The Thieves' God

Propers: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 25), AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The whole system is rigged. That is the message of our parable this morning.

As far as Jesus’ teachings go, this tawdry little tale—often entitled “The Parable of the Unjust Steward”—has proven itself to be quite the head-scratcher. Granted, the plot is simple enough. We have before us a wealthy man, so rich that he cannot even be bothered to manage his own affairs, and so he entrusts his accounts to a steward, a head servant. We don’t know anybody like that, do we?

Now reports come to this wealthy man that the manager is double-dealing, feathering his own nest. So his master tells him, “Put your affairs in order”—which is to say, the master’s affairs—“and turn over the books, because you cannot be my steward any longer.” Note that the story doesn’t tell us whether these reports are true. The steward may very well be innocent. Notice also that the master is so clueless that he doesn’t even realize his mistake. The steward still has control of all the accounts.

And the steward starts to panic a bit. “What am I to do?” he asks himself. “This is the only thing I’m good for. I don’t have qualifications for anything else.” And here he utters one of the more relatable lines of the Bible: “I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.” Oh, that one gets me right here. I’ve been professionally religious for 20 years now. If can’t do this, what on earth can I do?

Enter irony. If the steward hadn’t been dishonest before, he certainly becomes so now. It’s like when an innocent man goes to prison and there learns to be a criminal. He calls up his master’s debtors, and says to each, “What do you owe?” And whatever they tell him, he lops a slab of it off. 100 jugs of oil? Make it 50. Half off. 100 containers of wheat? Make it 80. A fifth off. Thus he hacks away his master’s wealth with but the flick of a quill, the ancient equivalent of numbers on a screen.

He’s doing this, of course, not simply out of spite nor even from some sense of justice, but purely for mercenary motives. When he’s axed, when he’s fired, he’s going to need some friends. He’s going to need some people of means who owe him. And here’s the kicker: the master praises him for this, praises him for his shrewdness! It’s as though now that he’s a bona fide crook the master can finally respect him. “Oh, so you are a conman! Well, me too. How do you think I got up on top?”

It really is quite the parable, isn’t it? What are we to make of this? What’s the take-home lesson? “Be good at credit fraud, kids!” So we try to allegorize it. We try to figure out exactly who the characters in the story are each meant to represent. I mean, the manager is us, right? Well, who then is the master? Is he God? Is he the devil? Is he just meant to represent fat cats in general, a generic master of the universe?

But perhaps we’re overthinking it. Perhaps we’re not having enough fun. Jesus teaches people as a first-century rabbi, and first-century rabbis are known for hyperbole and humor—not for allegory strictly speaking. They could play fast and loose. Some, like St Augustine, say that the parable is about preparation, being ready for the Kingdom of God, and certainly not about defrauding your master. “Won’t somebody please think of the money?” But it may be more subversive than that.

Jesus doesn’t give a flip about the bottom line. Never has, never will. Everybody likes to cite that Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” But in the world of Jesus, a starving person taking bread without the means to pay is not considered stealing. You know what is? Predatory interest on loans. That’s the worst sort of thieving: it’s stealing from the poor, a literal matter of life and death, of profit over people. So who really is the thief in this parable, from an Ancient Near Eastern perspective?

This is not some new-fangled liberal interpretation of my own. One of our greatest theologians, St Basil of Caesarea, wrote the following in the fourth century:

Naked did you not drop from the womb? Shall you not return again naked to the earth? Where have the things you now possess come from? If you say they just spontaneously appeared, then you are an atheist, not acknowledging the Creator, nor showing any gratitude towards the one who gave them. But if you say that they are from God, declare to us the reason why you received them.

Is God unjust, who divided to us the things of this life unequally? Why are you wealthy while that other man is poor? Is it, perhaps, in order that you may receive wages for kindheartedness and faithful stewardship, and in order that he may be honored with great prizes for his endurance? But, as for you, when you hoard all these things in the insatiable bosom of greed, do you suppose you do no wrong in cheating so many people?

Who is a man of greed? Someone who does not rest content with what is sufficient. Who is a cheater? Someone who takes away what belongs to others. And are you not a man of greed, are you not a cheater, taking those things which you received for the sake of stewardship, and making them your very own? Now, someone who takes a man who is clothed and renders him naked would be termed a robber; but when someone fails to clothe the naked, while he is able to do this, is such a man deserving of any other appellation?

The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.

Strong stuff, isn’t it? That’s how Christians used to preach! And a powerful word of Law. Who would not be convicted by the preaching of St Basil, by the parable of Jesus Christ? Who among us has not forgotten the injunction of John the Baptist, who proclaimed the coming Kingdom with the words: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise”?

Yet this is not proclaimed merely to convict us. This is not to enslave us to guilt. The Word of God is here to set us free! Be freed from your chains! “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” We don’t like to take that literally, do we? But you cannot serve both God and wealth. You can’t, because wealth is a god. Wealth is a religion. And everything it promises is false. It cannot make us happy. It cannot make us whole. All it does is sell us junk that we don’t need.

And I know what you would say. It’s the same thing I would say: “Pastor, we’re Americans. We’re capitalists. We’ve got the free market. Everything we do benefits from that: our food, our cars, our jobs, our medicine, our electrical grid, everything.” And you’re right. We know a little more about economics today. But the point still stands. There are still a very few who have a ludicrous amount of wealth while most of us scrape by, check to check, suffering from inflation and medical bills and job insecurity and debt. And we fight to keep what we have.

Go figure. People are still people. “You will always have the poor with you,” as Jesus liked to say. But the point is not that money is bad. The point is that it cannot be your god. It will enslave you, dehumanize you, and abandon you at death. What is it we like to say? “You can’t take it with you.” Money has been given for our use, for our stewardship. Like fire, it makes for an excellent servant but a terrible master. We must use things to love people, not the other way around. We are given wealth in order to share it, not to hoard it. Period. Full stop.

And if you don’t agree with that, you don’t agree with Jesus. Adam Smith, maybe, but not Jesus. The system is rigged. It has always been rigged. Put not your faith in it. Use the dishonest wealth of this world—because all wealth is dishonest, all money has blood on it somewhere down the line—in order to make friends for yourselves, to love God by loving your neighbor. What wouldn’t we give for one true friend?

Even Jesus needed money. But He didn’t let it rule Him. He was free in ways that you and I are not. But we could be! He wants us to be. He died to set us free—free from greed, free from guilt, free from the blood on our hands, free to give without regret and to love without restraint—free to not be afraid anymore, afraid of never having quite enough, trying to fill the hole in our soul with more disposable dreck.

Our problem is not that we haven’t enough stuff. We’re drowning in stuff. Our problem is that we haven’t enough love, enough compassion, enough solidarity. All we’ve got in spades is isolation and anxiety. That’s the kind of god that mammon makes. Money doesn’t love you, but your neighbor just might. And by the grace of Jesus Christ, we’re free to love them all. To make friends for ourselves is our eternal home.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.