Readings:
- Amos 8:4-7
Psalm 113:1-2,4-6, 7-8 Response: “Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor.” - 1 Timothy 2:1-8
- Luke 16:1-13 (long form) or Luke 16:10-13 (short form)
Reflections on the Gospel Reading
In today’s Gospel Luke has set a parable of Jesus beside a number of sayings of Jesus from different contexts in order to instruct us on the proper use of wealth. The parable of “the unjust steward” has puzzled commentators from the very earliest times. Can we find a message in it for our own time?
Luke’s Interpretation of the Parable
Writing around the year 85 C.E., Luke interprets the parable of “the unjust steward” by adding other sayings of Jesus – all but the last drawn from his special source and not found in any of the other canonical Gospels. In this manner Luke draws a number of morals from the parable for the Christians of his own time and place.
Luke is saying to his readers: Learn from the resourcefulness and resolute action of people around you how you should respond to the crisis of the coming of the reign of God. Use your possessions well, for example by giving alms, so that God may welcome you into the eternal dwellings just as the “unjust” steward used his wealth and position of responsibility to assure a new home after being dismissed from his master’s house. Being trustworthy with wealth has eternal consequences.
Luke’s final moral is the well-known saying that he draws from Q: “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” “The linguistic evidence points to Mammon as signifying wealth collected in the bank, or the storehouse, or the treasury: wealth which then becomes the object of trust for the powerful-wealthy to the exclusion of God and neighbor. More importantly, Mammon is based on a system that exploits the many for the benefit of the few. To serve Mammon is to be alone in one’s self-sufficiency; to serve God is to have concern for others and to practice reciprocity.” (Oakman 2004, p. 124)
What was Jesus saying to his contemporaries?
More difficult than discerning the morals Luke was drawing from the story of the “unjust steward” is the question of what Jesus was saying to his contemporaries. This involves isolating the parable itself from the sayings that follow and requires some information about the social conditions of Jesus’ time as well as attention to details in the parable.
Although commentators are divided, I find most persuasive the contention that Jesus’ parable ends with the first half of verse 8: “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly . . .” (NRSV) By itself the parable tells a story that Jesus’ listeners would have found to be true-to-life and even entertaining.
The Social Situation
One of the major social problems in first century Palestine and throughout the Mediterranean world was the pervasive presence of debt. It is hard for us to imagine the oppressive weight of debt born by the vast majority of Jesus’ contemporaries. Ninety percent of the population existed at the bare subsistence level or below. One bad crop could force a peasant landowner or a tenant farmer into hopeless debt. Interest rates for loans on crops were usurious – in the range of 60 percent to as high as 200 percent per year. (Herzog II 1994, 161) Inevitably, the peasant farmer lost his land and was forced into day labor that did not earn enough to meet the basic nutritional requirements of the laborer and his family. The result was beggary and starvation.
It is significant that in Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) Modern biblical scholarship has shown that debt forgiveness was a central part of Jesus’ proclamation of the coming of the reign of God.
The two main characters in Jesus’ story need to be understood against this background. The rich man was probably a wealthy absentee landowner who lived off the surplus value he could extract from the day laborers and sharecroppers who worked on his estate and from transactions with merchants who transported his crops to urban markets and provided him with various luxuries.
The steward or manager, who might have been a slave, was a learned person. He could read, write, and calculate. He handled the owner’s affairs and acted on the owner’s behalf. The steward collected rents and shares of crops, drew up contracts, and collected bills. He negotiated for himself or extorted as big a fee as the traffic would bear. He was constantly in the middle. He had to squeeze enough out of the owner’s debtors to keep the owner happy and make a good living for himself, but not so much as to enrage the peasants or to cause the owner to look askance at the steward’s lavish lifestyle. The steward did not want the owner to think he was taking too big a cut.
Also, charging a fee for the use of a commodity such as grain or oil was considered usury. The customary mark-up on a money or commodity loan was anywhere from 25% to 100% depending on the item. The steward negotiated a set price for the amount to be paid back, and this was put in writing. The amount loaned was not stated. Throughout the process the owner maintained plausible deniability. If he was caught taking usury, the steward took the blame. This made the steward very valuable to the owner.
The steward was very vulnerable to rumors, one of the main weapons in the arsenal of peasants and merchants who were trying to keep as much of the produce and profits as possible for themselves. If the owner lost confidence in the steward, it made their life a little easier. It is important to remember that the whole system was vicious – a raw struggle for survival with little room for moral distinctions. One did what was necessary to survive.
The Steward’s Dilemma
The steward in the parable was accused of squandering the owner’s property, and the accusation had come to the attention of the owner. We are not told whether the accusation had any merit. The Greek word for “accused” (diaballein) can also mean “slandered,” and is actually translated that way in the Latin Vulgate (“diffamatus est”). In one sense it was irrelevant. The whole system was corrupt. The owner wanted a steward who could extract as much as possible without causing an outright revolt among his debtors. The owner could use the rumors, true or not, as leverage against a steward who was taking too big a cut for himself or causing too much trouble with the tenants, laborers, or debtors.
