There is one more parable left in the preaching series, but this was my last sermon on parables (maybe for a long time). As I mentioned in the sermon, in some ways this was the perfect sermon for my final ermon on parables! This is the most difficult parable to understand, according to Kenneth Bailey, and I would tend to agree with him. It also clearly shows the gap between the world in which we live and the kingdom of God. Of course, trying to figure out how the parable makes the distinction is a challenge.
As an aside, I offer the following anecdote about how people hear sermons. After the sermon yesterday, someone came up and said something like, "I'm glad you admitted you weren't sure about the parable because your sermon showed you didn't understand tha parable!" Then, I received an email from someone who spoke highly about the preaching on the parables and thanked me for the sermons!" I'll give credit and blame the Holy Spirit for those varied interpretations.
“The Rich Man Had a Steward”; August 31, 2025; St. Andrew Presbyterian Church; Luke 16: 1-13
Manager vs steward. When working in the parable series earlier in the spring, the resources I was working with translated the Greek word as steward, instead of manager.
The NRSV found in the pews uses the word manager.
After studying the parable, I would suggest that manager is more accurate to describe the role the person plays in the story, but steward might be a better word if we are thinking of Jesus using the parable to instruct t us about how we are to approach our finances.
Luke 16: 1-13 16 Then Jesus[a] said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ 3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ 8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth[b] so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.[c] “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 11 If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth,[d] who will entrust to you the true riches? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13 No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”[e]
Introduction: This is the penultimate sermon on parables this summer,
Our Pastoral resident Chrissy Stevens will finish the parable series in her sermon next week, but this is my last sermon on parables for the summer,
and I suspect for a very long time!
And what a parable with which to finish!
Kenneth Bailey, a biblical scholar who has written quite a bit about Middle Eastern culture in the time of the gospels and in particular on the parables in Luke, calls this parable the most difficult parable to understand of all the parables Jesus told.
but, it might also be a the perfect parable to end with because it give us the clear reminder that the values of the kingdom of God are different than the values of the world.
So let’s dig in to this parable.
Move 1: the listeners know this story.
We know this story.
when Jesus starts telling this parable, we all know where he is going,
or at least we think we.
a. he mentions the rich man, and we know that with the rich label rich man stereotypes that the listeners would have brought to the story.
1. No surprise the rich man has a manager. he has lots of money and needs managers to handle all he owns.
2. We might add our own expectations to the story of the rich man because we know that the Gospel of Luke can be hard on rich people - rich men seem to have problems, particularly in the parables Jesus told.
3. Jesus mentions the manager or steward, and we know about him as well.
He is the employee who works at the will and whim of the rich man,
a manager with very little power except to enforce the fiscal policies of the rich owner.
We know where this story is going - it will be a story about how the steward handles things for the rich man and how the rich man responds.
5. The original listeners to Jesus,
even as we hear the story unfold now,
we are all predisposed to look with suspicion at the rich man.
and predisposed to like the steward and show sympathy toward him.
b. At first, the story plays to the expectations the listeners might have
1. The rich man lives into our stereotype, our expectations by treating the manager rather harshly.
he had caught him with some suspect bookkeeping, or poor management, and summarily fired him.
as expected, the rich man’s financial interests and bottom line are most important.
much more important than what will happen to manager.
2. We can feel our sympathy building for the manager.
he may have made some mistakes, but surely the rich man could have given him another chance!
c. But then Jesus keeps telling the story, and our expectations and stereotypes fall apart.
1. Turns out the manager is not a person who deserves our sympathy because he gets mistreated by the owner.
2. Instead, he is not only an employee who has been fired for shaky accounting practices,
but also a person who does not like the idea of being unemployed,
or having to do manual labor
or begging.
3. So in an effort to ingratiate himself with those whom he manages on behalf of the owner,
He goes and cuts them deals,
really good deals.
deals he no longer has the authority to make, so deals that should not be valid.
Apparently, his suspect accounting while employed is still his practice as he tries to salvage something for himself.
he now has ripped off the owner and given false hope to the debtors that what they owe has been greatly reduced.
5. He is not the stereotypical manager at the mercy of the rich owner with whom we should have sympathy.
instead, it turns out he is a swindler and a user of people.
we can see why he had been fired in the first place.
he is no longer a sympathetic character to the listeners.
d. and the owner?
