In my first two Reformed Journal Sunday posts this month, I started with a story before engaging with Robert Farrar Capon’s books on Jesus’ parables. Today, let’s just dive into The Parables of Grace and Capon’s chapter on “The Unjust Steward,” which he calls, “The Hardest Parable.”
After 20+ years of preaching, I still find this parable, which is in Luke 16, puzzling. As Capon points out, one of the things that makes interpretation difficult is that it is not entirely clear where the parable ends. The parable’s meaning changes depending on which verse is chosen as its conclusion. Capon leans toward ending the parable with verse 8, where the master commends the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.
But then what of verse 9, which says to make friends for yourself through dishonest wealth, and verses 10-13, which conclude with the memorable statement that no one can serve two masters?
All are possible readings of the text. Capon’s solution to this dilemma is rather cheeky. On months with 31 days, he reads the parable through verse 8. On months with 30 days, he reads through verse 9. In February, he reads the parable all the way through verse 13. There is something random here that captures the mystery of engaging with Jesus through parables, a mystery we may flatten in our interpretations.
I’ll show my hand. Like Capon, I prefer ending the parable with verse 8. Stopping there captures the grace of the parable and prevents us from turning it into a list of dos and don’ts about money. It leaves us with the troubling reality that the dishonest steward is praised in the end: he’s shrewd, gets things done, and, as a result, earns his master’s praise. This puzzling mixture forces us to wrestle with Jesus’s story.
The parable begins with someone bringing charges against the steward for squandering the rich man’s property. Jesus chooses “squandering” on purpose—it is the same word (diaskorpizon) used a chapter earlier to describe the Prodigal Son wasting his father’s wealth in a far country. There is nothing coincidental here—Capon says this overlap tips the scales to grace rather than morality.
You are probably familiar with the rest of the story in Luke 16. The rich man calls the steward onto the carpet to explain how he’s been managing the books. The steward knows he’s about to be sacked, so he calls the master’s debtors to negotiate terms, allowing them to pay a portion and forgiving the rest. The steward is looking for a soft landing on the unemployment line.
The surprise ending comes when the rich man opens his books, sees what’s been done, and, instead of erupting in anger, praises the steward, telling him he’s been shrewd (or smart, perceptive, or discerning). As Capon looks at the parable, he says that the rich man likely is obsessed with his books—they must be balanced. He can’t see past the books. The manager, recognizing he’s about to be caught dead to rights, gets some of the rich man’s money back by offering partial payment plans. The parable is a bottom-up retelling of another of Jesus’s stories, the parable of the unforgiving servant, found in Matthew 18. In that parable, a king forgives the debt of one of his servants but then the servant turns around and is harsh with someone who owes him money. The tables are turned in the parable in Luke 16—it’s the steward who forgives without consulting the rich man.
Capon’s next interpretive move catches me off guard: “As far as I am concerned, therefore, the unjust steward is nothing less than the Christ-figure in this parable, a dead ringer for Jesus himself. First of all, he dies and rises, like Jesus. Second, by his death and resurrection, he raises others, like Jesus. But third and most important of all, the unjust steward is the Christ-figure because he is a crook, like Jesus. The unique contribution of this parable to our understanding of Jesus is its insistence that grace cannot come to the world through respectability. Respectability regards only life, success, winning; it will have no truck with the grace that works by death and losing—which is the only kind of grace there is” (150).
Grace cannot come to the world through respectability. I was talking with a young man the other day, answering questions about faith, our church, and what we believe. During the conversation, I tried hard to present our faith community as “respectable.” We do good, respectable things—serve those in need, engage with scripture, and welcome and affirm those who are often left out.
I was pointing to our life together as a story of success and winning. When I hung up the phone, I wondered, “Is that our church?” Yes, we are respectable (at least we desperately try to be). But in reality we’re simply a small group of little, last, lost, dying people, who struggle in many ways, including struggling to see who Jesus was. This is where grace flows. This may be the only places where grace shows up.
As Capon says, “Lucky for us we don’t have to deal with a just steward” (The Parables of Grace, 151). We get Jesus instead, happily offering forgiveness.
15 Responses
Thanks for this. Do you want to start a conversation? I am sure that Our Lord told this parable many times. And characteristically, St. Luke appends a string of various applications, not all harmonious. Yes, it’s very important to read this parable in the light of the Prodigal Father, but here Capon, as sometimes happens, is too deft for his own good. I think hes wrong about the mastet being stuck in his books. Rather, just as the second son gambles on the decency of his father, so the steward gambles on the decency of the master not to cancel the kickbacks that the steward gave to the other debtors. Shrewd indeed. Our Lord also means this parable to be funny, when you consider the enormous amounts of oil and wheat in the kickbacks. So that humour is grace too.
