Homilies for Pentecost 17

17th Sunday After Pentecost

18 September 1994

St. George's Le Mars, Iowa Mark 9:30-37

Of Kings and Kids

One of the many remarkable things about the men who wrote the gospels is their ability to remember, and their willingness to report, unflattering things about themselves. Today's lesson begins with the disciples hearing Jesus say the most important thing he can say: that he is to be betrayed, arrested, killed and resurrected. Mark, probably relying on Peter's testimony, tersely relates: they do not understand and they are afraid to ask what he means. At first it's odd that Mark says they don't understand. This is the third time they've heard him predict the Son of Man's death and resurrection. By now they've been with Jesus long enough to have figured out that he uses the enigmatic term "Son of Man" to refer to himself, so they probably realize he is talking about things that are going to happen to him. To say one is to be betrayed, killed and arrested is straightforward. These are common enough phenomena. They understand what those things mean, even though they may well wonder how Jesus thinks they're going to happen to him, or why he believes they will happen to him. Earlier in this chapter, the second time Jesus refers to his impending death and resurrection, Mark writes that it's the idea of rising from the dead that they don't grasp. So it's reasonable to think that this is what they still don't understand. Whether there is a resurrection of the dead, and if so what it might amount to, was a popular topic for theological debate in the first century. Disagreement about it divided the Pharisees from the Saducees. I can imagine the disciples, like so many others in the centuries after the event, trying to find some reasonable interpretation, some edifying spiritual truth, symbolized in these words about the resurrection of Jesus, their minds stumbling over the simple, appalling prospect of a risen Jesus.

Still, it's hard not to suspect something else is going on here; that it's not merely a matter of not understanding Jesus' words about rising again, but of their not wanting to understand his words about his approaching humiliation and death. Perhaps they half understand but what they begin to understand is something they do not want to hear. Mark records that they are afraid to ask Jesus what, exactly, he's talking about. In part, they may be afraid because of the harsh words that came out of their attempt to discuss this matter with their master earlier. That, they remember, is when Jesus told Peter to get out of his way because he was doing Satan's work by objecting to Jesus' claim that he was going to be killed. And in part they may be afraid that he really means what he seems to mean, that he is heading toward something dark and tragic, not great and glorious.

The episode in today's text occurs not long after Jesus first breaks the news that he will be rejected by the leaders of Israel, put to death by them, and then rise again. (This is at the end of chapter 8.) There Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes him. A strong word: rebukes are for those who do bad or foolish things. I think the disciples find Jesus' talk of his suffering embarrassing and dangerous, as simply not the sort of thing one in his position ought to be saying. That's why, I think, part of Jesus' response is his warning to those who are "ashamed of the Son of Man." The disciples have a vision of Jesus' mission. This wild talk of weakness, humiliation and death is totally out of place in it, not mitigated by the puzzling references to some sort of 'rising again.' They are following Jesus out of a conviction that he is the long-awaited Messiah, indeed they have given up everything for this dream -- they are always ready to remind Jesus about that -- and they have gone through a lot for the sake of the messianic kingdom they think they hear Jesus preaching.

