Luke 16:1-15 "The Wrong Man, the Right Idea" Scott Hoezee

The second installment of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy of movies tells two stories simultaneously. While viewers watch the moral demise of the mafia don Michael Corleone in the mid-1950s, they see intertwined with this flashbacks from the early twentieth century when Michael's father, the original Godfather Vito Corleone, steadily rose from a penniless Italian immigrant to a powerful, respected, and feared figure. The key moment when young Vito's life turned the corner from poverty to ill-gotten riches is curious.

Vito and two friends had begun to do well for themselves--so well, in fact, as to attract the attention of the local mafia boss, Don Fanucci, who was known as "the Black Hand." Don Fanucci approaches Vito and says, "I hear you and your two friends were recently involved in some shenanigans which netted you $600 each." The don then demands some protection money, telling Vito that he needs to wet his beak a bit to the tune of $200 from each of the three men. The subtext of this "request" was clear: "Pay up or else!"

Upon hearing of this development, Vito's friends immediately and fearfully decide to pay up. But Vito has a different idea. He tells his two friends to pay him $50 each. Vito, in turn, will give the don this money plus his own $50 and Vito will do it in such a way that Fanucci will accept the $150 instead of the $600 he had initially demanded. When his friends ask Vito how he's going to pull this off, Vito tells them "Never mind that, but just remember I did you a favor once." Vito then tells his friends that they are to go to Fanucci the next day, tell him that they respect him and that through Vito they will pay the don whatever he wants. The next day both men go and tell the don just that. Later Vito meets privately with Don Fanucci but pays him only the $100 he had collected from his two friends. When the don demands to know where the other $500 is, Vito smirks and says he needs some time seeing as he was rather short of money at the moment.

Don Fanucci then comes to believe that Vito has shaken down his own two friends. Based on what the two other men had told Fanucci earlier, the old don assumes Vito had already received $200 from each friend but is now pocketing most of it even as he courageously winks at the don, who becomes an insider to Vito's little fake scheme. Surprisingly, the Black Hand turns velvet. He smiles approvingly, openly admires Vito's courage. "You've done well for yourself," he says. He then accepts the $100 as sufficient, offers to let Vito work for him, and even adds that if he can do anything for Vito, to let him know! Fanucci respected Vito as a fellow wheeler-and-dealer, a fellow sneak and cheat who knew how to work other people to his own advantage.

Now I realize that some of you are at best uncomfortable any time a pastor uses contemporary cinema as a sermon illustration. Further, considering that the movie I just mentioned is hardly The Sound of Music some of your discomfort may now be magnified. A good many people have criticized the Godfather films precisely because the main characters are bloodthirsty crooks. Yet the way those films are put together, viewers often tend to become interested in them as characters. Some of the Corleone folks, though hardly admirable, nevertheless are somewhat glamorized, becoming the heroes of these movies. But why should mafia thugs be heroic in any story?

That is a legitimate question. It's a good question to ask of also Luke 16. Because the passage we read a few moments ago is quite probably the oddest of all Jesus' parables. Who knows where Jesus came up with this particular story. Maybe it was based on some true incident Jesus had once heard about. Maybe Jesus composed it based on similar situations he had observed in the course of his life.

But whatever the origin of this story, the fact is that the "hero" of this parable--the figure Jesus holds up as somehow or another having something to teach "the children of light"--is finally an anti-hero. He's a crook, a swindler, a cheat. And even as some of you may well wish that a person like Vito Corleone would not be mentioned in a sermon, so many along the ages of church history have wished Jesus had not included this shrewd, corrupt manager as the protaganist of a parable.

The parable in Luke 16 follows hard on the heels of a parable we like a whole lot better: the Prodigal Son. But though the prodigal's actions in that famed story are initially despicable, he ends up looking downright saintly in comparison to this corrupt manager. That has bothered not a few folks over the course of church history. Some have been so scandalized by Jesus' use of a sinful wheeler-and-dealer that they have staged a number of desperate attempts to rescue Jesus from his own parable. But the attempts to turn this shrewd manager into some kind of decent fellow after all have generally speaking failed.

