“Hear this…” based on Amos 8:4-7 and Luke 16:1-13

It is Homecoming Sunday! I am always grateful for the slower pace of summer, and then excited to watch the energy rise back up in the fall. On Homecoming we remember that God is our home and this church is too. Also, because this is First Schenectady United Methodist Church there is an expectation that I preach a good just-y sermon!

Apparently, on the Parable of the Dishonest Steward. (FACE PALM) To be fair, my go to commentaries had useful notes on this parable. Truly. The Jesus Seminar colors the passage red, indicating they think it goes back to Jesus even though it shows up only in Luke. They say, “This story does not moralize, unlike so much edifying teaching in both hellentistic Judean religion and early Christianity and that exceptional quality became a large factor in the decision to attribute the parable to Jesus.”1

The Jewish Annotated New Testament points out “some commentators, but not the parable, suggest the manager was removing the interest charge.”2

The Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels makes it clear that the amount the manager releases from the contracts is NOT his fee, he wouldn’t have charged that much and he wouldn’t have written his fee into the contract.3 It also says explains that “It is a scheme that places the landowner in a particular bind. If he retracts the actions of the manager, he risks serious alienation in the village, where the villagers would have already been celebrating his astonishing generosity. If he allows the reductions to stand, he will be praised far and wide (as will the manger for having made the ‘arrangement’’ as a noble and generous man. It is the latter reaction upon which the manager counts.” 4

The only issue after having read all that was what on earth to make of the parable. Particularly if it doesn’t have a moral theme. So, I guess, for me, the primary question was “Why did Jesus tell this story?” And along with it, “why did Luke tell us about Jesus telling this story?” And at that point I was completely stumped.

In essence, to moralize the story, one has to decide if they want to celebrate or condemn the steward/manager. If it is cerebrate it is tricky because the manager is clearly acting in a self-serving way. Or, one could condemn the manager, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that without celebrating the systems that enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. I’m fine with hearing a parable as a description of the world as it is or as a description of the kindom of God as it should be. This is neither. Mostly, I was looking for an understanding of this passage that first with God’s passion for justice like we hear in Amos.

So what does one do when the first 8 books one looks at aren’t helpful? Well, I suppose different people have different answers, but mine is “find a 9th.” This turned out to be a good thing, because I’d forgotten how much I like the 9th. The actually helpful book in this case is Rev. Dr. William Herzog’s “Parables as Subversive Speech.”5

Herzog accepts all the wisdom already offered, and then finds something to actually DO with it to make sense of why this is a story we’re still listening to. That said, he’s dense, so please know I’m glossing over most of the wisdom he offers. First, Herzog points out that the dishonest manager is condemned by rumor. We don’t know if they were true. “Charges were brought that he was squandering” the property of the landowner. This is a really normal situation. Landowners were wealthy elites who derived their wealth from the land they owned and the labor of the peasants working it. But usually they didn’t live on the land, they lived in the cities where they could spend their wealth and engage with their social circles. So they entrusted the land and the work of squeezing all the possible wealth of out of it to managers. The landowners wanted to gain LOTS and LOTS of wealth, and if they got less than what they wanted, they’d blame the manger. So, landowners distrusting their managers was normal. And since they weren’t around, they were often reliant on rumors to tell them what was happening.

But, this is a story told by a Jewish man to his Jewish followers. These are people who knew Amos and the other prophets and had heard, “Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” (Amos 8:4-6) They didn’t trust the wealthy landowner, they thought the wealthy landowner was taking their wealth from them. (They were right.) They also didn’t trust the manager.

Second, the Hebrew Bible condemns the charging of interest within the community of faith. If the landowner was also Jewish, he would have been prohibited from charging interest on debts. This was a pretty firm rule, but there were common work arounds. Mostly, it happened that the contracts around debt were written in such a way that the repayment amount required simply too into account both the principal and interest. AND, the MANAGER would be responsible for writing the contracts, leaving the owner with plausible deniability. That is, the manager is doing the landowner’s dirty work and the peasants wouldn’t trust him at all either. He is an active participant in oppression, even though he has less power than the landowner.

