The Shrewd Business Manager...

With recent blogs on IL about the ethics of making a profit out of spiritual experience, the seamless return of a once slandered spiritual teacher and some related flip flops and accusations by a now ex IL blogger... I thought it appropriate to post an excerpt on the Parable of the Shrewd Business Manager from a book I'm working on called the Paradoxical Secret: The Authentic Teachings of Jesus... or something like that... It's a parable (short story) that speaks directly to some of these issues, but in a very intuitive or enigmatic way, while possibly raising some holy hell in the process...

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The Shrewd Business Manager, Luke 16:1-8 

1Jesus told his disciples: "There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2So he called him in and asked him, 'What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.'

3"The manager said to himself 'What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I'm not strong enough to dig, and I'm ashamed to beg— 4I know what I'll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.'

5"So he called in each one of his master's debtors. He asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?'

6" 'Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,' he replied.
      "The manager told him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.'

7"Then he asked the second, 'And how much do you owe?'
      " 'A thousand bushels of wheat,' he replied.
      "He told him, 'Take your bill and make it eight hundred.'

8"The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.

Often regarded as the most puzzling of all the parables, this short narrative also gives voice to the same deep structure that resides at the radical center of all of Jesus’ most recognizable teachings while again frustrating our everyday expectations about what it means to enter the Kingdom with subversive twists and enigmatic turns.

In essence, this parable of Jesus is the paradoxical story of a subordinate (manager) outwitting his superior (rich man/master). The rich man’s manager is a swindler who wastes his masters’ goods and possessions, and is immediately dismissed from his position. This same manager further perpetuates his fraudulent behavior by cancelling the agreed upon amount of the masters debtors,[1] and in a final, unanticipated turn of events, the dishonest manager ends up being commended by his master for his astute judgment and his inventiveness under stress.

The central scandal of this narrative – the master’s praise of the dishonest action of his steward, has perplexed and bewildered many parable scholars. The approval of the master cuts against the sense of justice that prevails in the everyday social world and undermines our expectation that the master would respond with anger and condemnation when he becomes aware that he has been taken for a ride by his subordinate. But when the shrewd manager turns his hopeless situation around by using his wits to make friends with his master’s debtors and reducing the size of their debts – so that they will take him in after his dismissal, his master can only marvel at what he has done to save himself from total disaster.[2]

The rich man’s manager is indeed a dishonest rascal, but one who acts with grace under pressure, and so in one of Jesus’ most shocking paradoxes the sacked manager is actually commended for being so clever in worldly affairs – even as he takes a moral holiday at the master’s expense.[3] And where the master’s sanctioning of such dishonest behavior runs in direct contradiction to ones expectations of punishment, this amoral reversal – from judgment to forgiveness, is itself definitive of the original teachings of Jesus as a whole and can therefore be considered to stem from the authentic voiceprint of this 1st century sage from Galilee.

So again, there is a paradox at the heart of this parable: the rich man’s manager is abruptly sacked for being a fraud, just as his fraudulent response to this sudden crisis is held up as an example of good management and spiritual discernment. In Jesus’ true paradoxical style: what appears to be the respected manager of a rich man is really a swindler who loses his master’s possessions, and what appears to be a fraudulent swindler in his dealings with the rich man’s debtors, is really an applauded business manager who is much admired for his shrewdness. Or put simply: a manager is condemned as a fraud just as this fraud is praised as a manager.

There is also another paradoxical reversal disclosed in the narrative structure of this parable which further points to the radical message of Jesus and his preaching on the Kingdom of God. Essentially, the rich man - the privileged agent in this parable, in ruthlessly sacking his manager is represented in villainous terms as a ruthless and judgmental man, whereas the shrewd manager, the apparent victim or the rich man’s anger, is seen to be a successful rogue - the hero of the story, as one who is opportunistic in a crisis and thereby comes out on top.[4] The paradoxical reversal, where the upright master is ‘bad’ and the dishonest steward is ‘good’, overturns the assumed value-hierarchy and shifts the meaning of victim and perpetrator in another one of Jesus’ radical language-events: for where the business manager at first seems to be a victim of the rich man’s arbitrary will, he is really the perpetrator of justice, while the rich man at first seems to be the perpetrator of justice he is really the victim of the shrewd action of the business manager.

When the perpetrator becomes a victim, and the victim becomes a perpetrator everything is turned upside down and the hearers of Jesus’ enigmatic tale now have no way to navigate their world; its established co-ordinates have been shattered. Is the rich man cruel or way too kind? Is his shrewd manager a hero or a villain?[5] Over and again in these parables, when our horizon of expectancy collides with the narrative structure of Jesus’ explosive teachings, we are called to redefine the meaning of our lives as the arresting shock of Jesus’ unexpected reversals subverts conventional wisdom and challenges the way that justice operates in the social consensual world. For in this parable, Jesus’ breaks the bonds between power and justice that constitute conventional notions of morality, so that “the victim’s power as a rogue is clearly greater than the supposed power of the rich man as a dupe.”[6] Cutting against the grain of our taken for granted assumptions, Jesus now equates justice with vulnerability and power with powerlessness, for where both the rich man and his manager have their integrity put into question they both exhibit the capacity to act graciously under pressure. And in collapsing any meaningful value-hierarchy between the upright master and his degenerate steward, the advent of the Kingdom of God is also a great leveler...

There is one final paradox here that also breaks open the structure of ordinary expectations, for at the end of this parable a distinction is made between the children of this age (wordly/profane), who are clever in arranging business affairs for themselves, and the children of the light (otherworldly/sacred) whom simply do not compare in worldly wisdom and resourcefulness.[7] With another characteristic reversal of meaning, Jesus’ says here that seeming shrewdness in worldly affairs, is really a form of spiritual discernment, and seeming spirituality of the ‘people of the light’, is really a kind of irrelevant and childish naiveté in terms of the resourcefulness that is required for dealing with business in the world.

Shot through with shocking paradoxes, this parable is not so much a puzzling story about the sanctioning of immorality but an unmistakably authentic communication from Jesus of Nazareth about how things happen in God’s domain. As is the case with all of Jesus’ authentic teachings, everything is turned inside out and upside down: fraudulent behavior is radical justice, the rich man’s cruel judgment shifts into an act of praise, the immoral villain of the story becomes an esteemed hero, the ruthless perpetrator becomes a powerless victim, a sudden crisis is an opportunity for creative action, the vulnerability of the shrewd manager is powerful, the upright master is powerless, Jesus champions a rebel over a king while those shrewd in worldly affairs are spiritually awake...

The paradoxical stories of Jesus do not make things make sense - they perplex, confound and unsettle us with an altogether new figure of reality in which our cherished assumptions and presuppositions are regularly put into question... These parables express Jesus' passion for the impossible with an “infinite qualitative intensification and an immediate and pressing demand” (Caputo).

All of which means I am hanging on by a prayer, and that I am made adequate only by a confession of my inadequacy, by a confession of the poverty of my philosophy and the weakness of my theology. I am praying to be able to pray, for what better prayer, what better reason to pray, than when we are lost and left without a prayer?

Thanks for reading

Cameron

ww.camfreeman.com