The straightforward reading of this tale is probably the correct one as it turns out. The manager of a wealthy man's estate is about to get fired. For some reason--laziness, disorganization, or maybe even corruption--this manager has done a lousy job and this has at long last come to the attention of the boss. So he summons the manager, tells him to prepare one final report to be handed in at his exit interview, and that would then be that. Too lazy and weak for manual labor, too proud to beg, this man has to think fast. Since his boss wants one last presentation of the ledgers before the manager gets canned, the manager decides that now is as good a time as any to cook the books in such a way as to feather his own future nest.

So he calls in a number of the boss's wealthier clients and cuts their debt-loads in half. When in startled amazement they ask why, the manager winks at them and says, "Don't ask, but just remember I did you a favor once, all right?" In this way the man curries some goodwill with people who could lend him money, give him a new job, and maybe even house him when soon he finds himself out on his ear.

Startlingly, when the boss gets wind of these shenanigans, he is not angry! He approves. He claps the manager on the shoulder and says in essence, "You've done well for yourself!" Indeed, the last word from the boss in this parable is so positive, the reader is left to wonder whether maybe the manager ended up retaining his job after all. This rich man could recognize a fellow wheeler-and-dealer when he saw one, and he liked what he saw! Anyone this shrewd, anyone this clever at working the angles, was just maybe someone worth hanging onto after all.

In the often cut-throat world of business this kind of unsavory story is not uncommon. What is uncommon about this story is what Jesus says about it. You expect Jesus to say something like, "Verily I tell you, cheats such as this will one day find themselves in a place of much weeping and gnashing of teeth!" But he does not say this at all. Instead Jesus finishes this little vignette of corruption, takes a breath, and then says to the disciples, "You see! There's something to that approach. Folks like this are far shrewder at dealing with this world than you children of light are!"

Here is a parable that sticks in the throat like a chicken bone! Other recent, and far more tender, parabolic images like a shepherd's cuddling a lost sheep or a kindly old woman rejoicing over the finding of a lost coin evaporate before the heat of this parable's quirky "hero." Just what is Jesus getting at in this parable? That's the first question we need to answer this evening. But once we answer that, a second question pops up: why couldn't Jesus have made the same point through a more savory story? Why present this man as having anything worth commending?

Let's start with the first question. What's the point here? Clearly it is not that any form of theft, cheating, swindling, or dishonesty is a good thing. You cannot turn this passage into some legitimation of "business as usual"-type practices. Throughout the rest of the gospels Jesus makes clear that dishonesty and discipleship most assuredly do not go together. Nevertheless, something about this man is being recommended so what is it? The answer begins to come into focus when you go all the way back to Luke 15:1-2 where you discover the setting for not just this parable but the three better-known parables that make up Luke's fifteenth chapter.

The larger issue before us here has to do with table fellowship. Jesus, as was his pattern, was hanging out and eating with all the wrong people in all the wrong places. The Pharisees muttered into their beards about how scandalous it was to hold a dinner party whose guest list was a "Who's Who" of local lowlifes. Jesus responds to this complaint with three parables on lost and found: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son. The point in all three is the same: the amount of rejoicing that comes when valuable lost objects are found makes it worthwhile to pay any price both to search for that lost thing or person and to then put on the fatted calf once the search is successful.

The parable of the prodigal son ends with a party. So as you transition into what we now call chapter 16, you can still hear the happy buzz of party chatter, the clink of silverware on china, and joyous music echoing in the air. Luke 15 ended with a vision of God's kingdom. It is a picture of such fervent joy that we should want to capture already now. If, like the Pharisees, we look at the so-called "sinners" around us and see them only as they now appear, then it becomes easier (and maybe even inevitable) to backhand them away as the kinds of folks with whom we don't care to associate.

Jesus, on the other hand, sees them as potential sources for heavenly delight, and he wants us to see them through that lens, too. He sees them as valuable lost objects, the re-finding of which could bring joy. So Jesus suggests we enjoy their company now in the hopes that we might enjoy one another's company forever and ever as well. The potential for eschatological joy among such people in the future of God's coming kingdom is great enough for us even now to do whatever we can to welcome them into our midst.

