Sermon for Luke 16:1-13; 15 Pentecost B

This is the hardest parable in the gospels. So, strap yourselves in. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

The rich landowner hears gossip about his farm manager. He goes from accusation to execution in two sentences. The manager doesn’t protest. He worries. Then he schemes. He cooks the books and conspires with debtors to defraud the rich guy. And then – and then – the guy who gets taken to the cleaners praises the crook for being such a sharp operator. Maybe we should cut our losses and just sing the hymn of the day.

Maybe not just yet. Here’s a framework that might help us understand. I grew up on a steady diet of Looney Tunes. Saturday mornings and after school, I spent time with Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Yosemite Sam, the Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, and the Tasmanian Devil.

The most popular cartoons featured Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. I can give you a list of things wrong with those cartoons. They used speech impediments for jokes. They were racist, sexist, ageist, and lots of other “ists.” But they were funny. And they often carried sharp social criticism just under the surface.

What is it about Bugs Bunny? He’s a rascally rabbit. He’s a loveable rogue. He’s always making life difficult for Elmer or Daffy or Porky or Martin the Martian. He makes wise cracks at the expense of others. He can’t read a map to save his life. He’s irreverent and rude and impulsive. And he’s our favorite.

Bugs Bunny is the underdog who comes out on top. Through sheer nerve, wit, and guile, he makes poor old Elmer look foolish time after time. Bugs turns the tables and lives to laugh another day. We can’t get enough of that. Think about the manager in our parable like Bugs Bunny. This is Looney Tunes in a gospel framework.

Assume the manager was an enslaved person. There would be no due process, no court proceedings. The manager was already as good as dead. He’s going to lose not only his job, but perhaps his hands, or his life. The enslaved person always understands the “system” better than the enslaver and has to be “shrewd” in order to survive.

So, the manager uses the one thing he still has – his brain. The rich man was probably charging his debtors loan shark interest rates. The system at the time was designed to squeeze as much production out of the debtors as they could get. At the same time, the landowners gradually increased the debt load until repayment was impossible. If the debtors owned any land, that was folded into the rich man’s property portfolio.

The manager used the system against itself. He knew which debtors were in danger of default. He had the authority, as manager, to write down the debt and cut the rich man’s losses. Word hadn’t gotten around yet that the manager was toast. He worked as quickly as possible to create an exit strategy. The manager wasn’t trying to preserve his 401k. He was trying to escape with his skin intact.

The scheme works! The manager gets the best of the rich man. The rich man, to his credit, knows when he’s licked. “Ok,” he says, “you got me. Pretty sharp operating there, my friend. Well done!” Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd can get us through verse eight. Then things get really hinky.

“And I tell you,” Jesus says in verse nine, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Just when we were having such a good time, Jesus tosses a monkey wrench into the machinery.

Jesus tells this parable to the disciples, even though the Pharisees are listening in to the conversation. Jesus tells his disciples to make friends with unjust mammon in order to have a soft-landing spot among the children of this age. But we disciples have to be careful. We disciples may well be able to use unjust mammon for short term tactics. But we must beware that possessions do not take possession of us.

There’s an interesting twist in this parable. The master praises the steward because everybody wins. The rich man gets some return on his investment. The debtors are freed to farm another year. The manager escapes with his head attached to his shoulders. The manager turns an unjust system upside down and inside out. And everyone is better off.

So, this is a story about subverting unfair and oppressive systems. We may find ourselves captive to unjust systems and structures. How can we work as Jesus followers to subvert those systems and do some good for the oppressed? Most of us can’t confront such systems directly. But with a combination of nerve, wit, and guile, we can make the world better reflect God’s justice.

With that perspective we can understand Jesus’ words that follow the parable. We’re all in positions of some kind of influence and power. We all have some kind of leverage. Whether we’re at home, at work, at school, in business, in government, or at church, Jesus puts us in positions where we can do some good. Many times, doing some good will mean challenging systems that produce winners and losers. Faithful stewards change systems so that everyone wins, and everyone is better off.

I think about where this whole section of Luke ends up – the Zacchaeus story in Luke 19. Jesus comes across Zacchaeus’ path and brings salvation to his house. Zacchaeus realizes that he is in a position to do good in response to having Jesus in his life. He realizes that any other choice is no longer possible if he is to follow Jesus. Zacchaeus chooses wisely, just as the steward in our parable chooses wisely in how to deal with the stuff of this age.