Dr. Herzog reads this parable in terms of the “weapons of the weak” and people using the tools they have available to take down the powerful. He says, “Because they are virtually powerless, peasants must find ways of resisting their oppressors that do not subject them to the jeopardy of open revolt.”6 Basically, he thinks the peasants started the rumor so to try to take down the manager.

He also points out that:

“There is no monolithic moral system to which everyone consents and by which everyone is judged. The entire system of which the steward is a part is exploitative and predatory. The steward represents the interests of a greedy and oppressive elite; the peasants are struggling to hold on to every bit of subsistence they gan get. … The moral economy of the peasants views the master as exploitative and ruthless; the master’s code treats peasants as resources to be squeezed to get a profit; the steward’s code is to survive while making a profit large enough to secure a lucrative honest graft, yet small enough to avoid attracting the master’s attention and reasonable enough to gain the peasant’s consent.”7

The steward lowers the debts by the amount that represented the hidden interest. By agreeing to this, the peasants have indebted themselves to him and would be obligated to repay the favor. The master is still going to make money, the interest is only a part of his profits, and those debts that are forgiven are now a favor owed to the master (via the steward). And the steward has effectively cornered the master, by easing the lives of the peasants – at least for the present.8

By lowering the debt amounts by exactly the amount of hidden interest, “the steward reminds the master just who has been taking chances to accumulate his wealth, including the questionable practice of charging de facto interest in spite of the prohibitions of the Torah and oral torah.”9 Which is presumably why he is praised for his shrewdness and is likely KEPT ON by the landowner after all.

In this story, despite his power and wealth, the master is outsmarted. I think, that maybe, this is one of the reasons the story is told. Because in the time of Jesus, much like to day, it was far too easy to just give up and assume the powers of the day were unmovable. The rich landowner was untouchable, right? He had more power than all of the peasants combined. His greed endangered their lives.

This was reality as they knew it, I think as everyone knew it. The rich and powerful seeking ever more wealth and power was the way of the world in the Empire and it shortened the lives of most of the people in the Empire.

So, to tell a story where the master landowner is diminished, cornered, and outsmarted helped. It humanized him. It reminded them that his power was limited, that he could be corrected or taken a notch. That the way things were was not the way things had to be. The nearly invulnerable turns out to be vulnerable.

I did not expect it when I started with this text, but it is in a way another version of the resurrection story. In resurrection the Empire uses its final and ultimate too, the power over life and death, to stop the work of God in the world. And it fails because you can’t stop the work of God in the world. Here, again, the powers of the world turn out not to be all that.

Instead, the prophets calling out “hear this…” and calling for justice for the peasants turns out to be louder and more powerful. The real power, the truly unbreakable one is, in love and relationships. It is shared.

In the end, I think this parable told its first hearers that there was hope. Luke shared it, including to his wealthy listeners, maybe to tell them that the powers that ruled their lives weren’t as impenetrable as they thought either! I wonder how many of them were able to hear it as good news. It is good news. The system that requires oppression benefits no one. Systems that take the abundance of God’s resources and share them benefit everyone.

Those who have the power, especially those who have power and use it to amass wealth, consolidate power, and vanquish their perceived enemies, they’re vulnerable. The power can be broken. Life doesn’t have to be like this. God isn’t for having things like this. It isn’t time to give up hope.

Thus says the parable. I think. Its a parable. This is my best work but they’re slippery.

Thanks be to God for the chance to struggle with a story until a meaning emerges. Amen

1Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 359.

2 The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) page 134.

3Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” page 292.

4Malina et al, 293.

5William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech, (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994).

6Herzog, 252.

7Herzog, 253.

8Herzog, 255 in summary.

9Herzog, 257.

September 21, 2025

Rev. Sara E. Baron 
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 
Pronouns: she/her/hers 
http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady