Proper 20C - Catholic Biblical Interpretation

Proper 20C - Luke 16:1-13
Many people can tell you without a moment’s hesitation what their favorite parable is. Most often it is the Good Shepherd or the Good Samaritan. For all the times I have heard people tell me what their favorite parable is, not one person has ever mention this one: the Parable of Steward.
Mother Ede and I have a schedule of preaching that allows us to usually preach every other week. This gives me the luxury of sitting with my text for two weeks before I preach on it. A little over two weeks ago, while setting up for a wedding, I peeked ahead in the Gospel book, and saw that this parable was in the lectionary for today. I saw Mother Ede later in the day and remarked to her that my least favorite section of all the Gospels was on deck for today. That is the honest truth: of any portion of the Gospels to proclaim to you all , this would be my last choice. And I have been working through this parable for the past two weeks.
I remember hearing a sermon at seminary on this lesson where one of my professors got in the pulpit and essentially said “I hate this parable!” And he went on stated his problem with it – from a surface reading, this parable seems to say that out of nowhere Jesus is praising immoral business practices. I confess that I don’t remember much more of his sermon. I was too busy being shocked by the fact that he was honest enough to admit to the congregation that he was really struggling with the Gospel that day. I decided that I too, would do my best to always be honest when I found a text difficult in my sermons.
There are times when preachers look at a text and say “I just don’t know that I have anything to say about this today.” Other times, they look at the text and say plainly “I don’t want to preach on this text.” I am in the second group today. I find this parable challenging to the point that I feel that if I am going to tackle it, I need to first teach for about a year on topics including Biblical interpretation, first century Judaism, Imperial Roman economics and the particulars of St. Luke’s community.
However, I don’t have that option. I also don’t have the option of choosing something else. I am obedient to a long standing Church tradition in which the Church chooses the texts. Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and some Presbyterians, Lutherans, Unitarians and northern Baptist churches have this same text this morning. All of us preacher must some present this text to our congregations today. How each preacher deals with the text will depend in part on whether they come from a Liberal Humanist tradition, a Protestant tradition or a Catholic tradition of Scriptural interpretation.
For those coming from the Liberal Humanist tradition, Scripture is often seen as a human attempt to deal with the divine. It sees Scripture as an entirely dependent on premodern ethics and world views, and must always be understood to be of human origin. Preachers from this perspective do their best to relate the scripture to a modern context if they can, and leave behind what doesn’t fit in our modern perspective.
Many coming from Protestant backgrounds that began during the 17th through 19th centuries have almost the exact opposite approach as their Liberal Humanist brethren. They see Scripture as the explicit and clear word of God, divinely given to a human writer without error. Because of this, scripture is plain and clear to all who read it, and mankind was meant to read scripture, and see the clear meaning in it, with no need for any other person to tell him what it means.
We Episcopalians come from the Catholic tradition. Like most things Anglican and Catholic, we are somewhere in between the two extremes I mentioned. We too believe that Scripture was written by men in previous times who were beholden to their culture. They wrote with the words of their communities, and conformed their writing to the literary genres of the time. We also believe that God is the true author of Scripture because He divinely inspired it’s writers in order to communicate His saving Truth through it. When you put this all together this means that every word in the Holy Scriptures is in there for a reason, and it contains the Truth. However, it also means that to be properly understood, it must be read in community, in light of the human author’s particular way of conveying the Truth. After all, Scripture was written with the intention that it would be read before groups of people. This community that we read it in is vast. We read it in the community that is Holy Tradition. We see how our brothers and sisters in the past have explained and interpreted the Scriptures to their smaller communities. We look at how it has informed our theology, how it has been enacted in liturgy. We stand back and look for the ways the Holy Spirit has guided the Church in its understanding of Scripture. When we come to views on Scripture that have been accepted by the Church both East and West, we see a sign that the Spirit is at work.
So with this all in mind we come back to today’s challenging Gospel passage. On the surface, we hear the story of a financial manger for a rich person who is about to be dismissed by his master. Knowing he is about to lose his job, the manager goes to everyone who owes him money and tells them they own him less now. When the rich man finds out what his financial manager has done, he commends him for his shrewd financial actions. Jesus then tells his disciples that the unfaithful people of His day are more shrewd than the people of faith. Jesus then seems to commend this example to us but then ends with a saying we know well: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
Read directly on its own, and in isolation, it is easy to see how you could read this story in think that in certain cases, Jesus actually appears to condone sneaky and dishonest business practices in certain circumstances. Yet, when we read Jesus’ direct statement that one cannot serve God and wealth, this interpretation seems ruled out.
So, going back to our Catholic tradition of interpretation, we know we must look for issues that were important to Jesus’ followers in the early first century. Jesus lived in a Judea that was occupied by the Romans. The Romans had a vast empire that supported a systematized economy on a scale that was unseen before. In Jesus’ time a middle class had arisen, the merchant class. This class raised itself up by making a profit, not just scraping by. Just as today, Jesus and St. Luke’s community saw a difference in how people were treated according to the amount of their wealth. In His parables and stories Jesus also spoke a lot about those who were in charge of the Temple worship, because they abused their power, often to gain money. The pursuit of ill-begotten gains and the abuses of the religious authorities became metaphors for each-other in Jesus’ preaching.
Knowing that Jesus used speech about money as a metaphor, combined with His stinging statement on the incompatibility of serving God and wealth, eliminates the possibility that Jesus is actually praising bad business practices. So we now know that we are hearing a metaphor.
Many scholars, preachers and teachers have written articles and chapters trying to figure exactly what the best interpretation of this metaphorical parable is. When we have so many options in interpretation our Catholic tradition bids us to look back at what the Church and the Church Fathers have said about this parable. Many of the Church Fathers have agreed that what Jesus is actually speaking of is the undeserved gift we all have – the Love of God and the salvation He purchased us – even though we are the ones who betrayed God.
God is the Steward who rewrites our bills, out debt owed to God for our transgressions. We are the debtors, and we incurred that debt in Adam’s fall. Jesus is the steward who comes to us unexpectedly and says to us “You owe the Father everything, but I will I grant you a favor! I will reduce your debt to this: all you must do is believe in Me and live a life bearing the fruits of that belief. I cancel the debt that you owe the Father when you disobeyed Him and chose yourself over Him.” Our responsibility then is to live up to this great act. The Church Father Origen tells us “If God rewrites our documents of sin, do no rewrite what God has blotted out.” (Ancient Commentary, III:254)
There are many other thoughts from the Church Fathers on this parable. Some have seen this parable as admonition to distribute alms to all. Some have seen it as an explanation that the gifts you have from God are temporary and must be used for good while you have the chance.
I have shown my preference for interpreting this parable, but I won’t tell you that one of these interpretations of the Church Fathers is more correct than the other. The fact that there are several good ways to explain this parable in our Tradition is the beauty of Catholic Tradition. We have a way of looking at scripture that shows that it is a living, breathing thing. We read it and we are compelled to think about it, to speak about it, to ask about it. We are forced to ask our brethren who lived centuries ago what they made of it.
That is why, in the end, I am glad the Church in her wisdom gave me this Parable this morning. Now, it is still not my favorite Parable, and it is not the text I am going to point an atheist to first. Yet this parable was handed down to me today and made me think hard about what it means to proclaim Scripture as the true word of God. It reminded me of the depth our tradition and just how privileged I am that the Church has asked me to delve into Scripture daily, and share my love of it with you.