Doing the wrong thing for the right reason
Reading the Gospel this morning, we have to wonder what Jesus is getting at with the parable he tells his disciples. First, we have a dishonest manager who is not taking care of his employer’s money very well, and finding out that he will be fired, tells the employer’s debtors to reduce their bills of debt. Then, the rich man, the manager’s employer, finds out what he’s doing and says that the manager has acted judiciously and wisely, instead of being angry at having been shorted money owed to him. Jesus goes on to say that it’s good to make friends through using wealth, because then you will be welcomed into eternal homes. Then he winds up the parable with words about faithfulness, honesty and dishonesty, and not serving God and money. This does not sound like something Jesus would teach when we’ve heard that dishonesty is unacceptable, and the ends do not justify the means. We have seen how those attitudes have created serious economic and political problems in our time and destroyed the integrity of leaders. How can we make sense of this passage?
An obvious explanation for the manager’s reduction of the debtor’s bills is that the manager was inflating the amount owed so that he could skim off the extra and still send the owed amount on to his employer. That’s plausible, and was not uncommon in Jesus’ time, but judging the manager is an easy reaction that skirts around a deeper issue: how does the manager justify his action? We can assume he knows that what he is doing is wrong because he tries to fix it before he is let go. Is he looking for a new, bigger house? Maybe he has his eye on a luxury car. Or maybe he is not able to buy enough food for the week, or he has a large medical bill, or a loan he can’t pay off. Somewhere in this scenario, there is an injustice, but it may not be where we think it obviously is with the manager. Somehow, that injustice needs to be addressed, but it is not by inflating the amount owed to the employer. If the manager makes amends for his dishonesty with the money owed, then the employer’s approval makes more sense, but the manager is still not completely right. He wants to get in the good graces of the debtors by appearing to reduce their debt rather than take responsibility for what he’s done. The employer sees that the manager knows he can’t justify his wealth by how he got it, regardless of the reason for obtaining it. This sounds familiar because we also try to justify gaining wealth and power by taking advantage of people who owe us something, be it money, or favors, or work, by explaining it away with excuses or distracting arguments. Making the effort to do the right thing is hard, and it gets complicated, so we try to justify our means.
I have read reactions to the college debt loan forgiveness that our President put in place to forgive up to $20 thousand in outstanding government loans. I’ve heard cheers and celebration of new economic opportunities, and I’ve heard complaints about unfair loan forgiveness and excusing financial obligations. I suspect that our reactions to this will be largely forgotten by Thanksgiving, but it illustrates what Jesus said about the manager’s reduction of the debtor’s bills. The debt burden from excessive interest rates has been cut for people who are struggling to pay off their student loans. Somewhere in this scenario is an injustice that is not where we think it is, and we need to address it by not unfairly inflating the amount owed to the lender. The forgiveness plan confronts us with the question of what do we value the most, education or money. This is the core of Jesus’ message that he says at the end of the parable, you can’t serve both God and money, particularly money as part of wealth that is gained unethically. The loan-holders may want to serve God by serving the world, but how can they when so much of their time is spent working off their loan? It’s easy for me to say from my secure financial position that they can pay it off just like I paid off my loan 35 years ago. But, I’m not in the situation they are in today, and there is no place for me to say in hindsight what they should or shouldn’t have done. We can’t solve the problems of the present by thinking in terms of the past. We can’t solve someone else’s problems by expecting them to do what we would have done.
Another illustration of Jesus’ parable is the current wave of “quiet quitting,” where some corporate business employees have, among other things, been quietly reducing their weekly time at work from 50 or more hours to 40. The employees I'm talking about are not the ones who take on a personal initiative to spend more time at work. Again, this won’t be on our minds in a few weeks, but it will be replaced by another situation that illustrates the same thing. On the face of it, cutting back hours to 40 a week feels wrong, like employees are shorting their employers, and underperforming or shirking responsibilities. Climbing the corporate ladder and enjoying career success has always meant putting in long hours and placing life and family second. In a reversal of roles, employees are adjusting their own bill by fulfilling obligations, but nothing more. Like many other things, the pandemic exposed ongoing problems like poor management practices and unreasonable expectations. Employees discovered that it was in their power to do something about them and reduce their bill of time and talent to the company to a level that lets them have a life beyond work. Jesus addresses this kind of situation when he says, "If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?" From the employee's perspective, their management and corporate culture has gained dishonest wealth by expecting more from them without compensation. The management may claim that they care about their employees, but don't admit to their excessive expectations of productivity. Jesus goes on to say, "And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?" Here his words support overworked employees and recognizes their decision to cut back on their overextended productivity. If their time and work-life balance are not respected, why should management expect to get much from them at all? Jesus' message here is that you can’t have it both ways, where you bring in dishonest wealth and expect to be trusted with honest wealth. There is work to be done to get us to Jesus' vision of truth and honesty.
We are challenged to examine what we serve in our lives, and what I've been talking about so far is serving wealth, or serving the people around us, and that we can’t really do both. But what if we were to serve God using our wealth, as Jesus suggests when he says we can make friends with our wealth. What if we were to establish relationships using the wealth that we have to help improve people's lives? We have a relationship with Calvary through the food we donate to their pantry. But relationships with St. George's Scholars program, or relationships with the Urban League of Louisville, or with Habitat for Humanity would allow us to share our relative wealth with our brothers and sisters in the west end of the city and elsewhere. Or think about what you would do with money won from the lottery. Would you spend it all? Or would you give it to the needy after taking care of your debts? The confusing and contradictory messages in the Gospel reading reflect the confusing and contradictory role of money and wealth in our faith and spiritual lives. In so many words, Jesus asks which do we put more value on, the world's idea of wealth, or God’s wealth? He pushes us to pick one, pick the one that gives us the most peace, the one that brings us closest to God. Wealth isn’t about getting the most for our dollar, which is the worldly way of thinking about wealth. It is about the value we see in our faith and God’s love and compassion for us, and how we decide to bring them together with our worldly wealth.
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