Ready to vote? Consider the following statement of Jesus: “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.”
It’s a mysterious remark for most people. And yet Jesus states it clearly, to summarize the teaching of his parable about the so-called “dishonest manager.”
The saying shocks us. Is Jesus really endorsing immoral behaviour by the manager who, in effect, steals from his boss by reducing the debts of his boss’s clients to curry favour with them?
The mystery of the saying vanishes when we see the parable in light of God’s love for the poor. Both Jesus and the Hebrew Bible frequently denounce the injustice of the wealthy who enrich themselves by exploiting the poor.
Such affluence is what this parable names as “dishonest wealth” – in other words, any wealth that somebody possesses at the expense of the poor.
In this parable, the poor finally get a break for once. The manager, who has just been fired by his boss, gives it to them. He starts buying future favours among his boss’s beleaguered clients by slashing down the debts they owe his boss.
It’s a literal rendition of Jesus’s recommended life-management technique of making friends for yourself by means of doing away with dishonest wealth.
But while it’s obvious Jesus does not endorse stealing, he does seem to be pretty clearly commending the clever use of wealth in order to benefit the disadvantaged.
On this point, the parable also imagines you to place yourself in the position of the manager, who has just been told by his boss that he has been fired.
My reading of the Greek text here is that the manager is being portrayed sympathetically. Read the parable closely, and you’ll see that the manager seems to have been fired quite hastily and in an unfair way.
His boss had listened to reports about the manager from other people, who had made accusations of poor management. But the parable makes no comment on whether the rumours are in fact true.
Even worse, the boss doesn’t give the manager a chance to defend himself. Instead he simply fires him first. Then he hastily demands an audit from the manager of everything with which he had entrusted him.
It’s easy to imagine the manager’s psychological turmoil. And the parable does sketch an outline of the aged manager’s panic. He has no good options for his economic future, other than backbreaking labour or going on measly welfare.
So it’s plausible to imagine the manager making a calculation that, if he’s going to be unjustly fired for being a bad manager, he may as well become that bad manager. On the way out the door, he can corruptly purchase some future favours from his boss’s clients.
Of course if, upon hearing the slanders against the manager from others, the boss hadn’t lost his temper and fired the manager right away, the boss could have asked the manager for an audit of the clients’ accounts first.
That would have made it impossible for the manager to fiddle with the bookkeeping. The boss could have waited to fire him after he had seen the financial statements of the audit, rather than before. Instead, he stupidly fired him first.
But the boss then ends up admiring the manager for taking advantage of the weak position in which the boss had placed himself, by asking for the audit only after already firing the manager.
The admiration is revealing. Both the boss and his manager have implemented a business model that relies on exploiting the poor. The boss maintains his wealth by keeping the poor in a perpetual state of crippling debt.
At the drop of a hat, the boss angrily fires an employee that he feels isn’t squeezing out enough money from the poor for him. This is a boss who knows all about exploiting the weaknesses of others for gain.
This boss can only admire it when his shrewd former manager steals a page from his own playbook, pressing an advantage and exploiting a weakness, to snatch a profit for his personal gain.
But getting fired is a bit like dying. When you die, you may not see it coming, or even think it to be fair.
Guess what? Everybody’s getting fired: we’re all going to die.
So, in the time that now remains, what will you do? Keep the poor down, while you tighten your grip on comfort and wealth, just like the boss?
Or maybe this election you could be like the manager and vote as Jesus recommends: to do away with dishonest wealth and to make friends with the poor.