His disciples' attitude must have deeply disappointed Jesus and hurt him. After all this time living and working intimately with him they still have no clue as to what he is about. They are as much in the dark as the crowds that have pursued and harassed Jesus all over Galilee. Those volatile crowds hungered for a messiah, a charismatic figure, a man specially chosen and anointed by God to be a powerful, glorious king. Like David of old, he would destroy the people's oppressors and make them again proud to be God's favored people. The unruly crowds that follow Jesus are never far from forcing kingship upon him and igniting a bloody peasant revolt against the religious establishment up in Jerusalem and their backers, the Roman puppet government. This is why, again and again in this gospel, Jesus, moved by love and pity, heals someone but then commands him not to let anyone know about it. And this is why, when the demons he separates from their victims spontaneously cry out "what have you to do with us, Son of God?" he is quick to silence them. Jesus does not deny that he is the Messiah, or the Son of God, but he insists that he not be called this in public. The last thing Jesus wants is for the crowd to proclaim him Messiah and try to make him their king. He loves them too much to give them the hollow redemption they want. He does, finally, permit himself be so addressed: he lets the high priest know he is the messiah, precisely when doing so is sure to enrage the priest's religious sensibilities and incite his condemnation at the hands of Israel's religious authorities. And he does let Pilate, the representative of imperial Rome, call him King of the Jews, because in doing so he helps guarantee his crucifixion. He lets himself be called by these titles just when doing so insures he will not be treated as messiah or king. The episode Mark puts next in his story shows the disciples tenaciously holding on to their hopes for a Davidic messianic kingdom. They seem to have forgotten Jesus' disturbing words about rejection and death. As they walk they are anticipating their places in God's approaching reign. They are discussing what positions they will have when Jesus comes into his own. They are like campaign workers whose candidate is far ahead in the polls as the election nears. They naturally see themselves as getting important, powerful jobs in the new administration. It's only right: Jesus, no more than king David, can't rule alone. He needs lieutenants, administrators. Who could be as qualified? It's rather awkward when Jesus overhears these discussions, but it's hard not to think about the exciting possibilities. Besides, someone has to think about these practical matters and plan ahead for that glorious day when Jesus rules in God's kingdom.

These are busy, important men. They're in the entourage of a man admired, revered, practically even worshipped, by delirious crowds. They're close to a man of marvelous powers, some of which he has shared with them. They're the inner circle who receive the secret teaching that the crowds don't get. They're envied and respected, involved in world-shaking events, in the vanguard of God's wonderful redemption of his people. The last thing on their minds is dropping everything and paying attention to the needs of some small child. Great things are in the air: how could they stop their vital work on God's behalf to concern themselves with what is small, noisy, dirty and badly-behaved? This, after all, is work for servants and women. And yet, there Jesus is, taking a child into his arms, saying: "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me."

Later in the book Mark describes Jesus as teaching that one must become like a little child to enter the kingdom of God, but that's not what he says here. In this passage Jesus is trying to get through to his dear muddled friends. They think they are accepting him, but in reality they are ready only to welcome a messiah who brings a kingdom that celebrates wealth and strength, not one that lifts up the poor and weak; a kingdom that seeks judgment and vindication, not one that grants forgiveness; a kingdom that is based on power, glory, and security, not a kingdom of love, humility and trust. Jesus' kingdom is not, as he later (in John's gospel) tells Pilate, of this world. He is the messiah, but the meaning of this is not bound to human illusions. Welcoming this king is not like welcoming a king; it's like welcoming a child. In our culture, we romanticize childhood, sentimentally picturing children as sweet and good and valuable, cherished in theory, if not always in fact. We have to forget that to feel the force of what Jesus is doing here. Children occupy the bottom of society. They have no status, no power; they're completely dependent and helpless. Caring for them is demanding, thankless and unrewarding; it's not a task for those who hope to make something of themselves in this world. Yet, to be like Jesus is to be the sort of person who is ready to make room and time not for a king, but a mere child; it is to come in last, to do the dirty work of everyone else. Until this readiness has been born in our hearts, we haven't really understood what Jesus says and does. Jesus is telling those of us who want to be his disciples that he suffers and dies on our behalf, and that all power and glory lie on the other side of the cross, and that they are the power and glory of God's love and grace.

Amen.

17th Sunday After Pentecost

20 September 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 16. 19-31

A Season in Hell

Reflecting on the events of the past few weeks, ex-presidential speech writer Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column a few days ago that one good thing that has come out of the terrorist attack is that God is back. Union Square in lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was, until the 11th of September, about the last place in America where one would have expected to see public symbols of patriotism or of the Christian faith. But Noonan describes it as full, not only with flowers, flags and placards bearing patriotic sentiments, but symbols of Christian faith of the most unabashed sort: mass cards, pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, votive candles, prayers written on envelopes and scraps of paper, and so on. She also describes Oprah Winfrey leading the crowd in prayer at Yankee Stadium, and Bette Midler singing God Bless America, the song that has become the unofficial national anthem. In its time of crisis, secularized America is, Noonan says, finding God.

