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.