Jesus is in town today. He has come to dine at our house. That means salvation has arrived for me, for you, and for all of us. That happens before we do anything to deserve it. In fact, we’re just like the steward in the parable before Jesus comes along. We’re scheming for any way to survive.

But, as that great philosopher, Hank Williams once said, “I’ll never get out of this world alive.”

The good news is that this world isn’t the last word. Every broken system is a sign that death wants to have each of us and all of us. But that’s not the end of the story. Jesus comes to give us abundant life now and forever. When we know that, we can joyfully love God and faithfully serve our neighbors in hope.

If I am following Jesus, I’m going to be in places where I can do some good. I may have to be a bit rascally to do it. Doing good will likely cost me something. I am unlikely to be the only or prime beneficiary. I may even have to flee for my life on a few occasions, so I better have a good exit strategy in place. I can use unrighteous wealth to serve God. But I cannot use God to serve unrighteous wealth. Which will it be for me?

Text Study for Luke 16:1-13 (Part Seven)

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a sermon for Sunday yet. I think I’m getting closer to something that’ll preach. It’s just that the research is so darn much fun! I know, I have weird hobbies.

Garwood Anderson offers a general analysis of the parables in the Lukan account. However, he returns several times to the Parable of the Unjust Steward and offers some interesting thoughts. He deals with the parables in the Lukan account as part of the narrative and as edited and framed by the Lukan author. “I argue that Luke regarded the parables of his sources as both problematic and salvageable,” Anderson writes, “and that his treatment of the parables is a rehabilitation in which both conservative and adaptive tendencies are evident” (730).

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The characters in the Lukan parables all face some sort of social and/or moral crisis in the course of their daily lives. While not all the protagonists are victims, all are in some sense “vulnerable to the vagaries of life.” They come from a variety of social and economic locations, yet, “what all characters share is a moment in which they must deliberate, internally or externally, and act, sometimes creatively” (page 731).

The Lukan parables feature a “rogues’ gallery” of protagonists. “One of the most arresting and charming features of the Lucan parables,” Anderson writes, “is that they are filled with an array of shady, picaresque, or otherwise unsavory characters” (page 731). I had to look up “picaresque” and was pleased to find “rascally” as a synonym for the word. As one who grew up on Looney Toons, I have a fond association of “rascally” (well, “wascawy”) with “rabbit” (well, “wabbit”) – namely Bugs Bunny, as pursued by the intrepid Elmer Fudd.

Anderson’s analysis and vocabulary is a reminder to me that I might really want to treat this parable as a comedy rather than a case study. Bugs Bunny was and is a loveable rogue. While I wouldn’t want him as a travel agent (“I musta taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque”), I can’t help but like him. I wonder if our parable paints a similar picture of the “Unjust Steward,” a clever fellow who always seems to get the better of ponderous and pompous rich guy.

“The charm of the Lucan parables lies in no small measure in this teasing playfulness and indulgence of wry humor,” Anderson continues, “yet the very strangeness that captures the interpreter’s attention creates a dilemma when these parables are integrated into a larger narrative that projects its own vision of the good” (page 733). Anderson notes that the steward is commended, perhaps, for embezzlement, but Ananias and Sapphira don’t turn out so well in Acts. Characters that should represent God in several of the parables are not figures we’d prefer to have in our immediate families. He notes that the Lukan author includes such tensions and does not avoid the questions such tensions present.

Anderson describes six “disambiguating interpretive practices” the Lukan author uses to smooth out the tensions. I’m not sure I’ll use “disambiguating” in a sentence again for a while (if ever), so I took the chance to do it twice here. Applicable to our parable is the identification and use of a narrative audience. The audience (as noted in previous posts) in Luke 15 is the Pharisees and the scribes. In our parable, the audience is the disciples. Jesus returns to the Pharisees and scribes for the rich man and Lazarus and back to the disciples in Luke 17:1.

Anderson suggests that the Lukan author uses three audience categories for three purposes. When the audience is the crowds, the parables tend to call for a decision. When the audience is the religious leaders, the Lukan author is scoring polemical points. When the audience is the disciples, the purpose is ethical and communal instruction. These are clues to the audience then and now as to the reading strategy and posture we should adopt.