If “mammon” means ordinary lower class wealth, not great wealth, than every last bit of wealth in Our Lord’s day was “unrighteous,” contaminated, tainted, corrupted, against the Laws of Moses, etc. So you ordinary people be shrewd in how you make it right, by betting on the decency of God and “making friends” with other debtors. So yes, it’s about grace, end to end, Mr. Capon, but also simultaneously about judgment, which come together, as you write about yourself.
Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I have come to love this parable, after having wrestled with it for 45 years.
Daniel,
I’m sort of out of leading my own worship, so I can jump into the conversation. As you know, Capon sets a framework, that mostly works, of the parables of the Kingdom in the beginning of Jesus ministry, then grace, then as Jesus moves into Jerusalem for the last time, he turns to parables of judgment.
I’m not sure the construct is always affective, and this might be one of those cases, though I think it might be 80% grace and 20% judgment. I think that depends on whether you end with vs 8 or vs. 9.
I agree 100% on the comedy piece. I see the steward running around from one debtor to the other, getting as much as he can (maybe to impress his boos) and forgiving as much as he can (to soften his own landing). Capon does say more about this, but the reasonable restrictions of only so many words helps me focus.
I would like to talk more about The Prodigal and this parable. Capon argues that the second son doesn’t so much count on the generosity of the father (though maybe a little) as he wants to argue that he can become a slave of his father. After all, they are living much better than he is in his circumstances. We know the rest of the story. The son doesn’t even get to make the argument. The father is “wasteful” with all the grace he showers on him. That might be the key overlap, because the father does the same with his other son. “Everything I have is yours.” It’s really quite scandalous in its own time. This might be the “crooked” Jesus.
I’m with you and the rich man with keeping the books. I think it’s a stretch, but it does answer a question. “Why hasn’t anyone tried to get the debts paid this way?” Could it be that the rich man wasn’t open to that way of doing business. It could be. Then that says something about what we do with mammon.
And I think you’re right with the rest of it. I remember when I asked Dr. Voskuil why the seminary took money from this person or that company, and he asked me to take a dollar out of wallet. Then he said, “Is it clean? What has it been used for?” There is no such thing as clean “Mammon,” There’s only what we choose to do with it.
I take no presumption from what you wrote. If Jesus’ parables only meant one thing, I’d only have one sermon to preach about them, and they’d be quite boring in the end. Really, not a parable at all.
As always, thanks Daniel
I think that Capon may be right about the second son. Kenneth Bailey says that a son coming back to offer to be a slave of his father would be deeply shaming to the father. The father “despises the shame.”
At the same time, because parables can be turned and turned, I have also preached the second son as Jesus, in his departure from his father in heaven and becoming sin for us.
I believe the unjust steward parable has resemblances to the widow and the judge.
It’s also relevant to understanding the “make friends for yourselves with unrighteous mammon,” that in the story of Zacchaeus, the natural translation of the verb suggests that he was ALREADY giving so much of his money to the poor. The verb is not a future intention.Also, it’s not “eternal homes” but pavilions of the age, party tents of the new Kingdom.
Instead of “Jesus Paid it All” we can sing “Jesus Cooked the Books” (!)
Both actions on our behalf, to upset the image of the Big Ledger in the Sky that we would all be held accountable to, nobody in the clear.
Jeff
This made me laugh!
Friends, then there’s the “Liberationist” interpretation by Miguel Escobar:
There is a “Liberation Theology” Interpretation:
The story Jesus tells takes place on a vast agricultural estate, one in which a landowner and his property/business manager and effective steward, have pressed workers into significant debt and debt bondage. Biblical scholars note that the steward in this story is likely a “first slave,” that is, a man who has been freed from slavery for the sole purpose of serving as a manager and overseer of the slaves, day laborers, and tenant farmers who were made to work the land (xvi).
At some point the manager takes pity on his fellow slaves, who are indentured servants & uses the landowner’s wealth to remit the debts of the workers to free them from grinding debt. He is praised by the owner & by Jesus himself, although the manager’s actions were illegal, a kind of theft from the owner. Even the landowner “commends” him; the steward makes him look “generous.” Jesus says we can learn from the steward, sharing our “Mammon” with the poor and needy, so we will be welcomed into the “eternal home” of other “enlightened ones.”
