September 21, 2025

I’ve struggled over the parable we heard today for. more than forty years, ever since I encountered it in an assignment for a course entitled “Exegesis and Preaching” back when I was in Divinity School. It vexed me then; it has vexed me every time it comes up in the three-year lectionary cycle. No doubt it will continue to vex me after I retire and no longer have to preach on it. But I’m not alone. I think it has vexed everyone who has tried to make sense of it over the millennia, and I hope it vexed you as you listened to it this morning.But I do think it can speak to us today, in our situation, even if its meaning remains elusive.

To me, one of the most frightening things about our current environment is the way in which many of our most powerful and storied institutions, not to mention our wealthiest billionaires, have folded under pressure from the current administration. We’ve seen universities like Columbia cede their independence and their commitment to academic freedom; tech billionaires pony up millions for the inaugural festivities; the Republican party, and many democratic senators have rolled over. We’ve seen news organizations and media companies acquiesce as well—the Washington Post has fired most of its oped writers; the cancellation of Steven Colbert and the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel.

None of these seem to provide examples of how to respond to the attacks on science, civil liberties, the humanities, common decency that have become commonplace. Many of us feel impotent, uncertain how to behave, what to do. How can we act ethically in a morally corrupt society and situation? It all seems hopeless; what little we could do seems futile in the face of all the evil forces that surround us.

My thoughts were spurred by a conversation I had with a parishioner this week about how to maintain hope in this situation; whether hope is even warranted. My response came easily off my lips—the Resurrection of Christ, his conquering death and the grave, is the source of our hope. Such words may cling hollow in the face of all that we are experiencing, but our faith in God, our assurance that God will reign, must carry us on. But even that may seem little more than a pipedream, wishful thinking.

You may be wondering how any of this connects with our scripture readings, and especially with our gospel reading, and the strange parable we just heard.  

Today’s parable offers insight into the economy of the first-century Mediterranean world, which was corrupt and rigged in its own way and brutally oppressive of the vast majority of ordinary men and women.

As I’ve repeatedly said before, when reading or listening to Jesus’ parables, it’s important to look for surprising, unordinary behavior, and to avoid trying to force the parable into a comfortable meaning. While that is difficult for many parables, in the case of this one, often called the Parable of the Unjust Steward, everything in it is strange, irrational, defying interpretation.

In fact, Luke appends to the parable a couple of verses that attempt explanation but let’s be honest, they don’t even approach making sense of the story; they’re like non sequiturs.

The difficulty of this parable is that no explanation is ultimately satisfactory, no explanation—not the ones Luke puts in Jesus’ mouth at the end of the story, not the ones commentators have come up with over the centuries. After all of our struggles with it, we are left with a story in which charges are brought against a steward, he reacts in his own self-interest, and when found out, his boss or master commends him for it.

In order to access the world of this parable, we need to access the economy of the ancient Greco-Roman world. The story is not necessarily set in the countryside, on an estate, but clearly the master is a man of great wealth whose business has to do with the chief commodities of the time—olive oil and wheat. It’s likely he was an absentee landowner. The steward, either a slave, or perhaps a freedman, was responsible for extracting the maximum wealth possible from the estate and passing it on to the landowner. But before passing it on, he would take his cut. Typically, as long as he didn’t abuse the system, the steward could benefit richly from the system, skimming off some of the profits for himself. This is the way the economy worked. 

Now charges were brought against him that he was dishonest. At this point, there’s nothing in the story to suggest whether the charges were valid or not, and that may be a significant point. In such an economy, in such a society, the only power the people at the bottom of the heap have is to bring such charges. Doing so makes the person above them vulnerable. The master demanded an accounting, but before having a chance to look at the books, the steward took action. 

While it may look like the steward is trying to ingratiate himself as he reduces the debts that are owed his master, I think there is another way of looking at it. Here is a place where we are very much in a comparable place economically. The master and steward occupied an economy in which worth was calculated solely in financial terms. The relationships between landowner, steward, and debtors were strictly economic. The master and steward had similar goals—to extract as much wealth as possible from the land and from those who owed him. Sound familiar? 

But suddenly, the steward is expelled from that economy. He has no place and no prospects. He doesn’t have the skills or strength to dig, and he is ashamed to beg. So he sets out to transform himself and his value. With a goal of being welcomed in people’s homes after he loses his job, he builds social capital by subverting the wealth economy. His actions create new relationships. No longer is he a steward and they debtors. Now they are united by mutual relationship. And there’s this. His actions have also probably created good will between the debtors and the master. Who doesn’t like to see the principal of their loans reduced?

There’s something else I find intriguing. In his weekly lectionary newsletter, Andrew McGowan, New Testament scholar and until very recently Dean of the Episcopal Seminary—Berkley Divinity School at Yale, pointed out that the phrase translated as dishonest manager could be translated differently. The word for dishonest here is the same word that’s usually translated unrighteousness or injustice. McGowan suggests “steward of injustice”—by which is implied not that the steward himself is unjust, but that the system as a whole is unjust. The steward has been complicit in that system. He has profited from the system. And, now, he’s looking for a way out.

Here’s the thing. We all struggle with money. We worry whether we have enough to pay the bills. We worry whether we’ll have enough for our retirement. We worry whether we’ll have enough to make it to the next paycheck. But that’s not all. So much of our personal value and worth is tied up with how much we make. Our self-worth seems to be often dependent on the fact that we are consumers, and that we can display for all to see the wealth we have. We know all too well how the system is gamed by the wealthy and powerful and how ordinary people are left out. We see evidence all around us of the myriad ways the system has oppressed and exploited people. Even as we feel the effects of that exploitation and oppression on ourselves, we also reap benefits from the exploitation and oppression of others.

How do we make our way in such a system? How do we live ethically, responsibly in it? How do we seek to follow Christ?

And here’s where the actions of the steward may give us guidance. As he sought to extract himself from the situation in which he found himself, he sought to make connection, to build community with others. 

By building community and connections that are founded not on monetary value but on good will, we are challenging the status quo and creating new relationships like those in the coming reign of God, where worth is not calculated by how much we have or make, not by our social media presence, but by our relationship to God—by our humanity, by the fact that we are created in God’s image and full of worth and dignity.

 We are very much like that steward, enmeshed in systems over which we have very little control, beaten down and yes, beating down. It may be impossible for us to extract ourselves from those systems, after all, they pay our salaries and ensure our standard of living. But we can look for ways to ease the burdens of others, to make those human connections, to nurture life-giving and meaningful relationships and to bear witness to the intrinsic dignity and worth of God’s beloved children.