Our text has the most significant example of the next Lukan practice Anderson lists – “aphoristic addenda.” That’s how he refers to Luke 16:10-13. He argues that “these aphorisms counterbalance the scandal of the parable, clarifying that it is only for [the steward’s] shrewd actions…not at all for his dishonesty, that the manager is commended” (pages 738-739). Yet the contrasts in these verses also further interpret the parable. The manager has made prudent use of another’s wealth in order to secure his future, Anderson argues.

We have examined Anderson’s final interpretive practice, use of internal monologue, at some length in an earlier post. But it is worth noting his conclusions on this practice. The use of the internal monologue makes the characters, including our manager, more human, vulnerable, and ambivalent. But the monologue also allows the Lukan author to clarify for us as the audience where things are headed. “By making the characters’ motives transparent,” Anderson writes, “Luke lets the readers see the actions for what they are and the characters for who they are” (page 748). We need not make the rascal less rascally in order to get something constructive out of the parable.

Anderson argues that Lukan parables are marked by “their startling employment of characters of questionable rectitude who respond to crises with dubious virtue” (page 748). Wow, do I resemble that remark! But I think that’s one of the joyous values of our parable. The Lord (not the landowner in the parable) can make loving use of even such characters as those in our text this week. If that’s the case, there may be hope for me too.

Anderson offers three conclusions. First, the Lukan author keeps the traditions the author has received and deals with them. We can wrestle with the author’s commentary on the tradition, but we don’t get to discount it, any more than the Lukan author could. Second, some of these parables may not be special to the Lukan author because no one else knew them but rather because no one else had the nerve to tackle them. Third, the Lukan author tames these wild parables to some extent. But by using them, the Lukan author allows most of the radical character of the stories to come through, allowing us to be shaken by them as well.

While I’m not sure I can go along with all his conclusions, I think the commentator who best reflects some of Anderson’s insight on our text is Robert Farrar Capon. He compares the Parable of the Unjust Steward to the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. He sees our parable as the reversal of that parable. In both cases, he argues for this punchline: “grace works only on those it finds dead enough to raise” (Kindle Location 3952).

In our parable, Capon continues, it’s the landowner who won’t die to the bookkeeping system that keeps them all in bondage. The steward is already dead to that system since he’s lost his position (and perhaps soon his physical life). “[A]nd because he is freed by his death to think things he could not have thought before,” Capon writes, “he is the one who, from the bottom of the heap, as it were, becomes the agent of life for everybody in the parable” (Kindle Locations 3955-3956).

Capon argues that the steward shakes the master loose from his bondage to an unjust system. Therefore, Capon continues, the unjust steward is a Christ-figure in the parable. He gives life by dying and in dying finds life. Most important, he declares, “the unjust steward is the Christ-figure because he is a crook, like Jesus” (Kindle Location 3962). Grace cannot come to the world through established channels of respectability. Those channels are about life, success, and winning. Grace works through death, failure, and losing. This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

I wonder what the response will be if I announce that the steward is a crook like Jesus. Capon has no doubts about the response. We church folks won’t like it and don’t like it. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “the church has never been able for very long to leave Jesus looking like the attractively crummy character he is: it can hardly resist the temptation to gussy him up into a respectable citizen” (Kindle Locations 3972-3973). Thus, we communicate the notion that church is a place where only respectable citizens are welcome.

I’ve only had fleeting glimpses of “Bugs Bunny churches.” Once in a while we Jesus followers in America have tweaked the nose and pulled down the cap of the establishment – but not very often. That’s because we have been and are “the establishment,” especially we White American middle and higher class Americans. The capacity for tweaking and cap pulling resides especially in the Black church traditions. We White Jesus followers are not the least bit skilled in poking fun at ourselves, much less at the systems that have served our privileged interests so well. We need to take lessons from our siblings in other traditions.

I think, however, that we’re going to have to become a lot more skilled at such nose-tweaking in the coming years as we cease to be part of the dominant cultural structures in Western societies. Who knows? That could be fun.

Resources and References

Anderson, Garwood P. “Seeking and Saving What Might Have Been Lost: Luke’s Restoration of an Enigmatic Parable Tradition.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2008): 729–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43726401.

