My
uncle Carl in the course of his working life was a farm manager for a couple of
big family farm operations in Augusta and Rockbridge Counties, VA. As my grandfather on my mother’s side had rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t work, Carl, for a time was the chief provider for
my mother’s family. He was and remains a
generous man.
Being
the farm manager could mean a lot of things depending on the size of the farm. Uncle Carl likely didn’t handle the
money. I’m sure the people who actually owned
the farms looked after that. Mostly, he was
responsible to make sure all the work got done, which meant looking after the
other workers and/or doing it all himself.
He was the farmer tied to the farm while the actual farm owner was free
to do something else.
It
was customary where I come from for farm managers to be compensated with a
stipend and a place to live. Back in the
day, it was not unheard of that if a farm manager worked faithfully for a
family for years and years and got too old to work anymore, the family would
let him and his family either continue to live on the farm or make sure he had
a nice place to live out his days. If
you were faithful in the day-to-day things of running someone else’s farm, that
someone else in the end would be faithful to you; and faithful my uncle
was. Now in his 80’s, he and my aunt
have a nice home just off the estate of the farm where he worked many years and
retired from and they want for nothing.
Uncle
Carl demonstrated the flip side of the coin with respect to the rhetorical
question Jesus put to his disciples.
Jesus asked, “And if you are unfaithful with what belongs to another,
who will give you what is your own?” Uncle Carl was faithful with what belonged to
another and so now he has his own.
That’s how it is supposed to be in the world of honest work. My uncle was not “in it for the money” so to
speak. He wasn’t serving Mammon. He wasn’t one of those bent on pinching a
nickel off of whomever however he could just so he could have a bunch of
nickels. He just loved to work, and
loved to farm. He and my aunt raised an
outstanding family and the only word I can think to describe them is blessed.
Looking
at his parable of the dishonest manager, I can definitely say, “My uncle, he
was not.” This guy was dishonest, greedy,
and only in it for himself. He didn’t a
worker. He was the business manager for
a wealthy landowner. Agriculture was not
fair business back then. It mostly
amounted to a rich landowner growing richer and richer, while the farmer like
my uncle grew poorer. Sound familiar?
Here’s
how it worked back then. Agricultural
land existed as massive tracts owned by a handful of wealthy people who rented
out small plots for people to farm. The agreement
was usually that the landowner would let a set amount of land for a sizeable
percentage of the yield. It was also
likely that the sharecropper would have to borrow money from the landowner to
live on until the harvest came using the harvest as collateral. Let’s just say that it was a situation where the
landowner wasn’t going to lose any money on you. It amounted to the farmer simply getting a
place to live and barely enough to eat and always being in debt. Sound familiar? Substitute “the bank” for “the landowner” and
we can say it ain’t changed much for middle income earners on down no matter
the profession…and it is worse for people in the Third World. That’s the way Mammon works. The rich get
richer while the poor get poorer unless someone intervenes.
This
dishonest manager in our parable was the one who collected the rent and the
yield percentages and settled the debts…and he was dishonest. We don’t know exactly what he was doing, but
for sure he was sweetening his own coffee at the expense of the sharecroppers
and using the authority of the landowner to do it. Accusations were brought against him and so
the landowner called him in and told him to turn over the ledgers because he
was fired. Knowing he was about to lose
everything, he rather ingeniously cooked up a scheme: he would get the tenant farmers
to “owe him one” by reducing the amount of debt they owed the landowner, which
he likely had inflated so that he could skim it.
Well,
something odd happens. The landowner
commends the dishonest manager for his creativity in this matter. In the world of mammon where making money is
all that matters, this dishonest manager had done a brilliant thing. He secured his basic necessities of room and
board by getting the people he had been cheating to feel obligated to him for
doing them the favour of getting their debt reduced. Incidentally, this was the same thing he
would have received from the landowner if he had faithfully administered the
business for years and years and retired.
It’s a messed up deal like when those credit rating companies tell you
that keeping your credit card paid off each month hurts your credit rating. It actually does. They say that paying your credit card off
each month does not demonstrate that you can responsibly pay off a debt. The world of Mammon is a messed up place.
This
parable gets all the more confusing when Jesus then says to his disciples, “For
the people of the world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are
the people of light. I tell you, use worldly wealth (or unrighteous mammon) to
gain friends for yourself, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into
eternal dwellings.” It seems Jesus is
telling his disciples to play the game of mammon, but be like Robin Hood with
the proceeds. Admittedly this is
probably the most difficult parable Jesus ever taught and it would be nice to
have him here to explain himself because he’s either encouraging financial
dishonesty from us or he’s just dripping with sarcasm because he knows the
Pharisees, “who are lovers of money”, are standing in the wings eavesdropping and
he’s trying to tell them that they have been dishonest managers of everything
God had entrusted to them. From their
teaching of the Law right down to their love of money they were squandering
what God had entrusted to them. They
themselves appeared faithful and blessedly wealthy but they gained their status
by means of spiritually and economically abusing God’s people especially the
poor. They were in fact serving Mammon,
the god of wealth and image, and using the authority of the one true God to do
it.
In
my humble opinion, this very troubling parable and its main point that we
cannot serve both God and Mammon fits very nicely into Jesus’ broader teachings
on how we, his disciples, should handle money.
If we look at this parable through the lens of the Sermon on the Mount
in Matthew’s Gospel the lesson is for us to not store up treasures of earth,
but rather to be generous with the wealth of resources God has entrusted to us
and by our generosity store up treasures for ourselves in heaven.
We
are to switch sides in the game of wealth; switch from serving Mammon to
actually serving God. The Pharisees were
using the things of God as a means to grow in worldly status, wealth, and
power. They were in it for themselves
even though they dishonestly said they served God. Like the dishonest manager appeared to switch
loyalties by reducing the debt of the poor in the land, so Jesus invites us,
his disciples, to really switch our loyalties from simply growing our own
financial security to actually helping others.
Though
the dishonest manager was dishonest and self-serving in all his motives when it
came to money (and if we’re honest so are we), a glimpse of Kingdom of God
values and its powerful reality of justice remarkably shone through when he,
like Zacchaeus, gave wealth back to those he had cheated. So also, Jesus calls us to keep our service
to Mammon in check by disciplining ourselves to honest work for an honest wage
and practising generosity. If we find
ourselves in the game of trying to grow our wealth on earth rather than in
heaven, it is likely we have left the Kingdom of God to serve Mammon. Amen.
