Proper 20

Picture this: You and your spouse are sitting in the family room when your two children, ages 10 and 12, walk in. “We’ve got a question,” the younger one announces. “We know you two are worth about 800 grand, and so me and Tyler were wondering about when we get our shares.”

This question hits you like a tracer bullet between the eyes for a couple of reasons. First, you’ve never talked to your children about any financial arrangements more than when to expect their allowances. And second, this “800 grand” that little Madison just mentioned is remarkably close to your actual worth. So, you sit there with your mind racing to comprehend where this conversation originated, but before you can frame a response, Madison adds, “I told Tyler that we each get our 400 G’s when we turn 18, but Tyler says we have to wait until you both die. Who’s right?”

You take a deep breath to steady yourself and to buy time to consider how to answer, and finally you stammer out, accusingly, “Just who says we are worth that kind of money?”

“Nobody told us,” Tyler responds. “We Googled you on the Internet.”

That’s when you realize that we’re not living in granddaddy’s world. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

Finding someone’s financial worth on the Internet is increasingly possible. If you have stock options, a high salary or significant business sales, there’s a good chance that at least some of that data is available online. And some kids have discovered that they can find those reports. The progeny of some executive parents are sifting through the filings of the Securities and Exchange Commission to locate the info. Others are using real estate web sites like Zillow.com to calculate the value of the family homestead and vacation homes.

As you can imagine, this new knowledge in the hands of savvy offspring is changing the dynamic of families and fueling the sense of entitlement among the younger generation. The Internet is making it possible for them to become smooth operators way before they become adults.

Had the Internet been around back in the first century, the central figure in Jesus’ parable of the dishonest manager would surely have used it to his advantage as a kid. Now, as a grown man, he is the investment broker for a certain rich man, living well on his income from the rich man’s properties, but not doing his duties diligently. As a result, the rich man isn’t earning the level of return he expected. Worse yet, someone has whispered in his ear that his manager is squandering the property. In short, the portfolio is tanking.

So naturally, the owner/rich man demands an accounting of his affairs, which clearly the manager knows isn’t going to be favorable. So, shrewdly, he calls in two debtors who owe a significant amount to the rich man, and he cuts what they owe. His intention is to gain friends who will be willing to hire him after his current master fires him, which is sure to happen.

This mid-level manager is a smooth operator — so smooth, in fact, that even the boss compliments the dishonest manager on his cleverness.

There’s a problem with this parable, however. Unlike the other parables Jesus told, where the moral of the story is fairly obvious and in keeping with the general tenor of Jesus’ teachings, this one’s moral seems to commend dishonesty – which doesn’t fit with either Jesus’ example or his message. It’d be like Jesus praising those kids for laying claim to their parents’ money, thanks to the Internet!

But, if nothing else, the dishonest manager demonstrates initiative, and when put to the right purposes, initiative is a good thing.

Think about the kid who Googled his parents’ wealth. We can imagine his mother saying to him, “Well, son, you’ve gotten into areas that are none of your business, and you’re way off base if you’re assuming you’re entitled to something you didn’t earn. But you’ve shown commendable initiative, so together we’re going to look for some ways to put that initiative to constructive purposes.”

We can assume from Jesus’ parable that there’s every reason to use our best and strongest abilities, including our initiative, for kingdom purposes.

But there are other questions which confront us through this parable. For instance, how does one handle a teaching that implies that the ends justify the means? Most of us, at some point in our learning experience, have been taught just the opposite – that the ends do not justify the means.

It’s not just a matter of whether you win or how much you accomplish or how far up the corporate ladder you ultimately climb; it’s also a matter of how you manage to arrive at those places. To win by cheating is no victory; to gain the whole world but lose your soul in the process is no accomplishment; and, as Pontius Pilate found out, not even the soap in the executive washroom will wash away the stain left by an unprincipled rise to the top.

So, at least in theory, we know that the ends do not justify the means. That being true, then how do we handle this parable from Jesus that seems to imply the opposite? Well, perhaps what’s being praised in this parable is not the means or the ends themselves, but the fact that they existed. In other words, the servant had a goal and a plan for reaching that goal, and these are being commended.

Could Jesus be subtly asking about our goals and about our plans for seeing them come to reality? Not your goals for retirement, not your honey-do list, not your next major purchase, not even your vacation plans, but your discipleship goals, your ministry goals, your spiritual growth goals, your putting-faith-into-life goals. Do these goals exist? Do you have specific plans for making them become reality? Are you working your plan? Are you making progress toward your goals?

If truth be told, for too many of us these types of goals exist more in the form of wish lists than of action plans. We intend to become more serious about our prayer life. We intend to become a part of that ministry group. We intend to become more actively involved in the life of the church. But as we all know, today’s good intentions become tomorrow’s regrets as we wake up one day to realize that what might have been will never be. While we, along with the disciples, stand on the sidelines criticizing the dishonest manager for his unrighteous actions, we hear Jesus say wistfully, “Yes, but at least he did something.”

Perhaps we need to sit with this parable, or, better yet, let it sit with us. Knowing that the road to understanding will not be easy and that we will be met with many more theological cul-de-sacs than throughways, we should nevertheless stay with this parable, insistent, like Jacob of old, that we will not let go until it blesses us.

If we do that, perhaps we’ll discover that, in its less than obvious way, this parable isn’t really about dishonesty after all, but about something else entirely. Maybe we’ll decide that the tag line should be: This is not a dishonest manager; this is an employee opening up his own individual retirement account (IRA).

Perhaps in this day of merger-mania, corporate buyouts, downsizing, outsourcing and bottom-lining, this parable has something to say to us about the priority of people over profits.

We have a choice. Are we all about making money and using friends? Or, like the manager in today’s Gospel, are we about using money and making friends?