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The Mystery of The Great Olive Caper* Three centuries before the birth of Jesus, a teacher, writing (no doubt pseudonymously) under the name of King Solomon (presumably to better the odds that somebody would actually read what he wrote) grabbed a stylus and dashed off a percipient observation. Not only did somebody read it…they included it smack dab in the middle of Hebrew Scripture. “There is,” declared that wise old rabbi, “nothing new under the sun.” From that perspective we visit the shenanigans oddly addressed by the Son of Man in His tale of the Shrewd Manager a couple of hundred years later. We confront a mystery amidst the ancient olive groves. What we really confront, I suppose, is an even more ancient mystery. Does God care? How does He care? What does that care look like? What are our responsibilities with respect of that care? Apparently at least some of the good folks in Galilee back then occasionally approached their business interests, responsibilities and exigencies in ways not altogether different from the way some folks occasionally approach the same stuff today. They cheated! Now we must be careful with our broad strokes. In that regard, I do hope you will note my reliance on modifiers. I said “some” folks “occasionally”approached. Contrary to the conviction harbored by some of the young people in my confirmation class, I have no experiential predicate upon which to form any conscientious conclusions about Galilean business practices in the 1st century. I strongly suspect, however, that not every body was as disposed as our chap in the parable. Not everybody cheated. Actually, I suspect very few cheated. I’ll bet that most people did not cheat then any more than they do now. And I do know enough about present human nature and the real modern business world to know that most folks don’t cheat these days either. Of course I am here very much “preaching to the choir” in observing that a disproportionate share of the good that has been visited upon the peoples of the world in the past century is attributable to the commerce of the world in the past century. Truth is that the more money some people have made... the better off more people have become. Of course you would never know that from the nightly news. A great sadness as well as a great danger of our modernity has been the ever-increasing preoccupation of the electronic media with everything that is wrong with the world to the virtual exclusion of plenty that is right with the world. Now, of course, there is enough wrong with our world to rightly command our attention. And one of those wrongs is the mélange of inequitable conditions surrounding the distribution of wealth created by business and the commercial venture. But there is also a very great deal of good in the world generally and in business particularly. I’m told that ratings and profits and time constraints (not to mention our median attention span) play heavily upon local and national media in their almost institutionalized “knee jerk” commitment to report all the evil about. At least vicariously, we rather enjoy evil don’t we? So, I suppose we are hardly in the best position to argue with or rail against what the tube offers us as news. However, you and I know full well that for all the base debauchery of the Tyco executive, the utter venality of the Enron honcho and the slapstick-like complicity of the Arthur Andersen number cruncher (novelist, if you wish) there exist countless and unfortunately uncounted examples of the very best that business, as a microcosm of humanity, has to offer. Those examples are absolutely resplendent in their glory. Aaron Fuerstein’s dogged self-sacrificing loyalty to his Malden Mills employees. The charitable resolve and largesse of Mr. Gates. The determined commitment to urban and concomitant human renewal and revitalization in South Central LA by the greater Los Angeles business community. I could continue and I suspect that, from your perspective, you might offer far more examples than I. The media could also. But it does not and when it does offer a smidgen of a tidbit, which actually showcases good, it does so sparingly with a halting reluctance that the piece is not “real news”, only “human interest”. I wish they would cut it out because, in a very real and destructive sense, their preoccupation with all that is wrong and their classification of decent and honorable endeavor as anomalous (so as to be of “human interest”), creates and sustains the inaccurate, petty and morally dangerous notion that the human condition is intractably evil and disjointed and pretty much hopeless. It disdains the history of the Creators relationship with His creation. A history of God reaching and re-reaching out to humanity with a merciful consistency, which debunks any notion, that He thinks we are hopeless. And that thought brings us to the fellow in Christ’s Parable of the Shrewd Manager. Saint Luke offers up a story in his ordered account to Theophilus, which ostensibly bears all the earmarks of an exceedingly disordered ethical indicative. He reports at the 16th Chapter of The Gospel, as you have read, our Lords’ Parable of The Shrewd Manager. At first blush the guy seems to be much more like the scoundrels at Tyco, Arthur Andersen and Enron than the heroes at Malden Mills, Microsoft or in South Central LA. For all the reality that business has and continues to be a source of very great good, the Shrewd Manager in the Lukan story was decidedly not a part of that action. He appears to us as a common cheat, intent upon scamming his way to self-preservation whatever the cost or larcenous consequence. Apparently he was a shalluah or general agent. His principal was undoubtedly the absentee owner of an agricultural tract-a large crop producing enterprise representing an exceedingly tidy sum of money. Translation, history and arithmetic lead us to conclude that the crop yield and funds involved in the rascal’s scheme would be roughly that of 150 olive trees and 100 acres of grain. The equivalent of 2500 denari, that is, a small fortune comprising better than 11 years worth of pay for the average Galilean wage earner. Our subject probably discharged that agency as an overseer and general manager of the several tenant sharecroppers hakirin who manned the operation. We learn that he had, at least, mismanaged the affair and that consequently the absentee landlord arrived on the scene and, as a precursor to discharging him, demanded the agent render an account. Whereupon the shalluah took stock of his predicament and concluded that he was in a pretty pickle. If he had heretofore actually embezzled from the owner, he was caught dead to rights because the law of the day provided that the minimum obligation of the tenant farmers, contingent though it may be, must have been established and mutually agreed upon in advance of the growing season and the owner, being no longer in absentia but (to the manager’s chagrin) very much present, could look at the olive groves and the amber waves of grain and see what was what. And, even if he had not helped himself to the fruits of any prior