It’s too soon to know whether this rediscovery of God will last and, if it does, whether it turns out to be a good or a bad thing. But there is a different response; it’s the darker one that we haven’t been hearing much in public but I think we’ve felt it in our private moments: what sort of God let’s things like this happen? One of my first thoughts was how easily and unobtrusively God could have spared us the horror. It wouldn’t have taken much: move that nail in the street, a flat tire on the way to an airport, a missed flight. One hardly need be omnipotent to pull it off. God, we assume, knew what was going to happen and did nothing. I respect Billy Graham for bringing it up when he spoke at the National Cathedral. Raising the age-old question: why does God allow tragedy and suffering he said: “I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction.” I’m sure that in retrospect Reverend Graham would agree that that’s an understatement, and that like the rest of us he has no idea why God permits these horrendous evils. Anything I’ve ever heard about God allowing for human freedom, about God bringing good out of evil, leave us, if we think about them seriously, with at best a God who is incompetent and, at worst, with a God who is a monster. I appreciate something else Graham said in that sermon: “You may be angry with God.”

There’s often more honesty in disbelief than in the platitudes Christians come up with, platitudes and rationalizations that turn to dust and ashes when we face real loss, real evil. The rock band XTC plays a song called “Dear God.” Some of its lines go:

You’re always letting us humans down

The wars you bring, the babes you drown,

Those lost at sea and never found, and

It’s the same the whole world round,

The hurt I see helps to compound

That Father, Son and Holy Ghost

Is just someone’s unholy hoax.

It’s a sad and lonely thing, to be caught in a hell of hating the God you fear is not really there. Anger at God is something we’re trained to suppress and hide. When I was a boy, we lived across the street from a family of conservative and very pious Baptists. They had three sons whose tendencies to bad behavior were constantly being impeded by parental admonitions about the God who would punish them if they did this, that, or the other thing. Peter, the youngest son, must have been six or seven on one hot summer night. All the windows were open and we could hear a not uncommon family altercation. There were muffled shouts as a wailing Peter was warned and threatened by his parents. No doubt Peter was once again being told that God was going to get him if he did not do what he was supposed to do. Suddenly a loud shout: “I hate God!” Over and over that shout, ringing out into the summer night: “I hate God!” “I hate God!” A moment of shocked silence and then, in the background, the horrified but unsuccessful attempts of the parents to stifle him.

Despite Peter’s parents’ horror, his fit of animosity toward the God they pushed down his throat was not a cause for alarm. A lesson, I gratefully recall, I got from my own parents, who were almost doubled over, trying not to laugh so loud they’d be heard across the street. I’m sure that as Peter’s parents, aghast, heard their son’s irreverent cries they envisaged him on his way to a life of atheism, crime and finally the hell they at other times so enthusiastically believed in and with which they had so often threatened him. I think that in such thoughts there would have been a core of truth, the truth that hell is real and that our pride, fear and anger traps us in it and separates us from God and one another.

Hell has become something hard for many of us to take seriously. There are of course those who hold on to the traditional ideas of a place of exquisitely devised torments, God inflicts on those who do not respond to his love. For them, being for Hell is as central to being a Christian as being against gays, abortion and evolution. But for most of us, the idea of Hell is more or less an embarrassment, a matter not for genteel company or even something comedic, a fantastic contrivance out of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch, a subject for New Yorker cartoons and jokes: “A minister, a priest, and a rabbi die and find themselves in hell…”

Yet, as we see in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is willing to put the idea of hell to serious use. There’s a banal, moralistic lesson one might try to skim off the surface of Jesus’ story of the rich man in hell, but Jesus is not portraying some sort of karma, some keeping of cosmic accounts that balances the books by reversing the fortunes of poor Lazarus and the rich man. Something else is going on here, something close to the opposite of that.