That line of thought from Luke 15 is hanging in the air as chapter 16 opens. So what is it about the shrewd manager's attitude which Jesus finds useful for also the children of light? It is this: he gave thought to the future and it shaped his actions in the present. Further, he knew that for now monetary resources are one way to secure the kind of future vision you have drawn for yourself. So even though in his case it meant being devious, his desperate desire to see his future materialize helped him to conclude that it would be worth it to take the risks he did in currying favor with his boss's clients.

Now do you see the point? We, too, have a strong vision of the future. It is called the kingdom of God. What's more, that future vision should include the potential joy that will rock the cosmos in celebration when more, and not less, people end up attending God's big party. That vision of the future should influence us mightily in also the present moment.

So if we have resources by which to reach out to the lost of this world, then like the shrewd manager we need to do everything we can to take the risks necessary to be with those people--yes, the very folks whom also yet today we typically don't invite over for a hamburger fry. Yet those are the ones we must reach, Jesus says. And since not much happens in this world without the help of money, then use it, Jesus says, for God's good purposes and glory. You cannot serve both God and the Almighty Dollar, Jesus says, but you can serve God by using the almighty dollar to reach out to others.

Needless to say, Jesus' charge to us here is a large and difficult one. Few of us could plausibly claim that we already have just such a consistently clear focus on God's kingdom. Fewer still could claim that this vision already leads us to this kind of generous a lifestyle. Jesus' challenge to us here is great. It is a big challenge, but we don't find it objectionable. We don't find this "bottom line" to Luke 16 scandalous. It was a worthy point for Jesus to make. But couldn't he have made it some other way?! Did he need to hold up a sneaky crook before our eyes to help issue this charge? Surely another version of the parable about the widow's mite or some such more homey tale could have delivered this parabolic freight just as effectively, couldn't it have?

Possibly. But maybe Jesus has something more subtle in mind by holding up an anti-hero as his parable's protaganist. Maybe this is an act of irony which pulls the rug out from underneath our feet even as it makes Jesus' larger point all over again. Because what are we doing when we pull up our noses at this shrewd manager? Then again, what have commentators in the past been doing in all their furious attempts to make this manager a good guy after all? Either way or both ways aren't we essentially saying that there are some greasy people in this world whom sanctified believers have no business pondering? Aren't we trying to re-establish some daylight between ourselves as nice Christians and those secular types "out there" in whose company we would rather not be at all?

Granted, the shrewd manager and probably his crafty rich boss are not swell fellows. They are not the kinds of people disciples should aspire to emulate. True enough. But they are the kinds of people with whom Jesus was having dinner on the very night he told this quirky parable. They are the kinds of people the Pharisees generally avoided looking at while they kept their pious noses pointed well up into the air. The shrewd manager is a sinful man. Probably he could be numbered among the very Mammon-worshipers whom Jesus goes on to say cannot serve also God as all people should. But does that mean believers have a license to ignore him? Does that mean that the only word we could or should ever address to such a person would be a harsh word of condemnation even as we told him to take a hike and leave our sanctified presence?

No. The whole point of Luke 15 and now of this first part of also chapter 16 is that these are the types of people we must seek first of all. We need to invite them to our parties now in the hopes that we will still be together when God throws his own eternal banquet. We need to fellowship with these people now so that while God's party is going on later, we will not find ourselves in the position of the prodigal son's elder brother: sitting alone on the front stoop and pouting over the injustice of it all. To be in that position is to be in a hell of our own making. So Jesus asks us to get into the spirit of things already now, doing whatever it takes to be open and kind and inviting to all people.

A few verses beyond this strange little parable is the better-known story about the rich man and Lazarus. Near the end of that parable the rich man asks father Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to shake his remaining brothers out of their wealth-induced stupor. Abraham replies that the rich man's brothers already have Bibles--they've already got written down for them everything they need to know to live the right way. They already know what they need to know. Thanks to gospel writers like Luke, we do, too. Are we listening? Amen.