chicanery, he was still about to queue up in the employment line. Well, you know the rest of the story. At that point our friend resolved to cheat like crazy and enlisted the aid of the obligees in a 1st century rendition of cooking the books. He throws caution to the wind and encourages the tenants to profoundly and fraudulently discount their yields. It is here that the parable takes an unexpected and seemingly deviant twist. The guy doesn’t get indicted, arrested, prosecuted or otherwise skewered. He doesn’t make the evening news…but he does make the Good News. In fact, he becomes a central expository focus of the Gospel, at least in a thematic sense. As observed by Dr. Smith, he becomes “one of the outstanding examples of (a character) whose conduct goes from bad to worse in a class of parables, the use of which seems to be a striking and unique feature of Christ’s teaching.” The fellow is commended for acting shrewdly. We might here note the likelihood that shrewd translates from the Greek as prudent. The manager’s very identification transliterates from a matter of pejoration to one of commendation. He is praised for acting prudently. He is commended for his vision and for not acting in accordance with the shortsightedness of customary normative behavior. He is praised for responding to the exigent with the only possible response to the exigent. He does not absolutize the present but relies upon something greater. Of course that something greater is God. He is commended for facing the issue as a true disciple - a “child of the light”. He is praised for faith. Commended for trust. The parable, which Kenneth Bailey argues, I
think correctly, must be understood (as best we can) from the perspective of a
1st century middle eastern peasant (because it was recounted by a 1st century
Middle Eastern peasant to an audience of 1st century Middle Eastern peasants),
uses the “master”of the story not as the owner of a whopping, albeit it Using contemporaneously homespun humor (the ageless fun of the watching the “little guy tuckin’” it to the “big wig”), Jesus focuses upon a serious eschatological tension extending far beyond the boardroom or whatever passed as a boardroom in those olive groves. The master is a metaphor for a forgiving and attentive God. The master in the tale knew right well what the unjust steward was up to. So did the sharecroppers. The guy had fooled no one. He must have known that he was completely and thoroughly “outed”. He had no excuse and no avenue escape from the inevitability of judgment. Consequently, he acted only as he could…and as we should. He accepted the Master’s power. Trusted the Master’s control. Believed in the Master’s mercy. Of course there is the rub and the very reason we know that the master of the parable is a metaphor. He forgives. The “masters” (the Pharisees) of this world seldom forgive but our Heavenly Master, when approached in faith, always forgives. Now, you will note as you again read the parable (if you again read the parable) that the Master does not forgive the deceit or the injustice or the crime. The act is not forgiven. The deceit is not commended and the crime is not praised. What is forgiven is the actor who approaches his destiny with and in faith. The steward, knowing he was wrong and utterly unworthy, absolutely trusted the Master to be merciful. He awaited the Master confidently and one supposes humbly. The manager fully believed that the Master would suffer the loss to save him from his scoundrel self. He was right! Sounds familiar doesn’t it? What is commended is the mindset which (finally one presumes) compels an undeserving, unentitled child of the present to reach out to a God of the always who has since the beginning reached out to him and promised His grace and presence and mercy to the end of that age. The steward is us, praised for prudentially casting off the pretension of self-assessed efficacious sufficiency in favor of trust in and submission to the Master… a God of love and mercy. What is commended is a disposition and resolve to accept the fact that without God we are each without cosmic reason or place, much less justification. Without Him we really are but infinitesimal, inconsequential and transient globs of protoplasm swirling about at the mercy of a vast, dispassionate and merciless universe which we really don’t understand and certainly cannot control. But the steward trusted and was commended. Inferentially he was saved. And he was saved only because he elevated trust in the Master over all else. He was also commended because he paid attention. In the midst of what loomed as an entirely secular prospect, he paid attention. The Lukan lesson teaches us to be attentive to our relationship with the Father. To plan and consciously attend to that relationship with the same diligence the steward brought to his ostensibly unconscionable mission. At least the same diligence we bring to matters of quarterly projections, inventory control, underwriting and flow charts and the like. That too the Master commends. Each of us is called to discipleship. “Children of the light”. I dare say none of us will leave this place today treading that path by stepping in the same or similar spots as our 1st century friend did among those olive trees. But do I hope we can traverse the pilgrimage of that process in the same spirit. A call to overarching faith. A call to surrender in that faith. A call to faithful attention which recognizes that there is no division between the secular and temporal…no disconnect between what we believe and what we do. And a call which leads us to that place in faith where prayerful attention and reflection does not end at the door of the sanctuary or the confines of the home any more than the deliberate planning of prudent business practice is somehow left on the threshold of a faithful life. A call to faith made manifest not as a category of what we do but as a determinant of all we do. No one can serve two masters. A call which allows us to rely always upon God The Master. To fall with the faithful expectation that we shall ultimately soar in the assurance of the care and nurture…and yes, mercy - even commendation of an ever present Merciful Master whose judgment (just like that rendered in the parable) is as certain to confound the children of the generation as it is to embrace the children of the light. It confounds because it is transcendently contrary to earthly norms. It embraces because it is solely occasioned by and rendered in response to faith. It is not for us to calculate or qualify or quantify. We are incapable of either. Try as we might and (as with every preceding generation) do, we cannot understand any more than we will ever (at least in this life) fully comprehend our Lord’s strange tale of 1st century mischief. It is for us and remains for us a part of the mysterious milieu of faith. “The assurance of things hoped for”, wrote the Apostle to the Hebrews, “and the conviction of things not seen.” And that my dear friends encapsulates the
ongoing miracle. The Mystery of the Great Olive Caper. God Bless you all. Amen.
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