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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 this 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 wasn’t a worker. He was the business manager for a wealthy landowner who had a lot of sharecroppers. Agriculture was not fair business back then. It mostly amounted to a rich landowner growing richer and richer, while the family 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.
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.