Thus, the steward was doing the “right thing” even though it was illegal. [Most of this comes from the book by Miguel Escobar, the Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today (2022).].
There’s grace here too, in the “resistance” of the Steward to the grinding indebtedness of his fellow slaves.
Thank you. This is something I can use for the next time I preach it.
Kenneth Bailey argues that the Owner is motivated by avoidance of shame. In Luke’s parables, like this one and the unjust judge and the widow, the reason for being gracious doesn’t have to be noble on the face of it, and that’s the play.
Zacchaeus will soon be an example of making friends with unrighteous wealth. (“Dishonest” is the wrong translation, and it misses the point. Wealth can be honest and still unrighteous.)
Thanks Daniel Meeter for your comments. We tend to think that it’s the money that is important. But it’s the relationships, not the money itself. Jesus is a crook? Perhaps in regard to money, but not in regard to relationships, in this case the relationship marked by God’s grace.
All these ideas are intriguing. If Jesus said he was like a thief in the night, he could also say he was like an unjust steward. I think, however, that we do well to connect the parable to what Jesus says about money, which is of keen interest to Luke. I find it far easier to think Jesus is telling us this: Don’t be afraid to use money — which belongs to Someone Else – to demonstrate the generosity of God — while you still have the time to do so. All money belongs to God, and using God’s money is not stealing, for he wants us to hand it out freely while we still have opportunity to do so. That may make the parable more moralistic than we prefer, but Jesus often gave “moralistic” commands designed to enhance our relationship with God. Jesus’ commands are much more than obeying a rule, or earning credit with God, but aligning our selves with the heart of our heavenly Father. Perhaps the manager in the parable did not know that his boss was so generous, but Jesus knew his “boss” wanted him to spend and love freely. And he wants us to know the same.
Jesus was also using the rabbinical technique of “from light to heavy.” We are not to copy his dishonesty but his wisdom or shrewdness. We are to “be wise as serpents, yet gentle as doves.” We have to act swiftly and wisely. If the people of the world can be wise (about money), then how much more should we be wise (about the gospel).
Have a friend who always saw verse 9 as a reason to tip big. “Make friends for yourself with the mammon of unrighteousness,” he’d say, as he put down a substantial tip for the waiter or waitress. I’ve always liked his interpretation. Whether it fits with the parable is another matter.
After listening to this parable reading in worship on Sunday, listening to the sermon, and ruminating on the “dishonest wealth” and “can’t serve two masters” phrases, I envisioned the character Dolly Gallagher Levi, whose dishonesty (and extravagance with other people’s money) was a virtue which rescued Horace Vandergelder from his lonely love affair with his hoard of cash. Cornelius and Barnaby also gained much, when they questioned the wisdom of obeying a master who cared for nothing but his own money.
I assume the estate owner in this parable hired someone who would be dedicated solely to increase the boss’s personal wealth rather than circulate that wealth back into the community like rainwater.
I love when the boss acknowledges that his steward got one up on him, and commends it with the respect due to an equal: “well played!”
My rabbit hole with this parable on Sunday also led me to a dishonest slave/house steward called Pseudolus, so I rewatched “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and put a few books on hold including a Plautus collection of plays which seem to often include a “wily slave” in the plot. It turned out to be a day well spent 🙂
So much to explore! Thanks for drafting this essay and creating a space for curious imaginings on this complicated story.
My first course on parables used a book by Archibald M. Hunter, it seems he followed a similar pattern as one mentioned above, coming of the kingdom, people of the kingdom, grace on the kingdom, and crisis of the kingdom. He also emphasized context, so urged a careful reading of the whole chapter. I like the idea that the steward was using someone else’s money to help others, with the thought we are all stewards of God’s money and should use His resources to help others. “The Pharisees who loved money were sneering at Jesus,” the way they understood the message caused them to sneer.
Since that course I’ve also been taught the rabbinic method of “how much more?” (kal vahomer – Jerusalem Perspective – June 1988) If the steward used someone else’s money to help others, “how much more” we should as well.
This rhymes with the variously told story of the grace shown to the singer Jewel.
Penniless and living in an unheated cabin, she was offered a partial scholarship to the Interlochen fine arts camp. Her local community attempted to raise the portion of her expenses not covered by the scholarship.
Tom Bodett’s book keeper (and Jewell’s aunt) wrote a check for, as the story goes, $5000 after being directed to write a check for $500. After all was said and done and some nice publicity for Mr. Bodett he said well done.
A little grace, a little shrewdness, a good story.
Chuck