18th Sunday after Pentecost/Proper 20C ​(Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13)

Today's gospel reading has the most difficult and puzzling parable. There are at least three reasons why it’s hard to make sense of this parable:

1. The rich man’s two different characteristics
2. The dishonest manager’s way of handling his career crisis
3. Jesus’ teaching on making friends by means of dishonest wealth

Let’s look at the first case. It’s about the rich man. It seems he has a secret informant. His informant reports to him that his manager is squandering his property. We don’t know how that manager is wasting the rich man’s financial resources. We can easily assume that the manager is taking some money out of his master’s account. But the bottom line is that we don’t know if the manager is really squandering the rich man’s property. It is actually quite unfair for that manager to be accused without any thorough investigation or trial. Based on this information, the rich man, the manager’s master, doesn’t look like a fair or forgiving person.

Not only is he unfair and unforgiving, but also he is very peculiar, odd, and strange. After knowing what the manager has done to his debtors, he praises his “dishonest” manager. The reason for that praise is that he acted shrewdly, making wise judgment calls. This is very strange and confusing because this rich man is actually losing money. He was losing money in the beginning of the parable, and is still losing at the end as well. Either way the manager is giving this rich man financial damages. So, we are looking at two very different reactions of the same person. 

Instead of hastily analyzing this rich man’s psychology as schizophrenic or bipolar, let’s think of him as two different people. Say, the dishonest manager has two masters. The first version is an unforgiving master, and the latter as a forgiving one. The first version of a master is ruthless and judgmental. There’s no second chance. He condemns his account manager, and summons him, “What is this I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.” To summarize the master’s saying, it means, “You’re fired!” (I know someone who likes to say very much…) Like I said before, there’s not even a fair trial for the manager. There’s no room for forgiveness in this first master.

On the other hand, the latter version of a master is completely different. He not only forgives his manager. He praises his manager for being shrewd, for showing an ability to accurately assess situations and turning his career crisis to his own advantage. And he doesn’t care about losing his money from his debtors. We can easily imagine this forgiving manager rehiring his manager. He’s no longer fired, but is rehired! There’s indeed a room for forgiveness and grace in this second master. 

Very often in the parables, a master, or any character with authority and power portrays an image of God. For example, last Sunday we heard the parable about a shepherd looking for the lost sheep. That is, the image of Jesus’ God looking for the lost ones. In today’s parable, we now see two masters that are far from each other. One is punitive, judgmental, and unforgiving. The other is loving, gracious, and forgiving. This is to say that Jesus might portray two different images of God in the parable. So this is a twist in the parable. This twist transforms from one to another, from the first master to the second master. Who then turns the punitive, judgmental, and unforgiving master into the loving, gracious, and forgiving master? It’s the dishonest and crooked manager. 

The manager is judged dishonest by the first master. He is also judged guilty! The manager is having a serious crisis. This isn't just losing his job. It’s about his life. He’s realistic enough that he has no other way to make a living. He’s not physically strong enough to dig. He has his reputation to beg money from people. Losing his job is not just a jobless situation for him. It is threatening his life. It is indeed a life and death situation. It is like facing his own death.

Facing the death of his career, he does something unusual and almost crazy. He doesn’t try to make the financial situation of his first master better. He gives up satisfying his former master. He becomes brave and creative. He really has to save his life by doing everything that can help him get out of his situation after he loses his job! For the last time he takes advantage of his position as an account manager. He reduces all the debts that people owe to his master. He creates his own, illegal, loan forgiveness program. He calls his unforgiving master’s debtors one by one. He asks each one of them, “How much do you owe my master?” He rushes them to sit quickly and take their new bills. He makes a hundred jugs of olive oil to fifty, a hundred containers of wheat to eighty. 

We can well imagine that he’s really doing all he can to save his life! Let’s not forget that this happens only after he faces the death of his career, only after he finally dies. He is freed by his death to do things he could never have thought before. And what’s more remarkable is not just his way of handling his life-and-death crisis in his career. By his action, all his master’s debtors are being saved. Their debts are reduced. Through the manager’s death, all the debtors are given another chance to live their lives at least with less debts. 

The manager’s action doesn’t just end with the debtors. It affects the master, and transforms him as I said earlier. The one who fires the manager becomes the one who praises him. The dishonest manager is turning the first master who is unforgiving and unfair, always bookkeeping scores, into the second master who is forgiving and gracious, forgetting his wrongdoings and praising his manager’s shrewdness! 

It is so ironic that this dishonest manager becomes the agent of life for everyone, not just all the debtors, but the master himself in the parable. This dishonest and crook manager is like Jesus Christ. We might think, “How can the dishonest manager who seems so corrupt be like a Christ-like figure?” But if you actually think about how the Pharisees, scribes, and religious and political authorities treated Jesus, it’s not too far of a stretch. He didn’t care much about the sabbath observance. He reinterpreted the law. He sat with tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners, the so-called losers in the society. From their perspective, Jesus was indeed a criminal and a crook! He received a death sentence. 

The dishonest manager likewise receives a death sentence. He dies and rises like Jesus. And he raises all the debtors like Jesus. The dishonest manager also transforms his unforgiving master into the forgiving one. Jesus sets God free from the image of an angry, bookkeeping, unforgiving, and scary deity. Jesus brings up a new image of God who is loving, forgiving, and gracious. This God, or this transformed master is ready to party! 

So who really are the beneficiaries from the dishonest manager other than the master? All those who owe the master! Because of the dishonest manager’s death and resurrection, they are set free, and their debts are forgiven. There’s nothing, really nothing that they did. They stayed as debtors who are not able to pay off their loans. Just like the master’s debtors, we might feel like we owe God something. We might tell ourselves everytime we come to church, “I should do better and more. I should be a better Christian.” The list goes one. One truth to that thought is, there’s no way that we can pay back God what we owe. We helplessly stay indebted. In that midst of our helplessness, however, grace shown in Jesus pays all. We do nothing, but accept that grace as God’s free gift that we do nothing to earn. We’re forgiven and embraced perpetually. 

Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we see God’s unconditional grace coming down to us, becoming flesh like us, becoming a crook like us. Jesus is the greatest sacrament, the greatest outward sign of God’s grace to the world. St. Paul in his letters to Timothy says, “...there is also one mediator between God and humankind.” Through Jesus, grace came to us and the entire humanity. 

And this is not it. We don’t stop there. This is not the end of the gospel. The purpose of Christian life is to be in union with God. On our journey to be in union with God, nothing, no wealth, possession, or mammon can be in the way. It requires us to follow the path of Jesus, that is, facing our own death to our selfish and egoistic desires, and rising up again with Christ. When we partake the Body and Blood of Christ, God’s unconditional grace enters into our bodies and spirits. That grace transforms us. That grace unites us eternally with God, all of us here and all those in the world, dead and alive. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
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