Let Me Speak With the Manager
There is a forum on the social media site Reddit called Am I the A**hole. On this forum, people tell their story of woe and ask the audience whether they are at fault or not. The responses have to have the following format. They must begin with a YTA - You’re the A, NTA - Not the A, or ESH - Everyone Sucks Here. I couldn’t help but read the story of The Bad Manager in that same format. Whether considered from the perspective of the master, the manager, or one of the forgiven debtors, I asked myself how they would present the story to that online community.
If it was the master writing, he’d begin:
“Hey Reddit, I just found out my employee has not been taking care of my property and I fired him. Now he’s given away EVEN MORE…. Am I the A?”
Or if it were the manager asking for advice:
“Am I the A because when I was getting fired by my boss, I used his investments to secure another job? Here’s the story….”
Or one of these debtors:
“My credit card company thinks I did something wrong. The manager was getting fired and he wrote off half of my debt….”
If that happened, who today would be giving back the money? Probably not me.
It’s a complicated story that when told a variety of ways we struggle to find a version that doesn’t end with “Everyone sucks here.” However, in nearly twenty years of writing and teaching about faith and the Bible, I have learned at least one thing: when it comes to God’s grace, nothing is that simple and God doesn’t look at us like that. God doesn’t ever say everyone sucks here.
If our inclination is to see that everyone is a mess and everyone deserves what’s coming to them, then we have to look a little deeper at the text. For me, that always sends me to the Greek. And when we look at verse one from the Greek, we see that it isn’t as simple as most translations would make it. That verse could mean a couple of things. First, our translators are at least mostly right. They say that the manager was accused of “squandering his property.” That’s a true translation, but another, a probably equally true translation could be, “ruining his life.”
The word ὑπάρχω could mean possessions or it could mean life. It’s the same with another world that we’re more familiar with in English called, “bios.” It can also mean life or possessions. We use the word in English to make other words like biology, biochemistry, or biofuels, and that means that they are concerned with or related to life or living things. When I reached out to a Greek scholar to help me work through the verse, he asked a significant question: “Is it possible that they didn’t have the categories needed to make a distinction between their life and what they owned?” It took me 20 minutes with my head spinning before I could respond. When I did I asked him, “Is it possible that we can’t either?”
That’s my question still as we seek to analyze the text a little more. Is it possible that we can’t tell the difference between our lives and our stuff?
But back to the story for a minute, when we read stories like this one, in our minds we make the master into a stand-in for God, even when that is probably not true in the rabbinic tradition that Jesus was raised into. For example, there is a story from the rabbis that goes like this:
Once, a man caught stealing was ordered by the king to be hanged. On the way to the gallows, he said to the governor that he knew a wonderful secret and it would be a pity to allow it to die with him and he would like to disclose it to the king. He would put a seed of a pomegranate in the ground and through the secret taught to him by his father he would make it grow and bear fruit overnight. The thief was brought before the king and on the morrow the king, accompanied by the high officers of state, came to the place where the thief was waiting for them. There the thief dug a hole and said, "This seed must only be put in the ground by a man who has never stolen or taken anything which did not belong to him. I being a thief cannot do it." So he turned to the Vizier who, frightened, said that in his younger days he had retained something which did not belong to him. The treasurer said that dealing with such large sums, he might have entered too much or too little and even the king owned that he had kept a necklace of his father's. The thief then said, "You are all mighty and powerful and want for nothing and yet you cannot plant the seed, whilst I who have stolen a little because I was starving am to be hanged." The king, pleased with the ruse of the thief, pardoned him.
So, when the rabbis tell this story, is the king supposed to be a stand-in for God? No. Is the thief? No. Who is then? It may be the answer is that no one character is supposed to represent God. Perhaps the story just teaches us how to better look at all angles of a story to see the truth about what it is to be human and what it is to be a child of God, living under God’s grace.
What do we do with that as we approach the story of a dishonest manager who comes out the other side better for his thievery? A story where Jesus finishes the tale with a moral that says, “Use wealth to make friends,” remembering that the wealth used to make friends was embezzled?
I had lunch with a friend of mine who is a paragon of business excellence. I was telling him how much trouble I was having with the end of the story and he had some really practical takes. He said, “Do you know what you call debt when you’re not the one in debt, that is when you’re the lender? Assets or investments.” He then asked, “What’s the possibility that by reducing the debt in the way it was, the master was still getting his initial investment returned, while receiving amazing goodwill for future business from these debtors? If not, why not just forgive the whole debt otherwise?” It made too much sense and I responded, “You’re just too practical for me!” I then went on to tell him that I thought this would be a great text to try a Marxist reading of Jesus.
I joke but he may be on to something, right? What if this story isn’t some zero-sum scenario in which one person wins and another loses? What if this is a win-win-win everywhere? The manager wins because he either keeps his job or has received enough favor from other business partners to be able to work for them. The manager wins because of getting back his initial investment quicker and potentially receiving future business from these partners. The debtors win because they no longer have to pay huge sums of profit to the master. Win. Win. Win. Maybe…
What if Jesus’ point was that we are meant to seek these opportunities where possible? So we begin to look at our lives and livelihoods, our bios, our ὑπάρχω, to make the lives and livelihoods of others better. How can I as a banker, a baker, a coder, a physician, a photographer, a student… How can I begin to use wealth (of all kinds) in my sphere of influence to benefit others? Those who can be trusted with little can be trusted with much.
May that be our inward self-reflection today: to take what is objective (our lives, our livelihoods, our influence, our everything) and seek to use it to make God’s kin-dom more fully here on earth, more fully in our lives, more fully in our communities. May God use everything that we are and everything we have to bring grace and flourishing to all.