Lesson: Luke 16:1-13

This Sunday’s gospel passage, the Parable of the Unjust Steward, is one of Jesus’ most confusing parables. Commentators are all over the map in their interpretations. A rich owner discovers that his manager has been dishonest. Fearing he’s going to be fired, the manager decides to do some quick dealing. He goes to a few of the owner’s clients and settles their debts at much lower rates. The manager figures that the clients will be grateful and treat him well in the future. The owner finds out about this strategy, and this is where it gets strange.

The owner commends the manager for acting “shrewdly” (NRSV). One of the challenges of this parable is figuring out whose side we’re supposed to be on. And another challenge is that it’s followed by four sayings offered as interpretations that sound as though Luke had a handful of random and inscrutable sayings of Jesus and decided to tack them on here. “Just put them here; no one knows what this parable means anyway.”

A mini-course on the economics of Roman-occupied Galilee in the first century is a good place to begin. Rich landlords were like loan-sharks. They charged exorbitant interest rates, and when the peasants couldn’t pay up, they’d lose the family farm. In fact, that was precisely the rich landlord’s plan – to increase and consolidate his holdings. Both the rich man and his manager were exploiting desperate peasants and violating the Torah.

Jesus’ hearers would know that typical debt contracts hid these exorbitant interest rates from illiterate peasants. Today, we might compare this to predatory pay-day loans. The manager was probably extracting his own cut of the profits, as well, and on top of that, Rome would take a share. When he reduced the payments, the manager may simply have forgiven his own cut of the interest. Or he may have been doing what the law of Torah commands by forgiving all the hidden interest in the contracts. He might even have been switching sides; maybe he quit working for the wealthy landowner in order to start working with the oppressed poor – which would explain why Jesus seems to commend him. Maybe the rich man recognizes that he needs at least to appear to be following Torah, and so he commends his manager.

That’s one possible explanation for what’s going on here. Still, it doesn’t tell us whose side we’re supposed to be on or why Jesus is telling his disciples this story. Here are a couple of thoughts: One thing for certain, the rich man is not the good guy here. In Luke and elsewhere, Jesus makes it very clear: No one can serve God and wealth – other translations use the word “Mammon,” a personification of wealth that makes it more obvious that wealth really can take the place of God in people’s lives.

In the Luke’s context, if you were rich, it meant you exploited others to get that way. On the one hand, we might reasonably say that being rich isn’t bad, after all. It’s exploitation that’s bad. We can look at our own economy and see exploitation in the wide gap between what CEO’s and workers earn, or the fact that when billionaire Jeff Bezos cut health benefits for part-time workers at Whole Foods, the richest man in the world saved the equivalent of what he makes from his vast fortune in just 6 hours.

On the other hand, isn’t it incredibly easy for all of us to ignore the way our economic system exploits people? It’s easy to enjoy cheap goods and ignore the actual cost of the manufacturing process on the workers. U.S.-made goods cost more because we have minimum wage laws and laws that protect workers’ health and safety. Places like Bangladesh or Guatemala that don’t have these protections put the costs of industrial accidents or chronic work-related ailments on the worker, instead of passing it on to us, the consumers.

It’s easy to ignore the catastrophic impact of climate change on the countries that had very little to do with causing it. Pakistan’s contribution to climate change is minimal, the level of emissions of that country is relatively low, but right now more than a third of Pakistan is underwater and about 1,400 have been killed by the floods. As one commentator put it, “It is like nature has attacked the wrong targets. It should be those that are more responsible for climate change that should have to face these kinds of challenges.”

Perhaps the real difference between the rich man and his manager and us is intention. The rich man and his manager meant to cheat the debtors. I don’t know any average consumer who wants to cheat the workers in Bangladesh or the Philippines of a decent living or safe workplace, or who wants part time workers at Whole Foods to have less access to health care. We don’t intend to exploit the planet by investing in companies that make gas-guzzling cars or burn coal. But at some point, when we know the impact, we’ve crossed the line from “I didn’t know any better” to, “Now I know, but I’m going to ignore it because it’s inconvenient” or because I want to spend less for my stuff or whatever reason we tell ourselves so we don’t have to change.

Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

But here’s the thing: We may do better when we know better. We may eat less (or no) meat, drive an electric car, carry our own reusable bags, plant natives, fly less, and use solar power but it still doesn’t result in the huge change needed to turn climate disruption around. By changing consumption patterns, we just might be able to influence companies to change their production patterns to more sustainable and humane methods. But others point out that making it the duty of individuals to limit global warming is misguided. Climate change is a planetary-scale threat and requires planetary-scale reforms. The power of consumers pales in comparison to that of international corporations, and only governments have the power to keep corporations in check. A recent report found that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988. A mere 25 corporations and state-owned entities were responsible for more than half of global industrial emissions in that same period. Maybe these corporations don’t intentionally want global warming, either. What they want is a quick profit, a high return on their investment. But now, we all know the consequence.

So, what would Jesus do about climate disruption? Luke’s Jesus consistently speaks up for the poor and marginalized. He invites people to change the world by disbelieving, by no longer believing in the stories that we currently allow to shape our lives, the stories that end up destroying people and the planet. Stories like “Being successful means being rich.” Stories like, “There isn’t enough to go around so I’d better get what I can.” Stories like, “If I win, someone else has to lose;” or, “Progress means economic growth;” or “People love me for my car, my house, my shoes, my stuff;” or “Corporations can’t be held accountable.” Instead, Jesus points to a new story, the story he calls the Kingdom of God. It’s a story about a loving God who, like a benevolent king, calls all people – all people – to live life in a new way, the way of love.

Author Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, died on September 1. There has never been a better time to revisit that book. Ehrenreich was asked in an interview, a while back, what she would give up to live in a more human world. She answered, “I think we shouldn’t think of what we would give up to have a more human world; we should think of what we would gain.”

Amen, and thank God for the life and witness of Barbara Ehrenreich.