Dinkler, Michal Beth. ““The Thoughts of Many Hearts Shall Be Revealed”: Listening in on Lukan Interior Monologues.” Journal of Biblical Literature 134, no. 2 (2015): 373-399.

Glancy, Jennifer A. Slavery in Early Christianity. Kindle Edition.

Goodrich, John K. “Voluntary Debt Remission and the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1—13).” Journal of Biblical Literature 131, no. 3 (2012): 547–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/23488254.

Levine, Amy Jill, and Witherington III, Ben. The Gospel of Luke. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard L. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

Sellew, Philip. “Interior Monologue as a Narrative Device in the Parables of Luke.” Journal of Biblical Literature 111, no. 2 (1992): 239–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/3267542.

Sherouse, Alan. “The One Percent and the Gospel of Luke.” Review and Expositor 110 (Spring 2013): 285-293.

Swanson, Richard. Provoking the Gospel of Luke: A Storyteller’s Commentary, Year C. The Pilgrim Press, 2006.

Text Study for Luke 16:1-13 (Part Six)

The commentaries at workingpreacher.org this week offer emotional support and solid exegetical encouragement for us preachers. “It is far easier to comment on this text,” Kendra Mohn writes, “than to preach on it.” Yes, I resemble that remark. Five posts into the week, and we’re not much closer to a message.

Mohn notes that when it comes to living our faith in the real world, we might see our only options as accommodation or resistance. “But the reality for most people, whether in the Roman Empire or the United States in the twenty-first century,” Mohn continues, “is more akin to negotiation, weighing options and choosing who or what to prioritize in the next decision with less-than-ideal options. Perhaps Jesus’ admiration for the shrewdness of this generation has this kind of orientation in view.”

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There’s much to be said for this perspective. This can certainly help us to understand what Jesus might mean by the idea of making friends with unrighteous Mammon. “Devotion to God, faithfulness in stewarding God’s gifts, is the priority for a follower of Jesus,” Mohn says, “But it is never easy in a world full of negotiation where wealth demands our loyalty. Recognition of this challenge drives us again to our need for Christ to reconcile us to God and to one another,” Mohn concludes, “and the response of mercy and forgiveness at the heart of the Gospel.”

This is a standard and appropriate Lutheran “second use of the law” move with the text. On our own, we can’t find our way to a right relationship with God or with one another. The realities of sin, death, and the devil will overwhelm us, despite our best intentions. The Law forces this realization upon us and drives us back into the loving arms of Jesus. Resting in those arms, we are given the wherewithal by the Holy Spirit to serve our neighbors freely in love.

I think that’s right and proper, and it may be one of the places I end up in my message. But Luther’s theology of Law and Gospel is a tool for interpreting the text. It is not in and of itself in the text. I’m not ready yet for that approach as the way to get off the horns of our homiletical dilemma.

Mitzi Smith helps us to stay connected to the enslaved status of the manager and what that means for our interpretation of the text. She reminds us that the accusations directed at the steward would have been taken at face value. Enslaved persons were regarded, by their enslavers and the culture, as inherently greedy and corrupt. However, the parable reminds us as readers that the system itself is greedy and corrupt, filled with opportunities for gouging the poor who were indebted to the master.

“Jesus seems to side with the slave manager,” Smith writes, “given the dilemma that slaves face and since the slave is not the owner of the dishonest wealth. Perhaps this is how we should read the verses that follow,” she continues, “Luke’s Jesus often sides with folks considered “sinners and tax collectors” (5:30-32; 7:34).” Siding with the oppressed requires honest dealings in the world. Otherwise, how would anyone trust us when we are dealing with the things of heaven?

Yet, Smith reminds us that treating the masters dishonestly was a form of resistance on the part of those enslaved in the American system (and elsewhere). I must wonder if the master regarded the steward as “unjust” because the steward was using his position to help the oppressed rather than the master. I continue to think it is critical to remind people that the enslaved steward’s “unrighteousness” is determined by the master and not by some objective standard of procedural or ethical justice.

Smith reminds us that the use of enslavement metaphors and tropes in the gospels should give us trouble, knowing what we know now. We will need to pick apart those metaphors and tropes to get at what they mean in the text. Smith makes an excellent suggestion for the meaning of our text in the end. “We should choose to be more conscious and strategic in our daily transactions and speech so that we contribute less to the pursuit of wealth for ourselves and others, particularly in the service of greed and creation of poverty and at the expense of equality and the justice and love of God.”

