A homily on that puzzling Gospel parable

I dug into my archives and found that I had preached once on Luke 16:1-13, the parable of the dishonest steward which we're discussing in another thread.  This homily is from 2010, when I had been ordained about six years. I don't think I've looked at it since I gave it back then.

 In its basic themes, the 2010 homily touches on some of the same ideas I've been sharing in our other thread.  So it's a little surprising to me how little my thought has changed in the last 15 years :-).  The other thing that struck me is: it's a really long homily!  This would have taken at least 20 minutes to preach.  I can't imagine what people were thinking, other than, "I hope he finishes soon!"  

Take it for what it's worth, it's below the break.

If you’ve been through high school and/or college, chances are pretty good that at some point in an English or literature class, you’ve been asked to read a Shakespeare play.  Now, Shakespeare wrote a lot of well-known works like Hamlet and Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.  If your assignment is to sit down and read Romeo and Juliet, you might think to yourself, ‘This might not be too bad.  I’m familiar with this story.  In fact, I’ve seen West Side Story with Natalie Wood on television several times.’  

But when you actually crack open the book and try to plunge into a 16th century English script, you discover that, even though you think you know the story, it’s very difficult to read the actual play.  It's written in English, but it’s not the same English that we know and use today.  They used words back then that we don’t use anymore; and when they did use a word that we still use today, it might have a different meaning than it does now.  

What’s more, Shakespeare's plays discuss a lot of things that we don’t understand very well today, because he wrote for audiences that lived 400 years ago and an ocean away, and life and culture have changed a lot in the interim.  Things that would have been intuitive and obvious to his audiences, we don’t recognize without a lot of scholarly help.  The fact is, if you’re not initiated into Shakespeare studies, it’s nearly impossible to read and understand any of his plays without an edition that has a lot of footnotes, and preferably you're guided by a teacher who can help give some background and context.

Trying to get our arms around the parable in today’s Gospel is the same kind of thing.  The fact is, this parable is very confusing to us.   Even scholars and experts in biblical interpretation have a difficult time explaining what it means in a way that ties all of these verses into a seamless whole.  Part of the challenge for us is that it takes place in a world that would have been very familiar to listeners in Jesus’ time, but probably not so familiar to people in Arlington Heights in the 21st century.  So, while Jesus tells this tale of masters and stewards and debt, we can imagine Jesus’ disciples nodding their heads in understanding, but we’re left scratching ours.  I’d like to spend just a few minutes offering one way – not the only way, but one way - to understand what this parable means.  

The main character is the steward, but in my opinion, the key to understanding the parable is the debtors and the presence of debt.  The master seems to be a man of affairs, so well-off that he needs a steward – that is, a servant acting in the capacity of a professional manager – to manage his affairs.  It appears that the master is a lender; one source of his wealth is lending money to others and being paid back with interest.  The payments and interest seem to be payments in kind: rather than paying the lender in currency, the debtors pay a portion of their produce.  We don’t know who these debtors are, but we know that, in Jesus’ day, many poor farmers struggled with debt.  A bad crop year could mean ruin for them.  We know from Matthew’s Gospel that those who were unable to pay their debts could be cast into prison or tormented.  The Old Testament speaks of the family’s children being sold into slavery to pay off debts.  Did you hear our first reading today?  It’s a condemnation of those who cheat and exploit the poor, by selling less than a full measure of grain, and overcharging for it, and adulterating their goods with refuse.  They buy and sell humans the way they buy and sell shoes.  The agricultural world of Jesus’ day was a world of poor and subsistence farmers, teetering on the edge of financial failure, being preyed upon by an elite upper class who amassed wealth by charging interest on loans and exploiting the poor every way they could.

We might say the steward bridges the enormous economic divide between the wealthy master and the poor.  He seems to be of the servant class, because it appears that when he gets fired for mismanagement in his job, menial labor or begging would be his future lot.  So it may be that he came from humble beginnings, perhaps from one of the local villages, but was able to rise to a position of great trust and responsibility, possibly because he had real ability – which seem to have included shrewdness and the ability to plan ahead.  Yet it seems that he wasted his great opportunity, because we’re told that he squandered his master’s property.

When the steward was fired, we can imagine what a crisis this must have been in his life.  All the perks and privileges that he enjoyed as the head of the master’s household were being taken away from him; all of the deference and kowtowing that would have been his due as head of the household would be a thing of the past. 

Now we come to the business of the promissory notes.  A promissory note is an IOU – it’s a debt instrument, just as a car loan or a mortgage would be for us today.  As I said, it may be that these debtors were farmers who borrowed from the master in the winter or spring, with repayment in the form of a portion of the crop after the harvest.   If that is so, then it appears that the debts were large, as 100 kors of wheat is about 1,000 bushels, which would have been a big part of the crop for a small farmer.

