This is the twenty-sixth in a periodic series of reflections on Brian D. McLaren's everything must change. Quotations used by kind permission of the author, with page citations from the edition featured on the Emerging Church Reading List to your right.
In the Gospels “stewards are intermediaries standing between the wealthy landowners who profit under the Roman Empire and the poor tenant farmers who suffer under it. . . . Each year, when tenant farmers must pay rent in the form of a percentage of their farm’s produce, stewards are the ones who collect this rent and manage the tenant farmers on behalf of the wealthy elite. . . . Stewards are thus at the epicenter of tension between competing narratives in the imperial framing story. . . .
“Specifically, consider the so-called parable of the unjust steward in Luke 16. . . .”
There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 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.” 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. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.” So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?” He answered, “A hundred jugs of olive oil.” He said to him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.” 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.” And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.
“Seen in terms of the imperial narrative, the story is transformed from an ethically difficult text to a politically dynamic one. The steward in the story “switches sides.” He stops working for the wealthy landowner and starts working for the oppressed poor. So he isn’t actually unjust― that would be the judgment of people within the imperial narrative who see the landowner’s position as legitimate. From Jesus’ perspective, outside the imperial narrative and within God’s liberating framing story, the steward is wise rather than unjust― wise enough to defect (as the rich young ruler should have done) from the service of the wealthy elite to give a break to the poor who are being crushed by the societal machinery driven by the imperial narrative. Jesus is saying that switching sides― choosing to serve the needs of the poor instead of working the system that favors the rich― is a way of ‘laying up treasure in heaven,’ if working for a higher spiritual economy rather than the ‘unclean’ imperial economy. . .” (pp. 96-97).
While I appreciate the insights in Brian’s approach, I can’t see the connection between “switching sides” and solving the global problems we face. And while it may be politically dynamic, it also remains “ethically difficult,” which is why I like Robert Farrar Capon’s outrageously unethical approach:
“. . . the unjust steward is nothing less than the Christ-figure in this parable, a dead ringer for Jesus himself. First of all, he dies and rises, like Jesus. Second, by his death and resurrection, he raises others, like Jesus. But third and most important of all, the unjust steward is a crook, like Jesus. The unique contribution of this parable to our understanding of Jesus is its insistence that grace cannot come to the world through respectability. Respectability regards only life, success, winning; it will have no truck with the grace that works by death and losing― which is the only kind of grace there is. . . . Lucky for us we don’t have to deal with a just steward” The Parables of Grace (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), pp. 150-151.
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