Barbara Rossing provides a clear description of the loan and interest system at work in our text. “To try to understand this parable…and the attached sayings,” she writes, “we need a mini-course on the economics of Roman-occupied Galilee in the first century.” Yes, that’s certainly the case, but it won’t make for much of a sermon. That’s the problem.

Nonetheless, it’s helpful to know that rich rulers and landowners charged loan-shark interest rates in order to accumulate more wealth and power. The result was that the poor lost their land, homes, families, and sometimes their lives. The prophet Isaiah pronounces a woe on those “who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land!” (Isaiah 5:8, NRSV). Yes, that will be a well-received text quote with my new farmer friends in southwest Iowa! But there it is.

It was this predatory practice of putting together large estates at the expense of the poor, according to Isaiah, that resulted in the desolation of the Exile. Rossing notes that both the master and the steward were part of a system that exploited desperate peasants and was emptying out the land. The parallels to what continues to happen in the American agricultural system are painful and obvious.

Rossing notes that the system was rife with hidden charges, penalties, conditions, caveats, and codicils (she doesn’t add those categories, I did). When such agreements were executed with illiterate peasant farmers, the results were predictable. Indebtedness became debt slavery became forfeiture and imprisonment.

In 2020, payday lenders in Nebraska were restricted by statute from charging more than 36% annual interest on their short-term loans. You can read the details here. As a result, those businesses have packed up and left Nebraska. Representatives of the industry note that with this limitation, the businesses could not make any money – given the default rate of forty percent or more. The implication was that there was something wrong with the lenders, not with the business model.

These representatives warned that without the payday lenders, low-income borrowers would turn to less reputable, and legal, sources of loans. In effect, they warned that these borrowers would have to turn from state-licensed loan sharks to the real kind. They predicted that the law was a bonanza for the illegal lenders, who had no concerns about “consumer protection.” Data so far shows that this has not happened, but that was the dire prediction.

This was the story from the perspective of the proprietors. But what if the problem is with the business model rather than the borrowers? Borrowers, according to a state report, paid an average 405% annual rate in 2019 on their loans. “As a result,” the article reports, “borrowers can end up in a spiral of debt, in which they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees over time and fall further and further behind financially. Some lose bank accounts or even end up in bankruptcy.” That’s the story from the perspective of the borrowers.

Former customers of payday lenders have found alternative sources of financial help that do not charge loan shark rates. Nonprofit organizations are stepping in to provide helpful and hopeful alternatives to the former system. This law has made life for low-income people better overall.

I mention this as a contemporary example of the sort of system in which the steward found himself. I’m not sure he set out to be a hero, but perhaps he became one in the end. He found himself in a place to either serve himself as he had before or to do some good for others. “What is important is to situate the parable in the broader economic context of how Jesus was reviving village life by reviving biblical covenantal economic life, forgiving debts and giving people new hope,” Rossing writes, “In Luke, the joy of the Gospel is the joy of God’s healing of relationships, including economic relationships,” she continues, “Jesus repeatedly warns that we cannot be disciples while accumulating wealth at the expense of the poor” (my emphasis).

I continue to think about where this whole section of Luke ends up – the Zacchaeus story. Jesus comes across his path and brings salvation to his house. Zacchaeus realizes that he is in a position to do good in response to having Jesus in his life. He realizes that any other choice is no longer possible if he is to follow Jesus. Zacchaeus chooses wisely, just as the steward in our parable chose wisely in how to deal with the stuff of this age.

If I am following Jesus, I’m going to be in places where I can do some good. It will likely cost me something. I am unlikely to be the only or prime beneficiary. I may even have to flee for my life on a few occasions, so I better have a good exit strategy in place. I can use unrighteous Mammon to serve God. But I cannot use God to serve unrighteous Mammon. Which will it be for me?

Resources and References

Dinkler, Michal Beth. ““The Thoughts of Many Hearts Shall Be Revealed”: Listening in on Lukan Interior Monologues.” Journal of Biblical Literature 134, no. 2 (2015): 373-399.

Glancy, Jennifer A. Slavery in Early Christianity. Kindle Edition.

