Sermon transcript:
This is one of those scriptures where I’m tempted to agree with American Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber’s tongue-in-cheek alternatives to confusing parables, “Here’s what would be helpful: six steps to better discipleship. Or the three secrets of the kingdom of God, spelled out in an acrostic…perhaps packaged as an easy-to-read policy manual or employee handbook—that sort of thing.”1 If you’re wondering what in the name of all that is holy is going on in this story, you’re in good company—Is Jesus actually commending dishonesty and a “look out for number one” approach to life? This is the strangest, most confusing, disconcerting parable Jesus is credited with telling.2
There are so many interpretations out there. As with every week, I share mine with you for your reflection. The thing about a long-term relationship with scripture is you find God reveals different truths at different times. So, this reflection is the truth that makes sense to me right now. It’s truth based on my research and reflection, and from that, the insights that speak to my heart and my experience of faith in the ways of Jesus—the one who prioritized love more than anything else. Here we go.
Often, understanding our cultural biases and having knowledge of the culture of the time helps with interpreting scripture. That only helps a little here; the sense of confusion and disorientation we experience is not much different for Jesus’ original audience. Hearing this parable is like going on one of those amusement park rides that lift you hundreds of feet in the air and then let you free fall back down. Jesus builds the people’s expectations up and up and up, so they think they know what is coming and then he says something that causes a free fall of expectations.
The society in which Jesus lives is one of huge inequalities. Most people, the vast majority, live day to day. A few enjoy a privileged life of wealth. It is also a rigidly hierarchical society: everyone has someone who is over them and to whom they are indebted either financially or socially. If you bring shame upon the person above you, that person has the right to exact punishment.
So, as Jesus’ listeners hear the opening line of the story about a master and his manager, they are already likely on the manager’s side. They can well understand what it is like to be under the thumb of someone who has the power to deny your livelihood. They expect the manager to defend himself but he is not even given that opportunity; he is fired on the spot.
Then comes the sweet revenge: the manager cuts deals with his master’s debtors to ensure his own survival at his master’s expense. What poor farmer, scraping by daily, does not relish duping his master to ensure his survival? So, when the master comes back the audience expects anger from him. But this is where Jesus triggers the free fall. Instead of anger at being cheated, the master commends the manager for his shrewdness. The villain and the hero, set apart in the beginning, come together in the end, united by their shrewdness and expediency in looking out for number one. The free fall keeps going though. Jesus then seems to criticize his followers for not being shrewd like the dishonest manager and then he seems to encourage looking out for yourself by means of dishonest wealth.3
What’s going on here? Is this stuff supposed to make sense? The answer is “no” if we mire ourselves in the values and workings of this world. The answer is “no” if we follow Jesus with expectations of what you will find. This approach gets religion into all kinds of trouble. Perhaps the grossest, most absurd example I have seen in recent times is the demonization of empathy. A few months back Elon Musk said this: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”4 I know Musk is no avowed Christian but he was echoing a growing movement among American Evangelicals warning of the dangers of empathy that could make you prey to accepting “sin”—transgender rights, “gender ideology,” abortion, illegal immigration, anger and violence as responses to deadly racism. It’s an absurd and dangerous approach to faith that subsumes Jesus’ words and actions beneath the false god of fear and power. American Episcopal Priest, Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello, put it this way: “The arguments about toxic empathy are finding open ears because far-right-wing, white evangelicals are looking for a moral framework around which they can justify (the President’s)…policies.”5
If there is any hope for this story to make sense, we need to stop trying to make Jesus fit the way we think things should be and let Jesus have his way with us, letting love—before any other considerations—drive our hearing of this story. Love always helps us hear and see as Jesus does. Let’s look at it again. Debt was used more than once by Jesus as a metaphor for sins and forgiving sins. Jesus uses the imagery in the Lord’s Prayer. Key to the story is the fact that the rogue manager had no authorisation to go around cancelling or cutting people’s debts. It was outrageous behaviour. But Luke has been telling us that Jesus’ behaviour was also outrageous. His opponents were saying he had no right to go about welcoming sinners and declaring God’s love and acceptance to them. Jesus was also a rogue in the system. It seems Jesus has taken up a popular story about a rogue manager, then used it in self defence to confront his opponents; Jesus is the rogue manager who is accused of being unauthorised to forgive debts. As the master praised the rogue manager, so, Jesus claims, God approves of his ministry, of his radical empathy and generosity. Jesus embraces the role of the rogue, because he is God’s rogue. There is a defiance in this parable in the face of criticism that Jesus subverts the norms and values which determine who is worthy in his society. Jesus is the agent of God’s rogue grace, a grace that does not care for values, rules, and systems that devalue people, renders them without rights, perpetuates the lie that we’re not all created in the image of God.6 Then he goes further.
