In his short book The Corrosion of Character (1998), the sociologist Richard Sennett examined how shifts in work dynamics from the 1960s to the 1990s might have increased flexibility, but they also increased anxiety and a lack of control. Gone are the days, he says, when you would work for the same company your whole life. Gone are the days when you did what you were good at and grew increasingly good at that thing. Gone are the days of job stability. What we have instead is what we might call a light-footed economy—the job needs stay the same, but people come and go. Sennett tells the story of Rico, a man who felt simultaneously completely in control of the direction of his life and yet completely exposed to sudden shocks of that light-footed economy.[1] Working one day, fired the next. Working again, fired again. Here’s the underside of a flexible working environment. Adaptive management means unstable management.
This is a little bit like Jesus’ parable in Luke 16, the parable of the “dishonest manager.” It’s a story of financial insecurity, the cold decisions of business, and corporate loss mitigation. But it’s also a story about how to get by, only with a couple of remarkable twists. There was a rich man who had a manager, Jesus tells us, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. In an instant the rich man runs down and fires the manager. We don’t know whether he was wasting the rich man’s money, but at the hint of mismanagement, profit protections kick in, and the manager is on the outs. Fired, the manager must figure out how to be light on his feet. What will I do now? he asks himself.
Light on his feet, then, the man attempts to secure some housing, to cast his lot with the folks who will take him in, instead of the folks who have just thrown him out. Take your receipt out, he says, and where it says 100, write 50. To save his own skin, the manager rips the rich man off.
We might expect, with a setup to a parable like this, to hear a story like what Jesus tells in Matthew—a story about forgiveness or judgment. In Matthew, a servant is forgiven his debt, and then shakes people down to collect his own money. The clear difference between how the master works and how the servant works gives us an easy teaching: forgive, because you have been forgiven. A teaching here is consistent with what we already know and believe about God: honesty. But things are obviously out of order here. The rich man protects his interests, and the manager protects his interests—both at each other’s expense—and given a choice between the two, Jesus seems to say to his disciples and to us, well, be like the middle man. Rip some folks off and look out for yourself.
And at this point we take a step toward many of us may face when wrestling with this parable. Being ripped off, the rich man praises his ex-manager for it! Jesus says the master praised the manager of righteousness because he had been very clever. However we might feel about getting ripped off like this, in a bizarre way, the rich man seems oddly pleased—whether he’s happy or just has to hand it to him.
And the matter only gets stranger. Jesus holds the manager up to us as an example of how we ought to live. “Therefore, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.” By means of? Here we enter the difficulty head on. It’s just this line, I think, that causes us the most difficulty as preachers and teachers. It’s not even the confusing response of the rich man. It’s the confusing response of Jesus.
But Jesus has pulled a little trick on us, I think. When Jesus says make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, he elaborates: “So that when it is all gone, they may welcome you into their eternal homes.” We should notice that he does not say, “Make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth, so that when you lose your job like this manager you’ll still have a place to sleep.” Jesus does not give a strict one-to-one comparison after all. He says something larger. His concern is for when all the money runs out, and I mean all of it—when the entire project of human money-making and managing and owning and acquiring dries up. When there’s nothing left to trade, nothing left to track or invest, no market in which to secure our future. At that point, he’s suggesting that we need another guarantor besides money, something even more stable than endless wealth. We need a way to secure a welcome into “eternal homes.”
Eternal homes! This parable is suddenly not what we thought it was. We thought that this was a parable about how to skate by in an unstable economy—by ripping one another off—and it turns out that this has been a parable about how to be welcomed into the kingdom of God.
Jesus gives us another trick. When our text says “dishonest,” it’s probably best translated straightforwardly as unrighteous. Adikiās is the word. It’s the same word Paul uses when he speaks of our unrighteousness before God (Rom. 3:5), and, more significantly, it’s the positive version of the word Jesus uses when he says, “I did not come to call the righteous (dikaious) but sinners.” The semantic range is theological and social before it’s about honesty.[2]
Likewise, the full phrase ek tou mamonā tēs adikias is a bit opaque. “By means of dishonest wealth” is not the only (or even the best) rendering. The regular word for wealth in the sense of cash or riches is plousios, not normally mamónas. Mamónas has a much more commodified connotation—wealth as an entity or a pursuit. “You cannot serve both God and wealth (mamona),” Jesus says just a few verses later. The whole phrase reads straightforwardly, then: “from the wealth of unrighteousness.”
In the end, I think Jesus means something like: “Make friends for yourselves out of the wealth that is unrighteousness, so that when it all falls apart, they will welcome you into their eternal homes.” It is not the righteous but the unrighteous who will welcome us into the kingdom of God. Therefore, let unrighteousness be your currency. Give your capital away and gain some important friends, the ones who are themselves rich in unrighteousness. Climb down the world’s ladder because God will flip it over in the end. Jesus’ parable drops us in a remarkable place: make friends with the unrighteous, because that’s who is going to have a place to live when it’s all said and done.
That’s how you get by: by casting your lots with the unrighteous, because that’s who God will justify; by making friends with the poor, because theirs is the kingdom of God; the ones who are hungry now, because they will be filled; with the ones who are weeping now, because they will rejoice; with the meek, because they will inherit the earth. Jesus calls the whole world unstable and tells us to hedge our bets by loving the stranger in our midst.
Have some friends in low places, I hear Jesus saying. Jesus made a life of it, and he invites us to do the same. Throughout Scripture, it’s the low places that come out on top. Don’t just be kind to the rejected. Befriend the rejected and the unrighteous. Hang out at the edges, he says, where folks struggle and screw up. Jesus can give us the freedom to linger in the low places because our life and salvation depend on him, and he, the author of our salvation, loved the unrighteous—that we might become the righteousness of God.
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[1] See Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), 15-31.
[2] For a similar linguistic point, see Leviticus 19:36. Where we often translate “honest scales,” the heavier theological word is simply tsedeq, righteous.
The Rev. Garrett Ayers is a Guest Writer. He serves as Assistant Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, Columbia, SC.
