In my favorite book on the parables, Robert Capon’s Kingdom, Grace, Judgement, the chapter on this parable is called, simply, the hardest parable. What are we to do with this parable? Is Jesus telling us to cheat people? To steal money? To be dishonest in business matters? That doesn’t sound very much like the Jesus we have been reading about thus far in Luke’s telling of the story. If not that, is he being sarcastic? Jesus does occasionally employ sarcasm or he tried to make a point by saying something extreme. But this seems like a lot. Plus, parables are intentionally obtuse – they go around the point in order for the listener to hear the point. That doesn’t work if it’s sarcasm.
So, what do we do when we are trying to understand scripture? We look at the context. What’s the context here? It’s in the gospel of Luke, and Luke is very concerned with economic equality and justice – that would be why it might seem like I have been hitting you over the head with justice. It’s not me! It’s Luke! We also see this in the book of Acts. Luke emphasizes Jesus’ care for the poor and needy, the outcast and the marginalized and that all are welcome in God’s kingdom. Following from that, Luke emphasizes the wideness of God’s mercy and the importance of forgiveness. It is clearly important to Luke that those reading his text understand God’s radical grace as shown through Jesus Christ. This is where we are in this gospel. We are in the midst of Luke’s parables about God’s grace.
This story follows the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son. Immediately after this, he tells the Pharisees that “what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God.” So, how does this story fit?
It’s another story of God’s grace.
The rich man believes the manager is squandering his property and fires the manager. This is a sort of death – anyone who has lost a job knows the pain and loss that comes with the loss of employment. He decides that what he is going to do is to lower the debts of the people, asking them to pay only what they are able. The rich man respects him for this move and has his mind changed. The dishonest wealth is the grace that we did not earn. No matter who we are, no matter what we have done, there is forgiveness for us.
This parable opens us not only to the wideness of God’s grace, but the absolute scandal of it.
We often forget that Jesus was scandalous.
He was disreputable, viewed by so many around him as someone who was not to be listened to. He was viewed as someone who had no respect for the faith he was trying to embody. His strict adherence to grace and love and mercy often looked, to the religious leaders and others around him, like he was disrespecting the religion in which he was a teacher. He broke all kinds of cultural norms because his core value was love – love of God, love of one another, love of self (yes, love of self – that’s in the Lord’s Prayer!). Jesus did not concern himself with what the people in power thought of him – not the religious elites, not the power brokers, not the rulers. He concerned himself with what the poor, the outcast, the widows and the children thought of him. He wanted everyone to follow him, but not at the cost of losing sight of the most important thing – love.
We are recipients of this amazing, sacrificial love.
We are held in God’s mercy – inheritors of forgiveness and love when we are at our worst, when we have done things that go against God’s call to love. The manager has removed what we owe. In this way, he might be seen as being terribly unfair, as giving things to people who don’t deserve it. In our world, as in theirs, writing off someones debts is scandalous! Think of the conversations people have about student loan forgiveness – for so many it is deeply ingrained that people must pay what they owe, and this is on a much larger scale.
As we are enveloped in the luxurious blanket that is God’s grace, we are called to do the same. We are called to be scandalous in our efforts to love so deeply that our dinner tables and our churches are filled with the people our society would rather throw away, or arrest, or put in detention centers. We are called to invite people into our love that would make those in power to want to arrest us too.
There is a lot of argument today on what it means to be a Christian, who is a Christian, what it looks like to be a Christian. I heard a priest on instagram (Jarel Robinson-Brown) talking about what it looks like to be a Christian and he said that “it’s not their baptism certificate, it’s not whether they agree that trans people are truly human, it’s not their sexuality, for example, it is the evidence of the wounds that they carry from having loved too much, it’s whether or not they know the names of the suffering and the poor in their communities and work to alleviate that… it’s about what trying to love the world like Jesus has actually cost them. It’s show me the evidence of your love. And if people cannot do that, it’s fairly obvious to me that Christianity is more of an identity, a label but it’s not a practical reality, it doesn’t cost them anything… Christianity is a life that is shaped by the cross.”
In a world shaped by power and separation and stepping on others to get ahead, in a world where there are books being published about how Christians shouldn’t have empathy, to love this way is seen as going against not only the world around us, but, in some circles, Christianity itself.
To actually have our lives shaped by Christ crucified and the cross itself is scandalous.
It’s really important to remember this as we are entering a time where to love our neighbor might become dangerous. We are already in a time when speaking up for or acting on beliefs that all people are worthy of God’s love, that all people deserve dignity and safety, including transgender people, immigrants, the people of Gaza are getting people fired and some are being disappeared to jails but cannot be found.
In the coming months, we may find ourselves having to make decisions about what we are willing to say aloud, or asking ourselves what we are willing to risk to ensure God’s love is known. We may find ourselves in uncomfortable social situations where to speak up in the lame of love will earn us scowls (or worse). We will need to remember these two things – that God loves and forgives us beyond what we can imagine AND that, as representatives of Jesus in this world, we are called to be scandalous in the name of love. We are called to be disrespctable, to throw aside our desire for the rewards of this world and aim our desires toward the things of heaven.
God’s love is scandalous. Let’s be scandalous in God’s name.
Amen
