Upside Down

 July 18, 2021

This morning’s Sunday School class dealt with what many scholars consider the most difficult of Jesus’ parables—the Unjust Steward. In it, the steward (or manager) of the business is accused of wastefulness and is called on the carpet and fired. Seeing his future go up in smoke, he concocts a clever plan whereby he contacts the boss’s creditors and offers them a deal cancelling part of the debts owed. The creditors are happy, and the boss is painted into a corner because in that culture, to renege on the deal signed in his name, however deceitfully, is a blot on his honor. So he commends his dishonest manager for such a clever plan.

It’s hard to imagine such a scenario, and even harder to imagine Jesus commending such dishonesty, but that is to miss the point. This parable is part of a series beginning with the story of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, followed by the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Jesus has begun by talking about lost things, each story building upon and raising the ante on the previous one, till it climaxes in the story of the lost or Prodigal Son. This climactic story of lost and found then becomes the first in a series dealing with money. 

The son wasted his inheritance, the manager wasted his master’s fortune, and the rich man wasted his very life. Jesus isn’t condoning the dishonesty of the steward, but his shrewdness in finally thinking beyond his immediate pleasures and planning for his future. In all three stories there is a contrast between immediate gratification and long-term benefit, culminating in the rich man losing his very soul.

Jesus does here what he so often does—taking a situation and turning it upside down, making us look at it from a different perspective. We get so stuck in our own little perspective ruts that it’s often nearly impossible to see the larger picture. Here in America, we are so fearful of so much in life that we are ready to sacrifice our freedoms for security. Whether it’s COVID or financial security, or merely the desire to live in peace, we rarely consider the long-term consequences of our bondage to security, while people in power are counting on our long-term amnesia. 

At the end of his story, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” This term is not widely known today, but in Jesus’ day, it was clearly understood. In the Aramaic Jesus spoke, the word is related to the word “trust,” or “faithfulness.” It denotes anything other than God in which we place our confidence. Whether it’s our investments, our health, our stockpile of weapons, our education, our friends, or our government, it’s all Mammon if we are looking to it to protect us in the storms of life. Through this story, Jesus is calling us to stop what we’re doing, take a good look at where we are headed, and make the changes necessary to enable us to invest whatever resources with which we’ve been entrusted for eternal purposes. That simply means…people. Nothing else in this life is eternal. Only people. Tonight, I am grateful for Scriptures that challenge my thinking, but even more for those that challenge my living.