Being consigned to hell is supposed to impress upon the damned the hideous error of their ways, so they can endure an eternity of regret and remonstrance, but the pains of hell appear to have had no such effect on the rich man. In Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures From An Institution, a college professor says of a colleague: “she’s so bossy she’d tell the Devil how to run hell.” The rich man, condemned and suffering, sees fit to tell Father Abraham what to do; he still sees himself as a winner, better than that loser Lazarus who is, in his eyes, still a nobody who can be sent on his errands. Insanely, he still has faith in who he was though his riches are forever gone. Every day, he strolled past miserable Lazarus, that living word from God right at his doorstep, and ignored him. Yet he imagines that he’s the kind of person who just needs a clear word from God to do what’s required. Perhaps a messenger sent from the dead, a certified miracle is what should have been provided. His arrogant pride, his self-reliance is so deeply engrained he’s unaware of it. It’s a fearsome picture: when everything else is gone, when everything he has relied on - wealth, power, reputation, life itself - has been burned away this hard, heavy core of self-righteousness remains and drags him down into a hell of his own making. Jesus paints a terrible picture of a man that seems beyond redemption. Jesus is not, I think, so much warning about the ultimate fate awaiting people who, like the rich man, like the Pharisees he was debating, put their trust in their own worth - moral, religious, economic, national - as he was saying they were already there. They were already cut off from God and contained in their individual hells. They think they are well off, but they are without hope. Like the rich man in the tale who was impervious to the suffering of Lazarus, they are calloused, closed up in themselves. A hard, protective layer keeps God out. Nothing can get at them. Charles Dickens got it wrong; old Marley’s visit, and the rest of the ghostly visitations, would not have broken the hardness of Scrooge’s heart. Jesus leaves his hearers bereft of hope.

The end of Jesus’ story is not in the telling. There is a joyful ending to the story, but it’s in what Jesus does, not what he says. It lies ahead, in the death that at this point in Luke’s gospel irresistibly approaches. For those trapped in the hell of their fear and anger, the hell of their pride and self-righteousness, there is exactly one hope: Jesus is there.

The only hope for us as we labor in whatever hells we find ourselves in is that Jesus is there with us. There’s the hell of feeling abandoned by a God who is to all appearances indifferent to the world’s evil, to our own suffering. There’s our anger toward God and with it our fear that we might be right when we say he is not there. There’s the hell of our own indifference to the suffering of others, not, truth to tell, all that different than that of the rich man in Jesus’ parable. And then there’s the hell of our anger toward other people, the contemptuous indignation that makes us feel justified, sure that we are invincibly in the right and others are wicked and deserve to be destroyed. For the past few weeks many of us have struggled with these feelings, trying to separate them from proper feelings of grief and resolution in the face of evil. And there’s the hell of fear, the naked truth of our vulnerability and impotence being thrust upon us. That too is a dark place we have found ourselves in the past few weeks.

One of the wisest things I’ve heard about hell came from an old friend of mine. A place where I used to work was beset with internecine strife, conspiracies, lawsuits, and general nastiness. Some people I had cared for and respected for years became obsessed about what to the rest of us seemed minor grievances and went to war, in the process sacrificing most of their friendships as well as their careers. They were, in particular, consumed with hatred for the president of the institution and had devoted themselves to bringing him down, at any cost to themselves and to the institution. Over dinner with my friend who had come to work at this institution at the height of the conflict we were marveling at what had overcome these people. He pulled out a pen and drew a straight line on a napkin. “That’s the edge of hell. Step over it and you drop into the abyss. People think hell is behind them, because they have escaped it by becoming Christians, or they think it’s ahead of them because that’s where they might wind up. They’re wrong. Hell’s always right beside them.” Drawing a second line parallel to the first, representing a person’s path through life, he said “At any time you can go sideways and drop off the edge. Blinded by fear, pride, anger; blinded by an unshakeable confidence of being in the right, it could happen to any of us.” But for God’s grace we’re there too.

Whatever the shape of the hells that we construct for ourselves or for one another, the only salvation is Jesus crucified, descended into hell and resurrected. Our only salvation is Jesus with us, even there. We have no answer to the problem of evil. We have only this faith in a God who puts himself in the way of suffering with us. We have no deliverance from the evils of our imprisonments in fear or pride or anger. We have nothing but Jesus standing with us at our worst.

