He also said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. 2 And he called him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.’ 3 And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ 7 Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ 8 The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. 9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.
Luke 16:1-9, ESV
At some point in college I watched all three of the Ocean’s movies, those of George Clooney putting together and deploying an elite team of casino robbers, in one sitting. There’s certainly a bit of cognitive dissonance involved in rooting for professional thieves,* but the filmmakers do their best to smooth this over by (1) portraying the casino owners as really bad dudes, and, more importantly, by (2) focusing on the purely technical aspects of robbing casinos.
Indeed, the Ocean’s trilogy works because one can appreciate the art and science of robbing casinos without signing off on the morality thereof. The same principle holds true for other kinds of high-cognitive (and usually nonviolent) crime – see, for instance, Catch Me if You Can, which traces the exploits of scam genius Frank Abagnale. In general, it’s hard to suppress admiration for ingenuity, even when it’s employed in the service of bad ends.
This principle, somewhat disconcertingly, also shows up in one of Jesus’ parables (Lk 16:1-9), the one that usually goes by the Unjust Steward (KJV) or the Dishonest Manager (e.g., ESV). At the beginning of the story, a rich man discovers that his manager is incompetent. But rather than sacking him on the spot, oddly enough, the rich man first demands a full account receivables report.
This gives the manager, who is interested in neither menial labor nor panhandling, time to make friends with his boss’s debtors by cooking the books in their favor. He now has somewhere to go after getting the boot (v4). He’s apparently not much better at fraud than estate management, however, because the rich man finds out about the scheme quickly enough.
But the latter is a remarkably good sport about the whole thing. “You got me pretty good there,” he seems to say, perhaps realizing that he had brought it on himself by not having security escort the disgraced manager off the premises immediately. (Other interpreters have suggested that the rich man is just as much a cheat as his erstwhile manager, but there’s no real textual evidence for that supposition).
That’s the story. Before getting to the moral, however, Jesus throws in the observation that “the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light” (16:8, ESV). In other words, non-believers are better at getting stuff done than are believers. Whatever disadvantages might accrue from it, unconcern about the world to come does free one up to focus on the here and now. No one’s ever said otherwise.
Jesus continues: the “sons of light” could take some cues from the dishonest manager about winning friends and influencing people. Disciples are similarly to use their own dirty money (ESV: “unrighteous wealth”) to buy friends, who can eventually welcome them into heaven when that money runs out.
My mind goes to a certain former mayor of New York City, who joked (?) in a 2017 60 Minutes interview that his vast philanthropic contributions entitle him to skip the interview with St. Peter at the pearly gates. Of course, the prospect of crudely buying one’s spot in heaven through charitable giving is excluded by the rest of scripture, not least by Jesus himself (see Lk 21:1-4). And, in general, attempting to monetize the spiritual doesn’t go well.
Even with those caveats, however, Jesus’ exact point is still not very easy to understand. What makes it especially interesting and confusing is Jesus’ reference to using unrighteous wealth to make friends – the Greek adjective here is the same one used to describe the manager. In the very next passage, Jesus warns against being “unrighteous” with “unrighteous” money (16:10-11). Regardless of what we do with it, in other words, there seems to be something intrinsically bad about the money itself.
Here’s what I think that might mean. I once overheard a young lady at a coffee shop ask if the establishment’s selection of teas was “slave-free.” Her question prompted a bit of research in which I “discovered” that a sizable amount of the world’s tea is grown by slave labor. (The same can be said for chocolate and coffee). And a lot of other everyday products are made, if not by slaves per se, then by people working for low wages in miserable conditions.
Continuing on the same theme: there’s literally no way of knowing if the gasoline I just put in my Elantra is helping to bankroll an oppressive Middle Eastern regime that helped bankroll 9/11. There’s no way of knowing if my tax dollars went to arming that same regime so it could carry out horrifically sloppy bombing campaigns in Yemen.
I could devote my entire life to extricating myself from the nasty stuff in our globalized economy and I wouldn’t be completely successful. Specifying what amount of moral responsibility I bear is a murky enterprise, but the fact remains that I – and everyone else – indirectly fund some repulsive things. This would be the case, incidentally, under any economic system.
And I think that’s Jesus’ point. There is no morally ideal economy. To be involved in a human economy of any real size is to be involved, however unwittingly or unwillingly, in “unrighteousness.”
But here’s the thing: Jesus doesn’t follow up with, “Therefore, all of you should go and be hermits in the Egyptian desert.” Rather, he says, “Use your participation in this morally flawed economy to do things that have eternal implications.”
One of my friends once suggested that this passage is a call to fund missions and evangelism in order to “make friends” in Christ. He’s not wrong. But I think it’s even more general and subtle than that. It includes careful, well-researched charitable giving. It includes helping keep that local business open. And it even includes the $10 bill you gave that homeless man panhandling outside the grocery store. To be sure, that $10 might go straight to MD 20/20. Or it might set off an unimaginable chain reaction whose effects will only be made clear in the dawn of the New Jerusalem. And, here’s the kicker: it might set off such a chain reaction even if it does go straight to booze in the short term.
God works in and through the incomprehensibly vast web of human interactions, in all their beauty, banality and even nastiness. To our current point, God works in and through our economic behavior as one aspect of his reconciling the world to himself in Christ.
And that’s in keeping with his MO. God took a device designed to degrade enemies of the state as it slowly killed them, and he used that thing to save the world. He can certainly take our money – our whole economy even – and use it in his plan to populate the “eternal dwellings” with our friends. How this happens is an unfathomable mystery, the work of a God who delights in building beautiful things from broken tools.
* The original Oceans film (1960), starring Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, struck a film critic for the Washington Post as jarringly “amoral.”
Let me know what you think!