1. We would expect him to continue to be a harsh man who not only had fired the manager for mismanagement, but now has even more reasons to be angry with the manager.
2. But instead, he praises the manager’s actions, even as the story labels the manager as dishonest.
Tell the truth - how many of you saw that coming?
3. Even if you don’t like the owner character in the story,
or owners with money who seem to do whatever they want,
at least if the owner deals harshly with the manager swindler,
if he declares all the actions of the manager after he was fired to be invalid,
we would know that the world is stable and people are doing what we expect them to do.
it might not be a perfect world, but it would be a world we know.
But Jesus tells a story that defies our expectations and assumptions.
Move 2: So what do we do with the story?
a. the verses following the parable suggest that there has been lots of confusion over how to interpret the parable Jesus told.
1. From the second half of vs 8 through vs 13, snd maybe even beyond,
we read words Jesus told with the oarable,
or maybe words of Jesus that Luke knew and put with the story to help explain the story
or maybe words that Luke gave to Jesus to help explain the parable.
2. those verses either shed light on the parable or make it even more difficult to understand.
or the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9
And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth[b] so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.[c]
“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 11 If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth,[d] who will entrust to you the true riches?
12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?
13 No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”[e]
3. Do those verses clear everything up for you?
I’m not sure those added verses clear up the meaning of the parable for me or if they confuse me even more!
but they do suggest that the parable is about how we deal with our finances and our sense of justice in light of the coming kingdom of God.
about how we should shape our actions as we live as disciples in the already arriving and still yet to come kingdom of God.
b. Bernard Scott in his study of the parables notes that this parable establishes “new coordinates for power, justice, and vulnerability. The kingdom is for the vulnerable, for masters and stewards who do not get even.”
b. We may need to rethink our idea of justice.
1. Even if we want to side with the manager, it’s hard to approve of his willingness to break rules and cut deals he really has no authority to do.
2. some scholars argue that he is just giving back the extra he was charging for his cut of the payment, so the owner is not cheated in the process,
but I don’t think so, because then it makes him out to be doing the right thing when Jesus himself calls the manager dishonest.
3. But, if the values of the kingdom of God are reflected in the actions of the manager, then the kingdom calls us to see the world and justice differently than we do.
which the kingdom of God does!
To live into the kingdom means reevaluating how we see the world,
it means moving beyond the expectations and practices we so easily accept,
until we see justice that comes to all God’s people,
justice full of God’s grace and God’s mercy.
c. Don’t forget the people who had their bills reduced.
those debts were big debts, onerous debts.
1. We look at those people on the periphery of the story and see the unexpected grace that comes to all the people who owed something on their bill.
2. The world we know does not work that way.
No manager comes along and cuts our bill in half;
no owner goes along and accepts the fact that the manager has cut the bill in half.
But in the kingdom of God, grace abounds.
d. Tom Long in his study of this parable suggests that the parable is telling the followers to use the money of world to make friends for the kingdom.
1. In other words, instead of making friends who will benefit you in the present, use the money to do things for the kingdom.
2. To help make the point, Long tells a story about a large urban church that was voting on a proposal to spend $10 million dollars on a major renovation to the church facility, including the organ refurbishment and roof replacement (I’ve never been in a meeting deciding to spend that much money, but Session meetings often discuss how to spend money).
They had the money in their huge endowment, so it sounds like it was not too big of an ask. Probably as easy a vote to spend an $10 million dollars as there could be.
But as the board discussed it, a man proposed they also raise $10 million dollars to build a facility to deal with the unhoused people on the streets around the church.
one of the officers told the man he was nuts. $10 million for the homeless?
the man reminded them of the woman who broke open a jar of expensive perfume and poured it on Jesus’ head. “We’d be doing that,” he said. he then added, “we need to do that.”
Silence in the room.
It has gone from approving an easy $10 million to adding the hard challenge to raise $10 for a project for the unhoused.
The next person who spoke was a woman who said, “I vote to pour that perfume.”
The vote then carried.
Conclusion: this is indeed a good parable for me to finish my preaching on parables because it bookends where this series started.
We began by saying Jesus tells parables to give us a glimpse of the kingdom of God.
I finish by noting with certainty that the kingdom of God is different than the world in which we live.
the values of the kingdom of God are different than the values of the world
living into the kingdom calls us to live differently than the expectations of our world demand.
Just listen to the parables Jesus tells.
Go and people of the kingdom of God.
