By The Rev. J.C. Austin
There are not many things that can unite the entire country these days; as we all know, we are living in a time of great polarization, whether you’re talking about politics, economics, or culture. But there’s at least one thing that left that can unite this country across all those fault lines and more, and that’s the Houston Astros… because nobody likes them.
According to polling done around the World Series this year, 47 out 50 states are pulling for the Atlanta Braves to win, or at least for the Houston Astros to lose. The only exceptions are Texas, where the Astros are from; Louisiana, which is right next to Texas and particularly close to Houston; and, oddly enough, Delaware.
And I gotta tell you, if Delaware is one of the linchpins of your fanbase, you’re in trouble; no disrespect to Delaware, it’s just that the population of Houston alone is seven times greater than the entire state of Delaware, so they’re just not able to bring that much to the party. And that’s it. Everybody else wants the Astros to lose.
And there’s a reason for that. If you’re not a baseball fan, the Astros systematically cheated their way to a world championship in 2017 through an array of practices to steal the signs from the opposing team’s catcher that indicated which pitch was coming, and then relay that information to the batter so he could unfairly know what pitch was coming and adjust accordingly.
When the truth came to light two years later, there were repercussions: the Astros were hit with a big fine, they lost several amateur draft pics, and the team manager, several coaches, and multiple front office executives all were fired. But to the disgust of many baseball fans, the team was allowed to keep their championship trophy, and the players, many of whom naturally had particularly successful seasons while benefiting from the cheating, were allowed to keep their jobs, the record of their performance that year, and any awards they won. And fans have neither forgotten nor forgiven the Astros for what they did, especially since several of the key players from 2017 are still on the team now and playing in the 2021 World Series.
“Nobody likes a cheater,” the saying goes. Which I think is why this parable that Jesus tells is so surprising and, frankly, a bit unnerving. Jesus, it seems, would be an Astros fan, because he seems to like a cheater, or at least the one in his parable.
The parable starts off right: the rich man has a manager to run the day to day affairs of his business and property, and when he hears that the manager has been “squandering” his possessions, he fires him and demands an accounting of what he’s been up to. So far, so good. But then the parable keeps going, and that’s where the trouble begins.
The manager is at a crossroads: now that he has lost his lucrative position, what can he do? Where can he go? He knows he doesn’t have the strength or endurance to be a manual laborer, which is the most obvious possibility. And he’s not willing to suffer the indignity of being a beggar. So where does that leave him? Standing at a crossroads, with no clear idea of what road to take that will bring him to safety and well-being.
Standing at a crossroads is such an old and common metaphor that it has become a cliché in many ways, a phrase so overused that it’s lost the strength and content of its original meaning. But the original metaphor does have real power when you think about it. A crossroads is a place where you can choose between multiple roads, multiples paths or ways forward, but it is also a place of confusion and even despair if you don’t know which way is the one that you should take.
The manager is here at his own crossroads between getting fired, manual labor, begging, or destitution. But, as he stands in confusion and even despair he has an idea, a very clever idea. He goes to the rich man’s debtors and cancels significant portions of their debt to him. It’s clever because the debtors don’t know that the manager has been fired; they assume that he’s acting in good faith for the rich man, who then gets considerable social status from having been so generous to his debtors.
The rich man can’t then go back and reimpose the debt without a massive loss of social prestige that he’s earned from this trick, so all he can do is congratulate the trickster manager on his shrewdness, and that’s the end of the story! Then Jesus goes on to affirm the manager, as well, saying that people like the manager are more shrewd than Jesus’ own followers, who should use their wealth to “make friends” with others as the manager did with the debtors.
So: does this mean Jesus loves a cheater? Well, that’s not really the right question: Jesus loves everybody, that’s his whole thing. But is Jesus commending a cheater? Well…kind of, yeah. But there a couple of important caveats here. First, both Jesus and the rich man in the parable commend the steward for his shrewdness, which is an English word that means clever, but with connotations of shadiness: clever to the point of being, well, dishonest.
But that’s not a great translation of the Greek word that Jesus actually uses; that word means “prudent,” “sensible,” or “wise.” It doesn’t have the negative elements of trickery that our word “shrewd” does. Jesus is commending the prudence or wisdom of the manager in investing in relationships, not his cheating or tricky cleverness.
Second, the really startling thing is that Jesus isn’t commending a cheater because Jesus doesn’t even consider this cheating; Jesus simply doesn’t care about following the rules of fair business practice in the first place. The point of money, of wealth, in Jesus’ eyes, is not to use it on oneself, either by spending or saving, or to invest it in making more; he sees no real value in that, even though you and I are so steeped in that perspective that this passage seems incomprehensible at first because we can’t even conceive that there is another way to think about money.
But Jesus doesn’t think that way; the point of money in Jesus’ eyes is to use it for the benefit of others, to invest in relationships through generosity so that generosity itself becomes the currency of the world, not scarcity, even when, in the case of the rich man, the generosity wasn’t intentional or even willing!