One of the biggest obstacles to following the rogue God and freely accepting rogue grace is wealth. Even in Jesus’ time, wealth and the values that drive economic exploitation are often primary and then those who benefit look for ways to justify themselves, including religion. God’s grace is rogue in the face of an economics that renders people as less than human or poor ‘because they deserve it.’7 Jesus’ mission as God’s agent of grace is not debt collection; it’s release from debt.8 You can’t serve both wealth and God equally—they undermine each other. If you claim to follow Jesus, if you want to experience God’s rogue grace, you must put wealth in its proper place9—in service to Love. Love has its own logic; this story makes sense.
Christian faith is not about intellectually agreeing to certain beliefs or worshipping a hero,10 but trust and intimacy in with the God made known in Jesus, such that that Love is the primary driver of our lives. You see, the grace, the good news is that following the rogue God means encountering God in our daily living. It doesn’t always feel like good news or grace. Following the rogue God is quite often uncomfortable—uncomfortable because faith asks us to let go of expectations and agendas. The renowned anti-fascist theologian Dietrich Bohnoeffer, echoing the words of Martin Luther, Protestantism’s founder, said following Jesus is not limited to what you can comprehend; it must transcend all comprehension. It’s as if Jesus says in this story, plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will ground you in love’s logic, in God’s understanding. In this sense, bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. The grace is to let go of the burden of knowing and live in the peace of faith and trust, to experience the undeniable reality that we are not alone: we live in God’s world. Let’s pray that it may be so.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 Nadia Bolz-Weber, Don’t dissect the parables, The Christian Century, June 11, 2012, https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2012-06/dont-dissect-parables
2 Anonymous, So, Is This Stuff Supposed to Make Sense?, September 18, 2016, https://journeytopenuel.com/lectionary-sermons/sermon-so-is-this-stuff-supposed-to-make-sense-proper-20c/
3 Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then The Parable, Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1990, pp. 255-266.
4 Russel Moore, Hellfire-and-Brimstone Empathy, Christianity Today, April 30, 2025, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/04/hellfire-brimstone-sin-empathy-russell-moore/
5 Tiffany Stanley, Is empathy a sin? Some conservative Christians argue it can be, PBS News, August 21, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be
6 William Loader, First Thoughts on Year C Gospel Passages from the Lectionary: Pentecost 15, https://billloader.com/LkPentecost15Ord25.html
7 Loader.
8 Olubiyi Adeniyi Adewale, An Understanding of the Parable of the Shrewd Manager (Luke
16: 1-13), IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science, Volume 16, Issue 6 (Nov. – Dec. 2013), p. 130, https://www.academia.edu/69951878/An_Understanding_of_the_Parable_of_the_Shrewd_Manager_Luke_16_1_13_
9 Adewale, p. 130.
10 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from The Cost of Discipleship, but found here: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2723088-nachfolge, the full quote by Luther from On Christian Liberty found here: https://www.immanuelelmhurst.org/content.cfm?id=151&blog_id=8