A good place to turn for theological instruction is the films of Robin Williams. In “What Dreams May Come” he plays Chris Nielsen – Christy to his friends – a man who dies and goes to heaven, but once there he learns that his wife has died and gone to hell because she cannot forgive herself for the death of their children. He leaves heaven and descends into hell’s darkness in search of her. He finally finds her, but she is so deeply sunk into self-hatred and self-pity that nothing can touch her. She doesn’t even recognize him. If he does not abandon her and return to heaven he too will be trapped forever in hell. His guide implores him to leave, to save himself, but he won’t. Christy chooses to stay there in hell with his wife. That choice of radical love breaks the bonds of hell and saves her when nothing else can. God in Jesus does not forsake us, even in the depths he is there, known or unknown, loved or hated.

Our forebears had ideas of hell most of us cannot reconcile with the gospel of God’s victorious love made manifest in Jesus. They envisioned a hell made by God, not a hell made by human beings. But they did not conceive it merely as a place of final punishment. They also knew the harrowing of hell. Love implacable breaks into it and sets the captives free. I’ll conclude with some words of M.R. Ritley, whose splendid sermon, “The Harrowing of Hell,” relates her own experience of being saved from a hell of rejection and depression:

I waited in the halls of hell itself to see him come. I waited, knowing there is someone whose compassion reaches down into the very depths of this final prison of the spirit. He bursts into death like an eruption of the sun, hurtling himself headlong into the silence where we have waited for him. The walls burst outward, and our tombs crack around us at the great shout of his voice. “Awake! Arise! Come! Follow me!” The doors lie shattered at his feet. The very air of hell recoils from the whirlwind that his passing makes, a vast and irresistible vacuum into which, still terrified and startled, the lost are drawn, pulled like dust motes in a tempest, whirling in his wake. Hell cracks upon itself, and in the great inrush of dazzling light and air, the freed souls tumble into daylight, stunned and blinded. The captives are released, and hell lies broken.

Amen.

17th Sunday in Pentecost

23 September 2007

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. Luke 16.9

The Faithful Servant

The weird but wonderful film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus documents singer Jim White’s odyssey across the cultural fringes of the American South in quest of people “lonely for God” and for “the Holy Ghost, alive and awake and present, even if wearing the clothes of crazy religious people.” At one point he muses that he is “looking for the gold tooth in God’s crooked smile.” That came to mind as I tried to understand the parable of the unjust steward, looking for the grace and gospel hidden in it. “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” How’s that for advice? It was a relief to skim the commentaries and find that everyone describes today’s text as the most difficult of Jesus’ parables, and to see that no one has a slam-dunk interpretation of it. It looks like one of those passages where some obvious key to understanding Jesus’ words must have been there for his hearers in mid-first century Israel, but is now lost to us, and maybe even to Luke, struggling with them in a different place and time. Why, in the parable, does the rich man commend the dishonest manager? Why, commenting on the parable, does Jesus present the sleazy manager as a model for faithful discipleship? It’s a puzzle and we don’t seem to have all the pieces. But let us have faith, and sin boldly.

I believe that the most helpful move we can make to see why the rich man praises his corrupt steward is to realize that this is the ancient Mediterranean world, so the rich man’s biggest concern is not his wealth, but his honor. In that culture, the wrongdoing, even if only alleged, of anyone in a man’s household—wife or child, servant or slave—was a black mark on his honor and cried out to be rectified by some public display that erased his shame. This mentality lives on even today, in those horrific “honor killings” where the father of an Arab Muslim family murders a daughter who has dishonored him merely by being seen, unescorted, with a man. The rich man does not detect financial irregularities in the books. Some unnamed person reports that his manager is cheating him and that is enough to fire him. He does not say, “Give me an accounting of your management, so I can see if these reports are true and fire you if they are!” He says, “Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer!” The report that he is being cheated dishonors him, and dismissing his manager is necessary to restore his reputation, or at least to mitigate his dishonor.