Levine, Amy Jill, and Witherington III, Ben. The Gospel of Luke. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard L. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

Sellew, Philip. “Interior Monologue as a Narrative Device in the Parables of Luke.” Journal of Biblical Literature 111, no. 2 (1992): 239–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/3267542.

Sherouse, Alan. “The One Percent and the Gospel of Luke.” Review and Expositor 110 (Spring 2013): 285-293.

Swanson, Richard. Provoking the Gospel of Luke: A Storyteller’s Commentary, Year C. The Pilgrim Press, 2006.

Udoh, Fabian E. “The Tale of an Unrighteous Slave (Luke 16:1-8 [13]).” Journal of Biblical Literature 128, no. 2 (2009): 311–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/25610185.

Text Study for Luke 16:1-13 (Part Five)

And just when it was going so well…I am reminded with some force that there’s always more than one way to read a parable. I am reminded further that we always read from a social position – either actual or imagined, or both. Goodrich’s analysis is solid and well-documented. It is also written implicitly from the viewpoint of and for the benefit of the landowners and masters in the imperial system. The system assumes that it is good, right, and necessary for the landowners and masters to get their money, regardless of how that money is made.

This is an agricultural parable. Therefore, the landowner makes a large portion of his money from the free labor of enslaved laborers and managers. That is not a political statement. That is an historical and demographic reality of the first-century Mediterranean. The enslavement of people to work the land was a regular feature of small, medium, and large agricultural operations in that context. Columella’s agricultural manual assumes the use of enslaved laborers, as do the letters of Pliny the Younger. Very few in that context question the system of enslavement itself.

Christian New Testament documents also rarely question the imperial system of human enslavement. Jennifer Glancy examines at length the figure of the enslaved person in Jesus’ words in the Lukan account. The figure of the enslaved person shows up with some regularity in Jesus’ sayings and stories and less often in his interactions with real people. “Because so many of Jesus’ sayings preserved in Luke and Matthew feature the figure of the slave,” Glancy writes, “they create the impression that Jesus’ audience was as familiar with the world of slaveholding and enslavement as with the worlds of farming and fishing” (Kindle Locations 2112-2113).

Glancy refers to our text, and specifically to verse 13, to examine “the double bind” clamped on enslaved persons who were in fact owned by two or more enslavers. That’s a common occurrence in the first century (at least in Egypt, where we have documentary evidence in the form of contracts, etc.). Yet even the documentary evidence is written from the perspective of and in the interest of the enslavers.

We can surmise these difficulties when two enslavers disagreed on time-sharing, or on freeing the enslaved person. It appears to have been possible, for example, for an enslaved person to be “half-free” if one enslaver renounced ownership! “Considered in the context of ancient slavery,” Glancy writes, “Jesus’ warning against serving two masters no longer sounds vague and metaphorical but resonates with the actual tensions implicit in the not uncommon occasion of a slave caught between the demands of two or more masters” (Kindle Locations 2134-2135).

Was the Unjust Steward a free person or an enslaved person? And what difference would that make in our interpretation of the parable and succeeding verses? Fabian Udoh brings that conversation up to date in his article. While the majority of scholars regarded the (fictional) steward as a free person, Mary Ann Beavis shook that consensus and reasserted what had been a minority opinion. Udoh builds on Beavis’ work and may shake some of my settled assumptions as well.

Udoh reads the parable “in the context of the social and ideological world of chattel slavery.” Especially when it came to agricultural and mining concerns, the use of enslaved labor was the norm. Free hired labor was the exception to that rule. “Slave labor was exploited wherever land was sufficiently concentrated in private hands,” Udoh writes, “so that a permanent workforce was needed outside of what the family could provide” (page 312). Udoh notes that Columella, in his first-century farming manual written a few decades before the Lukan account, declares that an estate manager for a farm should be appointed from among the slaves.

“Consequently, although the Roman Empire cannot be said to have been uniformly a slave society,” Udoh notes, “since the empire was a political (rather than economic) unit in which various modes of production coexisted, chattel slavery, wherever possible, was the most usual mode of production” (page 313). As N. T. Wright has noted, chattel slavery was as ubiquitous in and necessary for the economy of the Roman Empire as electricity is for the contemporary world.