The steward did not waste time trying to defend himself. He immediately grasped the seriousness of the problem. Losing his post as steward and becoming a day laborer or a beggar was a death sentence. Fortunately for him, he knew how the system worked, and he knew how to play hardball. He swiftly implemented a strategy designed to expose his enemies and either retain his job or position himself for employment by some other rich landowner.
The enormous sums owed (about 900 gallons of olive oil and 1,100 bushels of wheat) plus the fact that the debtors could read and write make it unlikely that the debtors were laborers or sharecroppers. They were probably wholesale merchants. In the parable the steward deals swiftly with each of the owner’s debtors, one by one. He handed them his own copy of their IOU and had them rewrite it in their own hand, omitting his cut.
By doing this he exposed his rumor mongering enemies who were only too happy to take part in a scheme that appeared to defraud the owner. They were the ones who were squandering the rich man’s fortune. Moreover, the debtors enjoyed a certain measure of debt forgiveness that meant for a better life. The owner was happy because he got his share. Both the owner and the steward were insulated from any charges of usury. By the time the owner found out what was going on, all his debtors were praising his magnanimity, and his honor status was measurably increased.
The steward’s shrewd action also put the owner in a bind. The steward had acted in the owner’s name. If the owner countermanded the transactions and insisted on the original debt amounts, he would lose face for not being able to control his agent. Further, he might provoke just the kind of rebellion among his debtors that he employed the steward to prevent. He also realized just how clever and resourceful the steward was in dealing with the rumor mill. In the end the owner had no choice except to commend his manager for acting shrewdly.
The Point of the Parable
All of Jesus’ parables have a point. Not all of them have a moral application. The primary purpose of a parable is to open the listener’s eyes – to disclose new possibilities and to help the listener see the world in a new way. Moreover, Jesus’ parables often have an ironic twist.
William R. Herzog II notes that “the parable began with the usual social scripts: masters distrust stewards; peasants hate stewards; stewards cheat both tenants and masters. But by means of his outrageous actions, the steward manages to reverse all of these scripts so that at the close of the parable, peasants are praising the master, the master commends the steward, and the steward has relieved the burden on the peasants and kept his job. . . The result was a glimpse for the debtors of another order, one in which forgiveness of debt would be more than a petition in a prayer.” (Herzog II 1994, 257, 258)
By means of this parable Jesus enabled his listeners to draw from their own experience to glimpse the possibility of another world. Life did not have to be marked by a constant struggle for bare subsistence, by endless conflict between rich and poor, and by hopeless debt. The story of the steward’s crafty action helped them imagine that debt forgiveness could actually work to everyone’s advantage.
Jesus’ parable opened the eyes of his listeners to the possibility of a world free from the crushing reality of unpayable debt. May it do the same for us.
Explanatory note:
Q “Q” (from the German “Quelle” or “source”) stands for a lost written document made up almost entirely of sayings of Jesus which scholars have reconstructed from an analysis of passages in the Gospel of Matthew and Luke which are very similar to each other but generally not found in the Gospel of Mark. Examples would be the Sermon on the Mount or the Lord’s Prayer. These scholars hold that Matthew and Luke were written independently. However, each of the authors had access to written copies of Mark and Q.
In preparing these reflections, in addition to the biblical texts, I consulted the following works:
Fitzmyer 1985 – Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV : Introduction, Translation, and Notes. Anchor Bible Volume 28A. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985), pp. 1094-1111.
Fuller 1984 – Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary. The Word of God for the Church Today (Collegeville [MN]: Liturgical Press, 1984), pp. 506-507.
Funk, Hoover & Jesus Seminar 1993 – Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 357-359.
Herzog II 1994 – William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speach: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994)
Hultgren 2000 – Arland J. Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary (Grand Rapids [MI]: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 146-154.
Johnson 1991 – Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke , Sacra Pagina Series Volume 3, A Michael Glazier Book (Collegeville [MN]: Liturgical Press, 1991), pp. 243-248.
LaVerdiere 1990 – Eugene, LaVerdiere, S.S.S., Luke. New Testament Message, Volume 5. A Michael Glazier Book (Collegeville [MN]: Liturgical Press, 1990), pp. 205-208.
Malina & Rohrbaugh 2003 – Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Second Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 291-294.
NRSV = New Revised Standard Version – Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, Editors, The New Oxford Annotated Bible [with the Apocrypha] containing the Old and New Testaments. New Revised Standard Version. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Oakman 2004 – Douglas E. Oakman , “The Radical Jesus: You Cannot Serve God and Mammon,” Biblical Theology Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Fall 2004), 122-129.
Pilch 1997 – John J. Pilch, The Cultural World of Jesus, Sunday by Sunday, Cycle C. A Liturgical Press Book (Collegeville [MN]: Liturgical Press, 1997), pp. 139-141.