The manager, facing unemployment and destitution, comes up with a plan: “I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed…people may welcome me into their homes.” He approaches the debtors and makes deals for repayment, drastically discounting what they owe his master. On standard interpretations, herein lies his dishonesty: he cheats his boss to make a golden parachute. However, it’s not clear how this works. What does he mean by “they may welcome me into their homes?” Does he really expect to parlay these favors, substantial as they are, into not having to work any more? Does he think these favors will entitle him to live off these folks for the rest of his life? Or does he think that, once it becomes widely known how he has cheated his employer, someone else will want to hire him as their manager? If this is what he thinks, then he is foolish. Yet his master commends him for acting shrewdly. If he has tried to save his own skin by cheating his master even more, it’s hard to see why the master would commend him for doing so, even if he recognizes how clever he is. He does not react with, “I was right about you, you crook!” The rich man acts as though he has changed his mind, as though now he thinks this is a good manager, after all. You want shrewdness in someone you pay to manage your holdings, but not if he uses it to rob you. What the rich man says makes no sense if what matters to him is the money this crooked character cost him before and is costing him now. He is not going to praise him for cheating him again. But what he says makes sense when the focus shifts from lost money to lost honor, if the favors the manager has done for the debtors restores his employer’s tainted honor. It is plausible to think that it does. When, out of the blue, the manager approaches the debtors and offers them drastic discounts on what they owe, they will see him not as acting on his own, but simply as his employer’s agent. If they think he is freelancing, they have no reason to pay him even the reduced amounts he asks for. So they receive this unexpected largess as a gift from the rich man. In this culture, it was in fact a common practice for the rich to enhance their reputations, and thus their honor, by the magnanimous ad hoc distribution of gifts to the poor. There are neighborhoods in New York and Boston, where Mafia bosses, living by a similar archaic honor code, still do this. The manager dreams up a scheme to save himself. He’ll make his employer appear fantastically generous, enhancing his reputation by portraying him as so fabulously well-off he can on a whim write off big chunks of their debts. At worst, he’ll be seeking a new position with a reputation for being a shrewd manager, one who knows how to make his boss look good. At best, he’ll show his employer that he’s worth keeping, because he is sharp enough to restore the honor his malfeasance cost him and in so doing to bring him greater honor. When, in crisis and under judgment, he cuts the discount deals with his employer’s clients, he is no longer trying to serve two masters. Before, the manager did try to serve two masters, officially his employer but unofficially his desire for his employer’s money. Now he is wholeheartedly pursuing his employer’s interests because he sees that they coincide with his. The manager is praised for wisely seeing to his interests, now that they are one with those of his employer. His fate is bound up with his master’s. He realizes that to save himself he must save his employer’s honor. He has become his master’s faithful servant, even if by an unorthodox route.

One difficulty in interpreting the parable is that it is not obvious where it ends, where it is no longer the rich man speaking, and where it is Jesus talking about the parable, drawing lessons from it. My bet is that the parable ends with, “8And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly,” and that Jesus continues, now observing, “For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” What contrast is he making? There were plenty of foreign absentee landlords in first century Israel, and Jesus’ audience, mostly poor peasants, would have been familiar with, and in many cases would have worked for, their hired managers. I can imagine those hearing Jesus’ story taking it for granted that its characters are a rich gentile landowner and his gentile steward. Jesus says that these are the kind of people that are wily enough to grasp what wealth is good for: it’s for winning friends and influencing people. That’s all money is good for. It doesn't have any inherent value. Having it or the things it buys won’t do you any real good. There’s no sense hoarding it, worrying about holding on to it, taking care to spend it cautiously, or getting bent out of shape when someone cheats you out of some of it. It’s good only for getting rid of. Above all, there’s no reason to think having it marks you as blessed by God, better or holier than the unwashed many who have to get by without it. There’s nothing sacred about it: it’s just money. Denying its importance, its spiritual power, blowing it on a big party (as a recent “Professor of the Year” infamously did with his prize money) is the epitome of Christian stewardship. The tradition warns against greed, against wanting too much money, or wanting money too much. But Jesus warns against taking it seriously in the first place, showing it any respect at all.