Sam Wells, an Anglican priest who is doing prudent and wise ministry, particularly around questions of money and property, as the Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in central London, goes so far as to argue that what Jesus is depicting in this passage is two economies. The first, he says, is one defined by Mammon, which is the word that Jesus uses for “wealth” in this passage, taken from the name of a Syrian god of riches.
This is the economy of the rich man and, frankly, the economy of the world throughout the ages: an economy defined by scarcity and competition. There is a second economy in this story, though, Wells argues, and the Biblical name for that is Manna. Manna, as you may know, is a reference to the story in Exodus about how God fed the Israelites wandering in the desert after being delivered from slavery in Egypt by showering down a flaky substance called manna each morning, which the Israelites could bake into cakes for food.
Each day, there was more than enough for everyone to collect and feed their families to full satisfaction, but it would go bad the next day if people tried to hoard it. “Manna is for everybody,” Wells says; “[it] gives what money can’t buy…manna is the economy of abundance. It is the currency of the kingdom of God. The secret of happiness is learning to love the things God gives to us in plenty. The name for those things is manna.”
What the manager has done here, then, is exchange the currency of scarcity for the currency of abundance, the currency of the kingdom of God: grace, forgiveness, love, compassion, justice, community, and above all, generosity; all things that God gives in abundance.
Which is precisely why it seems scandalous that Jesus is praising him for this, because none of it makes any real sense in an economy of scarcity in which people compete over resources and power rather than share them; an economy in which human community and human relationship and human flourishing is seen as expendable, even wasteful, when compared to amassing resources. Which is why generosity is the key here.
Generosity is the way the economy of God disrupts the economy of scarcity, because generosity uses the logic of the economy of abundance even when operating in the economy of scarcity: it offers more than is necessary in a system where there is never enough. Generosity is the antidote to scarcity; it drives scarcity away like a torch in the deepest night shines out and sends all the shadows scurrying off in fright.
I think the best example of this might be in the closing scene of the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life. You probably know the basics of the story, given how often it has been shown at Christmas time. George Bailey is a man who gets trapped in the small town he grew up in because he shoulders an unfair amount of family responsibilities, most notably become director of his father’s small Savings and Loan firm to keep it out of the hands of the town’s rapacious rich man, Mr. Potter, who controls the main bank and most of the other businesses.
George himself is constantly scraping to make ends meet, but by making its services affordable, the Savings and Loan does ensure that many of the poor and working people in town are able to finance owning their own homes, which Potter constantly derides as irresponsibly indifferent to profit-making.
But when George’s uncle and business partner absent-mindedly loses $8000 at the bank (worth over $100K today), Potter recovers it but says nothing, realizing that the bank examiner that is reviewing the Savings and Loan’s records will charge George with criminal mismanagement, sending George to jail and the Savings and Loan out of business.
Unable to see any alternative to scandal, bankruptcy, and prison, George becomes suicidal and is saved only through the intervention of an angel who is sent from heaven to help him. Still despairing, George tells the angel that everything would have been better if he had never been born, and the angel allows him to see the town if he had, in fact, never been born.
George, lost in the logic of the economy of scarcity, did not think about how the closure of the Savings and Loan after his father died would have led to a town of bitter and downtrodden people exploited by Potter, numbing themselves at a proliferation of seedy bars that would have sprung up.
He wouldn’t have been present to save his brother from drowning as a child, who in turn would not have been a World War II hero pilot who saved an entire transport ship of Marines from sinking. And his own beloved family wouldn’t exist, because he wouldn’t have married his wife, Mary. Realizing that he had, in fact, had a wonderful life, he says he wants to live again, and all is restored.
Racing home, he rushes past the bank examiner and police officers waiting for him there and into the arms of his children, knowing that he is going to jail but grateful simply to be alive and to love his family and be loved by them. Mary bursts in a few moments later, telling him that something wonderful has happened.
She leads him to the living room and clears off a table just in time for what seems to be the entire town pouring into their house, all the people whom George had so generously helped at his own expense for so many years, and they begin piling whatever money they have on the table to cover the $8000 loss.
The economy of abundance has broken through what seemed to be an inescapable scarcity because of radical generosity, and when it becomes clear that there is more than enough to cover the cost, a party breaks out which even the police officers join. Finally, George’s brother arrives, having just flown in from the war, and is handed a glass of champagne. “Good idea,” he says; “A toast! To my big brother George: the richest man in town.”
George is not the richest man in town according to the economy of scarcity, of course; that’s clearly Mr. Potter. But Mr. Potter is destitute in the economy of God’s kingdom, because he doesn’t have a shred of grace, forgiveness, love, compassion, justice, community, and above all, generosity. George, though, as we can see in this final scene, truly is the richest person in town precisely because he spent his life giving generously rather than taking greedily, and that generosity transformed him and everyone to whom he gave so generously.
And that is the good news of the economy of God’s kingdom: anyone can become the richest person in town, because all it takes is a heart and spirit of generosity to give in ways that build up God’s love and mercy and justice and peace among people in the world. That is the way forward at whatever crossroads we find ourselves, into the economy that God intends for all of us, into the kingdom that Christ is establishes for all of us, in all its abundance and joy.