Udoh argues that our Unjust Steward was a managerial slave or a freedman. The classical definition, going back at least to Aristotle, of an enslaved person was that of a “living possession.” The enslaved person is deemed to have no separate personality from the enslaver and is in fact an extension of the enslaver’s body and is therefore inhabited by the enslaver’s “soul” (creepy, I know). “These conceptions enabled the person of servile status (slave and freed),” Udoh declares, “to be the preferred agent for private household management and estate management in the Roman Empire.”

The Lukan account describes the steward as an “oikonomos.” This is the term most often applied to enslaved persons in management positions. This is the case in Luke 12:41-48, in the discussion on faithful and unfaithful enslaved persons. And it is likely, according to Udoh, the case here as well. The steward might have been a freed person, but that would change the dynamics of the relationship with the master very little.

One challenge of reading this parable, Udoh, notes is that it does not interrogate the system of enslavement. The picture we have of the enslaved person contains “the slaveholders’ fantasies, fears, ideals, values, and agenda.” This is a parable, not a sociological case study. The steward “is a literary character – but a character,” Udoh argues, “if he is to be comprehensible, with an underlying social reality” (page 328). The parable does not give us details about the realities of Roman enslavement. Rather, we should use what we know about Roman enslavement to interpret the parable.

From the perspective of the enslavers, a “just” steward would always and only represent the interests of the master. “Servile subservience and loyalty,” Udoh writes, “were necessary for the personal safety of the slaveholder and the stability of slavery as a system of economic exploitation” (page 329). Enslavers in the Roman system (and in the American system, by the way) were always afraid that the enslaved would murder them in their beds, steal them blind, and/or rise up in rebellion. Therefore, servile subservience and loyalty were encouraged with brutality.

An ”unjust” steward would resist being used as an extension of the master’s body and soul. Enslavers expected such resistance. They labelled such resistance as lazy and criminal. The enslaved were described in enslavement literature as greedy, drunken wanton, reckless, cowardly, cruel, stupid, and dangerous. The Lukan account, according to Udoh (and Glancy as well) takes these opposing types, created by and for the masters, for granted (page 330).

So we come to the “unjust” or “unrighteous” steward in our text. The steward “is said to be ‘unrighteous,’” Udoh argues, “not because his actions were ‘dishonest’ by an extrinsic, universal, moral code but because he was disloyal and caused injury to his master’s interests” (page 331). I think this is a critical insight for our interpretation. In another historical context, “unjust” equals “uppity.” If we read the parable from the view of the enslaver, then we see the steward as a criminal, and we collaborate with the enslaver. But what if the steward is a resistor rather than a felon?

Let’s look again at the parable. The gossip mill generates accusations, never proven, against this highly vulnerable manager. The enslaver gives no thought to due process or investigation since an enslaved person does not deserve such consideration. The manager doesn’t begin to look for alternative employment. Instead, as Udoh argues, he creates an escape plan. He’s not looking for new work. He’s trying to survive with his hide intact.

Udoh believes the manager builds that plan by falsifying the master’s accounts. I’m not sure, based on Goodrich’s work, that such a conclusion is required. I think the strategy of giving everyone a “win” (including the steward) is still a valid observation here. The enslaved person always understands the “system” better than the enslaver and has to be “shrewd” in order to survive. In the end, the enslaver recognizes this cleverness, I think, and decides not to beat the hell out of the enslaved manager.

In this analysis, Udoh notes, the steward doesn’t become “just” by the end of the story. He receives the enslaver’s praise at the precise moment, in Luke 16:8a, when he is described as the “unjust manager.” He has continued to shrewdly pursue his own interests, which for the moment may coincide with those of the enslaver and the debtors. “Why does the parabolic Lord praise the unfaithful manager?” Udoh asks. “Perhaps, so that the Lord can urge the ‘children of light’ similarly to be prudent ‘in their generation…” (page 335).

But don’t lose sight of the nature of that “prudence.” I quote some of Udoh’s concluding sentences. “If the Lord’s (sic) praise means that, in spite of the expectations and anxieties of the propertied classes, Justice is on the manager’s side, then Luke has told a subversive tale. Subversive because this would be the only text in the NT that commends, even if incidentally, such servile behavior as would threaten the stability of the system of slavery itself…” (page 335).

We may find ourselves captive to unjust systems and structures. How can we work as Jesus followers to subvert those systems and do some good for the oppressed? That’s a subtle question, but I think it works with this text.