Also, I suspect that Jesus’ audience would have resonated to his default characterization of wealth as “dishonest” (the word is literally unjust.) Like peasants everywhere, they would have taken it for granted that the rich are rich because the poor are poor, and that the only honest money is what you get for hard physical work, not for renting, lending, managing, buying and selling, and so on. This is bad economics, but in the context it’s good theology. For we hear Jesus speaking on behalf of the crowds of ritually unclean, morally suspect, contemptible poor folk against the well-off, theologically correct, and religiously pure establishment. What Jesus says would have galled the powers-that-be in Jerusalem: the despised gentiles know better than you how to use their wealth; they at least know enough not to imagine it is a sign of divine favor. They know to use it for the worldly purposes it’s good for.

What, though, to make of the explanation, “…so that when it is gone they may welcome you into their eternal homes?” I suspect Jesus indulges in sarcasm here. It’s implausible that he would have seen the friends to be won by sharing the wealth as really having eternal—or heavenly, as the word also means—homes to invite anyone to. I wonder whether Jesus might have said this in a tone of voice that expressed the opposite of the word’s literal meaning, and that emphasized the fact that nothing of ultimate importance is at stake in wealth, except, of course, being wise enough to avoid imagining that there is. (This reading is, perhaps, supported by the fact that the Greek term we read as “homes,” is the Greek term for tent, that most impermanent of dwellings.)

Jesus asks, “If you are not faithful in this small thing, this ultimately small matter of money, then how can you be entrusted with things that really matter?” What is it to be faithful with what God gives us? Taking as our model the shrewd manager who moved from being dishonest to being faithful, we should spend whatever God gives us in ways that embody, and make visible to one and all, his extravagant generosity, and the good news that he forgives our debts.

It’s crucial to the story that the rich man’s steward became a worthwhile servant not when he went from being dishonest to honest, or unjust to just—we don’t, as a matter of fact, have any reason to think he did—but when he forgave the debts of his boss’ debtors, when he gave what was not even his to give. Keep in mind that in the parable, everyone came out ahead: the manager got back in the master’s good graces and avoided being fired, the master had his honor restored and his reputation as a rich and generous guy enhanced, and the debtors got a big break. But no one got justice. No one got what he deserved. But everyone got more than he had any reason to expect. This is the strange world we are called to as followers of Jesus. God’s world, where justice doesn’t count. Only love and mercy matter. The shrewdness of Jesus’ faithful servants might look crazy, even disreputable, in the eyes of the world. For it’s about forgiving and giving without regard for who deserves what.

There’s a Russian folk tale about a miserable old lady who was notoriously selfish. Beggars who made the mistake of coming her door were sent away empty handed with the miserly woman’s angry words ringing in their ears. But one day a beggar turned up who was especially hungry and persistent; he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Finally, she chased him away; in a rage she grabbed an onion and flung it at him. In due time the wretched woman died and proceeded to the nether regions of hell. But one day from far above a hand appeared, reaching down, down into the deepest hell. In it was the onion. “Take hold of this and be saved!” calls a voice from heaven. She did, and with it she was drawn up out of hell into heaven.

There’s another, darker version of the tale: The old woman is in hell and complaining bitterly to God about it; a respectable woman like her does not, she insists, belong there. God asks her what acts of charity she did in her lifetime. For ages she cannot think of any but at last she recalls one. She tells Him she once gave an onion to a poor beggar. God then lowers an onion into the fires of hell and tells her to grasp hold of it. She does; and as she is being lifted out of hell, others also desperately grasp the onion. She turns to them and screams, "This is for me!" and kicks them off. She immediately falls off the onion herself and drops out of sight, down into deepest hell.

Each week we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We do not, of course, think that God’s forgiving us depends on our forgiving others. Or that God’s endless generosity to us is conditional even on our meager generosity to others. God’s love, God’s forgiveness, unlike ours, is utterly unconditional. God loves and accepts us, he gives and forgives without limit, just because of who he is, not because we deserve it, not with our good behavior, not with our spiritual discipline, not even with our repentance. But when we hesitate to forgive as we have been forgiven, to give as God has given to us, we put ourselves in an absurd position, acting us if we deserve God’s favor while someone else does not. We make ourselves pretty much useless as God’s servants. Instead, let us be God’s faithful servants and take hold of his unstinting mercy, giving and forgiving as recklessly as he does.

Amen.