Stephen Baldwin
NT: Luke 16.1-13
Two Masters
This
is a strange parable. We spent much of
Bible Study this week shaking our heads trying to find something, anything
redeeming about this strange parable!
The only thing we could agree upon was the last verse. Serving two masters is a concept we
understand. We may not get how Jesus
makes the point, but we get the point.
And then… I’m only going to say
this once because it would hurt our collective pride...Allan Clower made a good
point. What can I say, Jim? Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now
and then.
He said, “One time I had two
bosses, and it was terrible! You
couldn’t do anything right.”
Anybody here ever had two bosses or
two people you reported to at work?
How’d that work? Not so
well. I had two bosses once when I
worked at the Greenbrier during high school.
They both made me a schedule, and it was completely different! That was only the beginning of the
struggle. You can’t have two
bosses. You can’t have two masters.
That was the rich man’s problem,
and that was the shrewd manager’s problem.
Let’s break this strange parable down as simply as possible.
Jesus tells
us the boss man is set to fire his manager.
Why? Because he’s not managing
well. The manager realizes he’s about to
be out of a job, so he goes to see all his boss’s debtors. He tells them he’ll slash their bills if they
promise to give him shelter when he’s fired.
They agree, and they pay him. No,
they don’t! That’s a common
misconception about this parable. They
don’t pay the manager a dime. He simply
lowers their bills in exchange for shelter.
Isn’t that manager a good guy?
Well, not really. He was looking
out for himself.
Companies
today do things like that all the time.
“Switch from Dish Network to DirecTV and pay only $29.99 per
month!” What they don’t tell you is that
after a few months your bill will keep going up and up and up. Or, “Call now for a free ginsu knife! But wait, we’ll double your order and send
you two knives!” What they don’t tell
you is that it’s not really free because they charge you $10 for handling, $20
for shipping, and they do that twice, once for each knife. Right?
Hidden charges have been a business tactic for millennia.
Let’s
remember the economics of this. In the
ancient Roman world, Jews & Christians were forbidden from charging
interest by the Old Testament. Of
course, people found ways around that.
They charged fees which regularly amounted to 50% for goods and 25% for
money. Would you pay 25% interest to
borrow money for your house today? Not
to mention the cut off the top taken by the managers collecting what was
due. So when this manager takes a bill
and cuts it in half, he’s actually not doing them such a gracious favor. He’s just removing the fees.
So…back to
our story…the boss learns his manager’s scheme, and he fires him. No, he doesn’t! You would expect him to, but instead he
congratulates him on acting so shrewdly.
Why would he do that? Because the
boss is as ruthless as the manager. They
both are concerned about the wrong things.
Parables
are meant to shock us. Meant to turn
conventional wisdom on its head. And
conventional wisdom says that we should all be repulsed that the shrewd manager
uses two wrongs to make a right. It
doesn’t work that way and we all know it.
All of us except the shrewd boss, who admires him for being so
shrewd. That’s the shocking part of this
parable Jesus uses to knock us off balance.
He says,
“Whoever is dishonest in very little is also dishonest in very much.” The little things matter. And if you know someone who fudges the truth
or blurs the lines about little things, do they also in the big things that matter? The shrewd manager had squandered the boss’s
wealth, and he tried to make it right…by squandering even more of it! Do two wrongs make a right? Not for Jesus.
I used to
think this parable was about greed, but now I think it’s about something
deeper. Idols. When your greed gets the best of you, it
becomes an idol. Something you can’t
stop thinking about. Something that
guides your every decision and makes you think two wrongs can make a
right.
In fact, as
we all know well, two masters makes for not having one at all. You can’t love God and money, Jesus
says. You can only serve one
master. Whom will you serve? Amen.
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