A Rort and a Twist
If you have lots of money, there are plenty of ways to rort the system. For instance, you can set up a foundation with deductible gift recipient status. You then funnel some of your profits into the foundation, which employs friends and members of your family to do very important work, and which is heavily branded with your name and logo. The foundation gives some money away, but nothing like as much as it would have cost to pay tax on the original amount, plus you’ve enriched your mates and got some cheap feel-good marketing into the bargain.
Or you might find a service that the government needs – like offshore detention centres or cashless welfare cards. You set up a business to provide the service, and then funnel the profits into your preferred political party while lining your own pockets along the way.
When you have lots of money, there are plenty of ways to rort the system. And a tried-and-tested method to distract from this inalienable truth is to point the finger at the poor and claim that it is theywho are rorting the system. You know, the people on Newstart who are spending it all on drugs and booze, or the single mums who are just having babies for the money. (Of course, there is some rorting that goes on in the welfare system – I’ll confess to being one of the rorters! Back in my student days I failed to report some work and ended up with a debt to Centrelink.) But the reality is, that the amounts paid out in welfare payments are so small, and the work required to rort the system is so complicated, that no self-respecting rich person would waste their time when there are far easier and more lucrative ways to amass wealth.
Mind you, we shouldn’t tar all wealthy people with the same brush – there are undoubtedly people of means who are generous, sacrificial and honest. But not, I’m afraid, the rich man and his manager in today’s parable from the gospel of Luke.
This parable is problematic. It is very confusing. The subsequent commentary in Luke’s gospel on this parable is problematic too. Redaction criticism – considering the sources of difference pieces of text – suggests to us that the four sets of analysis that follows are a collection of sayings loosely related to the text. And they’re all contradictory! Not just with each other, but with other parts of the gospel text.
But the biggest mistake we can make with the parable is to imagine that either the rich man or the manager are being held up as models. For the audience gathered about in a field or a marketplace, this was a recognisable story.
The rich man had his rort, of course. Lending money with interest (usury) was explicitly banned in the Hebrew Scriptures. You couldn’t go around extending credit in a way that made profit. That would render you ritually unclean and cause you to lose face in the community. So a workaround was created. You sold, for example, fifty barrels of oil, but it was recorded as a hundred barrels of oil. You sold eighty containers of wheat, but it was recorded as one hundred. It was functionally exactly the same as borrowing on credit, but the rich man could get away with saying that he was not lending money with interest.
It was also a way to control the client’s relative wealth. The client who bought the fifty barrels of oil from the rich man had to sell it for at least a 100% markup, but actually more than that if he wanted to make a living. By extending credit in this way, the rich man ensured that he became richer, and, more importantly, his client did not.
So when the manager is about to be sacked, he does something quite remarkable. He eliminates the interest on the debts. Suddenly, these client merchants who were surely struggling to make a profit, would have found themselves able to make a substantial profit – possibly even a life-changing profit. The ambition of the manager was almost certainly realised – when he left the rich man’s service, he would have many local friends who would ensure that he did not starve.
The punchline of this story, though, is quite a twist. You need to imagine Jesus talking to a group who has gathered around – tax collectors and sinners according to the previous chapter, perhaps some interested pharisees. As he is telling the story, the ending is crystal clear. When the rich man finds out that the manager has duped him, he is going to be furious and have the manager locked up or put in jail. Everyone is expecting that ending. But what happens instead? The rich man applauds the manager for his self-interest. He sees what he has done and praises him. The manager is a risk-taker, an entrepeneur, a strategic thinker, so the rich man praises him for acting in his own self-interest. ‘Nice work, old chap! Jolly good show!’
The manager, who had done the rich man’s dirty work and enriched himself, then did one final act of bastardry to protect his own hide. And the rich man, recognising a kindred spirit, praised him, because, as Luke’s Jesus explains ‘…the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.’ They are better at this stuff than we are, says Jesus. And everyone listening, both then and now, knows it to be true.
The author(s) of the gospel of Luke give us a range of ways to interpret and apply the text – encouraging us to be shrewd, warning us about honesty and trust, giving us that wonderful stand-alone saying about serving two masters which perseveres as one of the great, universal teachings of Jesus. But for today, how about we just hear the story alone, without the interpretative lenses. Trying, as best we can, to hear the story as though we too were gathered around the wandering rabbi. I don’t know what you take away, but for me it is a story of exposure, of mates protecting mates, of the system serving the few over the many. It’s a picture that as accurately and relevantly depicts the world of a first century Roman colony as it does a 21stcentury Australia.
And it makes me think of all those hundreds of thousands of people on the streets on Friday, enacting their own sort of parable. The children leading and the grandmothers pleading, crying out not simply for personal gain but for a transformation of destructive systems. In this way, the Climate Strike was, like the parable of the dishonest steward, an exercise in truth-telling, naming the reality and inviting personal and social transformation.
The rich man and his dishonest, incompetent manager are not models for us to emulate. It astounds me that anyone would identify the rich man with God and the manager with us disciples. But their story is a universal story that we must understand, and integrate into our view of the world if we are to be followers of Christ.
The Lord Be With You