectitude for obedience to the Law, even if,privately, he would have preferred his money. He commended the steward, he had no choice, otherwise all his peers would know that he was party to the scam, the instigator of the injustice, the culprit who ignored the Law of Moses. I think the Galilean disciples would have loved the irony of the drama. Can we not hear the faint echo of a Galilean guffaw from the disciples as the sheer ingenuity of the story elicits from them a realization of, first, the jaw-dropping effrontery of the steward, followed by, second, their delight that a rich, effete southerner losing money and embracing the “joy” of losing his money to look pious. So I hope you can agree with me that the reputation of the steward is now restored, and the parable should have been named after the ‘Unjust Master’.

My second objective is that we understand why Jesus told the story. Jesus, like so many of the prophets before him, was not just interested in people’s behavior, not just how good or bad they were at obeying The Law, or their attempts at pretend piety, as in our story, but about the future and the sovereignty of God in the turbulence to come. Jesus could see trouble ahead; he was a prophet in the apocalyptic tradition. In the Lord’s Prayer that we have already repeated is the phrase, “Do not lead us into temptation”, which might be better translated, “Do not put us to the test”, or as the modern version in Rejoice and Sing has it, “Save us from the time of trial”. We should not seek the crisis, but if it comes then we will need the resilience of our faith to face it. Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane reveals his own preparedness, his own faith, for the trials and tribulations to come; “Let this cup pass me by. Yet not my will but yours”. So behind the humour of the parable was a more serious purpose. He wanted his disciples to be ready, to expect and to plan for a time of crisis. This parable is about planning for a crisis.

The steward was a man who faced his crisis of losing his job, with the prospect of never securing another, even in the crooked business environment in which he had been operating, by turning at the very last to what God wanted in their society. It may have been the first time in his life that he had dealt honestly with the debtors. He wanted friends for his old age, he didn’t want to be an outcast from society nor irrevocably separated from God. He used a memorable phrase to point up his dilemma; he was not strong enough to dig and too proud to beg. He knew he could not be self-sufficient. He depended on others; he needed friends.

Well, crises can come in all shapes and sizes; there can be personal, family, community, national, world-wide and cosmic crises. The context of Jesus’ crisis was the Roman occupation of a land of rigorous but flawed faithfulness to God, and he soon knew on reaching Jerusalem that his sort of radical love and gracious spirit might not last long in the political, economic and social turmoil of Jewish and Roman power broking. Jesus’ personal crisis took on cosmic dimensions upon the cross. His rejection became the sign of the sovereignty of God for all people for all time. God bears the marks of religious, economic, military and political barbarity upon a cross; the life extinguished there had crackled and sparkled previously with insight, humour, subversion and urgency, faith and love. His death became the means by which we find life in all its fullness, and see what God is like.

Jesus would have known the Hebrew scriptures off by heart, and he would have known of other more recent writings and movements which all attested to the coming Day of the Lord. His ministry was inspired with teachings about preparing his disciples for what was to come.

So how can we respond and prepare for the crises that will come? On a personal and family level we may have to prepare for illness and even death, and we do that by deepening our faith and recognizing we are safe in God’s hands, and nothing can separate us from the love of God. That’s even more important than writing a Will and a Lasting Power of Attorney, and they’re essential, too.

Prepare for a crisis in the national and international arena as well. At the present time the wars that are being fought in our world are someone else’s crisis. The hunger and poverty is someone else’s burden; the migration of millions of people is another’s concern. But war could envelop the world again with a new ferocity, so we should not believe the propaganda and demonization of enemies emanating from any and all sides, for truth is the first casualty of war. One of the most startling things Jesus ever said was to love our enemies, so we don’t do that by believing lies about them.

Dealing with debt and debt-forgiveness gave us a clue to understand our parable this morning. Now we live in a quite different world but the way our nations organize financial affairs and create money out of nothing and run national economies has become so dependent on credit and debt that there is a finite and non-trivial risk of an international collapse that would affect everyone, almost certainly to our detriment. At one level, preparation for that needs a financial adviser, but at another level we need to seek spiritual advice, too. Can we cope with less? Does our dependence on material things interfere with our growing to spiritual maturity? Can we truly sing, “All my hope on God is founded”. All these crises are there somewhere in the Bible.

Whatever the crisis is, whenever it comes, our rehabilitated steward in the parable reminds us of two requirements. You’ll need your faith in God’s overarching love to get you through, and you’ll need friends when you’re tested, friends in the church and in the family, to support you and for you to support. If you want a ‘take-away’ from this parable, it’s this: Do what the loving God expects of you, friendship is to be treasured and be prepared to face anything.

We are all getting older, and hopefully wiser. So here is a word to the wise. Love God and make friends and live at peace, because we’re all not strong enough to dig, and we’re too proud to beg.

Amen

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