This business of writing down the amount of the loan isn’t explained; but because the master praises the steward for being shrewd, it seems somewhat unlikely that the discounted amount came out of the principal and interest amount due the master.  One explanation offered is that the part of the loan being forgiven is the portion that would have been paid to the steward himself as his commission.  If that’s true, then what we see here is the steward currying favor with the poor by reducing their debt, while making the master whole – while he takes the financial hit himself.  It’s a win-win-lose proposition, with the steward himself absorbing the loss.

What does this parable tell us? 

Well - I stand before you today as a man in debt.  Like many folks here at St. Edna, my wife and I have a mortgage on our home, a debt obligation that we’re trying to pay off, little by little, month by month.  The amount we owe is very large – more money than I earn in a year.

If some sort of financial disaster befalls our family – say, I lose my job – and we stop making payments on the mortgage, then eventually the lender probably would foreclose. That means that my family and I would get kicked out of our home – something that has already happened to too many folks in our parish during this Great Recession, or Jobless Recovery, or whatever it is that we’re in the midst of.  If that was to happen, then the lender would be saddled with a property that isn’t generating any income for him, quite possibly for many months.  That would be a bummer for him.  Of course, it wouldn’t exactly be great for my family, either – we’d need to try to find an apartment to rent (although, without a job, it’s hard to say how we’d pay the rent), or move in with my parents, which wouldn’t be a thrill for either family, or borrow a lot of money from someone, which would push me even deeper in debt, or live in our minivan, which doesn’t bear thinking about, but even so is a reality for some people in our community. 

I’m articulating some of the deepest fears that run through families in this community – the fear of defaulting on debt.  These are the scenarios that keep people like my wife and me awake at night.  It’s a nightmare scenario – yet a scenario, as I’ve mentioned, that is all too real in this time of economic instability and a tight jobs market.  And underlying it all is debt.  The difference between the guy who makes the loan and the guy who pays the loan - or even worse, the guy who is not able to pay the loan -  is a huge gulf –a chasm.  

I mentioned that, should our lender foreclose on our home, it would be a hardship for him; but truth be told, I’m not going to lose too much sleep on his behalf.  Whoever owns our mortgage – and it’s surely been bought and sold a number of times since we originally signed it, in one of those arcane financial markets that ordinary people never really see or understand, even though it has a huge impact on our lives – that mortgage holder probably owns thousands of other mortgages just like ours.  If we defaulted, he’d continue to be rich, just marginally less rich.  One non-performing property more or less isn’t going to have a material impact on his financial well-being.  But for the guy on the other end of the mortgage – meaning, me and my family – it really would be catastrophic.   

In the arrangement between lender and debtor, Jesus sides with the poor.  He came, he tells us, to preach Good News to the poor.  If he preached good news to well-off lenders who grow rich by exploiting the poor, it’s not recorded in the Gospels.   In fact, we’re told rather the opposite – he told the rich young man that, if he wishes to have eternal life, he needs to give away all his possessions to the poor. It’s much better to store up treasure in heaven than on earth, particularly if the way we gain our earthly treasure is by exploiting the poor.

One of the great dangers in being poor is the risk of being exploited.  The poor aren’t connected.  They have no influence.  They’re vulnerable.  The more poor and powerless a person is, the greater the risk that they will be exploited – used as an instrument to enrich someone else, and then tossed aside when they’re no longer useful.  This is why runaway teens so often fall into lives of prostitution, exploited by criminals who rent out young bodies to enrich themselves.  It’s why illegal immigrants are so vulnerable to exploitation: they don't feel able to go to the police or sue if they’re underpaid or mistreated.  It’s why slavery is so evil.  It’s why payday loans, which charge amazingly high interest rates to the poor who need short-term loans, are so unjust.

I described some of the bad outcomes for my family if we are unable to pay debts, but for defaulters in Biblical times, it could be much worse.  Debtors could be thrown into prison.  They could be tormented.  Their children could be sold.  

By reducing the debt of the debtors, the steward is acting justly toward the poor.  At the same time, he is meeting his financial obligation by making the master whole for the debts owed him.  And, most important of all, like Jesus, he is siding with the poor.  By removing his exploitative commission, he is making it more likely that the poor can pay off their debts and continue on in their way of life for another year.  He managed to satisfy both his earthly obligations and the obligations of Christian discipleship.  That’s something we’re all called to do.

This is why St. Edna talks about the importance of stewardship.  The fact is that the things that are most important in our lives, or should be most important, are things that belong to God.  Our lives belong to God.   Our families belong to God.  God’s creation belongs to God.  We’re called to be good managers on behalf of the owner, who is God himself.  

I hope that none of us finds himself crushed by debt and exploited by wealthy people.  As stewards of our society and our culture, we must be vigilant for unjust economic arrangements.  We must live, both in this world, and for the next.