Debts are Tossed

I remember the summer of my junior year in high school traveling with my mom to France. I was beside myself. I couldn’t wait to get over there and eat some pastries, to buy some perfume. But when I arrived I suddenly realized the American dollar didn’t hold the same weight. I felt like I was getting cheated. I had to convert my dollars to euros. Cash was still king, but the currency of the kingdom had changed.

Jesus talked a lot about currency. In fact, he had a lot of words to say about it. We often like to skip over those words, but today’s passage challenges us. Why does the rich man commend the dishonest manager on lowering the debt of his debtors? Why doesn’t the manager seem to get what he deserves? What does Jesus mean in telling his disciples to make friends using dishonest wealth? Let’s go back and look at it again.

We begin with a rich man who brings the manager of his estate in and says, “What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.” The manager is being accused of squandering the rich man’s property.This is the same word used to describe what the younger son did in the parable of the prodigal son with his inheritance. The manager has wasted everything, and as a result is losing his job. Facing unemployment, he panics. He realizes that he is losing his job which during this time would have meant losing his social status and his livelihood with little option to rebuild it. He says “what will I do?” and references both manual labor or begging. Not up to either of these, he summons the debtors of the rich man and one by one begins to reduce their debt.

Now it may be hard for us to understand the amount of debt that these people were under when it is expressed in things like olive oil and wheat, but the amounts equaled years of wages. There is no way they would have ever been able to repay it. So the manager takes each case and starts tossing the debts. If it says a hundred, make it fifty. If it says a hundred, here make it eighty.

Why does he do this? Is he trying to stick it to his boss? Is he saving his own skin? Is he stealing from the rich to feed the poor like Robin Hood against the Wolf of Wall Street? He says in verse 4 that he forms a plan so that when he is fired he will still be welcomed into the homes of others. His aim is status and hospitality. This is based on the ancient system of reciprocity and patron/benefactor relationships. Some credit was always due. Nothing was for free, even hospitality.

When the manager lowered the debts of the debtors, he was placing them in a new relationship with him. In return for lowering their debts, they were now part of his own fraud and owed him hospitality and a place in their homes. The dishonest manager was trying to take measures to secure his status after he was fired.

How would you feel if you owned a bunch of vacation rentals and your property manager secretly met with everyone and reduced what they owed you? Well you might expect the rich man would have been furious when he discovered this. But in some odd twist of sorts Jesus tells us that the rich man commended his manager for acting shrewdly. He said that the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own than are children of the light.

What? This just seems out of sorts. I thought honesty was the best policy, but here dishonesty seems to be the new rule in town. Why does it seem that good things always happen to bad people? How do they get away with everything? This “manager” clearly needs to be fired. He has stolen, lied, and stolen some more just to save himself. And somehow rather than a raking across the coals we have a commendation. Rather than giving him over to the authorities, we have this moment of unexpected grace.

The manager had been reckless. No remorse. No repentance unlike the prodigal son. A complete lack of faithfulness, and yet he is commended for the creative way he uses dishonest wealth?

This text frustrates us to say the least. We want to say, “C’mon Jesus, what point are you really trying to make here?”Like the older brother from the story of the prodigal son, we are fuming and just want the bad guy to get what he deserves. We want to decide who is right and who is wrong, what is honest and dishonest, what is unjust and what is fair. We place ourselves in the seat of the judge and act as if fairness is ours alone to choose.

But when I stop to consider it, I am not just the rich man or the debtor who owes more than I can repay. I am also the dishonest manager, a scoundrel in the face of faith. Sometimes we act like when we become a Christian and accept God’s grace, that over time we need it less or if we do all the right things then we are somehow more deserving of it than another. No matter how far we travel in our Christian life, we never get to a place where we are beyond the need for grace. Grace is the currency of God’s kingdom, and it always comes to us without merit. It always meets us undeserved. It doesn’t play favorites and it is no respecter of social status and acclaim. It is scandalous precisely because it offers itself to us: to the rich man, to the dishonest manager, and to the debtor, to all of us, all the same.

Jesus says, “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.”

Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth. Dishonest wealth. Unholy mammon. I grew up hearing phrases like “good, hard-earned money. Honest money” But is money ever really honest? Derek Weber describes dishonest wealth as the currency used by the empire to do business. As such, it is the money in the offering plates. It is the money in your wallet. He once heard a preacher say that “We print ‘In God we Trust’ right onto the god we trust.” God and mammon in the same place.

And yet we are to befriend mammon to make friends. How do we use something that is intent on being dishonest in an honest way? How do we use the currency of the world in a way that reflects the currency of the kingdom? Maybe money serves as its own current. It is the current and the conduit of our intentions.

I don’t know how many of you saw the movie Pay It Forward that came out in 2000. In it this young boy talks about his idea of how one person paying it forward to three people, and how they challenge others to keep paying it forward until it keeps growing. Sometimes you will see this in coffee shops where they will have cardboard sleeves hanging on a wall with things written on them like “for a single mother having a hard day.”

I know a woman who once shared with me about a time in her life where she felt like the debtors who could never repay.Her husband had just had major surgery. She was busy caring for her husband, her two children, and the bills were steadily piling up with no way to earn enough money to take care of them. She went to the grocery store with her stack of coupons and when she went to check out someone said to her, “it’s been taken care of.” There at the checkout, her whole bill had been covered. She was shocked. She went to the doctor’s office and once again she was told, “it’s been taken care of.” She went to pay her utilities. “It’s been taken care of.”

Here in the midst of her crisis, the economy of God’s kingdom was breaking through. Debts were being tossed. The currency of others love for her was being spent in a way that fostered growth. It doesn’t matter whether or not we have little or much that flows through our life, our calling is to be faithful with it. We are to use it well, as Derek Weber says, “use it for the kingdom of God; use it for the kin-dom of heaven: use it for purposes it really isn’t designed for; use it to build community and to value people. Use it to rescue people rather than to enslave them. Use it to lift folks up and not push them down. Use it to give away and not to hoard.”

Allow the truth of God’s kingdom to flow through your wallet in a way that knocks on the doors of injustice, that lifts up the lowly, that fills the bellies of the hungry, and reminds the world that there is another policy, another currency at work, the currency of grace. By His grace, it’s been taken care of.