Jesus, a good rabbinical teacher, is remembered as telling his listeners realistic illustrative stories that often challenge long-held, traditional assumptions. No one goes away unmoved after listening to one of his parables; everyone is called up short.
The parable in Luke (16:-13) about a businessman of great corporate wealth who suspects his business manager of squandering his properties and profits and threatens to fire him, is one that always leaves me reeling, gets me twisted in knots. Business as usual is obviously not an option in God’s economy. But what is? Christian scholar and theologian, John Dominic Crossan, calls this story a challenge parable—not morally obvious but spiritually unsettling. Money tends to do that to most of us.
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Once there was this business manager who panicked at the thought of losing his job. He devised a scheme whereby, if he is fired he will be taken care of by those who can least afford to do that. Why can’t he take care of himself? Because he is not strong enough to work, too ashamed to beg, and just plain scared. So he schemes.
The scheme: When debtors come to repay their legitimate debt to the boss, the manager tells each of them to halve the amount due and pay only that. Thus he cheats the boss out of his legitimate profit, and gains some money for himself as well as good will around the neighborhood.
He imagines that his “generosity” to the poor debtors might also please God who, according to Jesus’s teachings, likes open-hearted generosity. But Jesus tells the story to warn listeners that wealth accrued by cheating, even if you think the businessman has too much wealth, is itself dishonest behavior not pleasing to God.
One cannot, Jesus teaches, “buy” friendship with money, and wealth accrued by dishonest means is an insult to the ways of God, or divine economics. And here Jesus delivers one of his best, and probably least heeded yet most preached, one-liners: “You cannot serve two masters, both God and wealth/mammon”
The semitic translation of “mammon” is “that in which one fully trusts.” Frankly, I do feel more secure when there is money in my wallet, and in my bank, and a credit card in my bag. But what good would that do me if my purse were snatched, my wallet and checkbook gone. I’d feel naked, unsafe. I’d report everything. I’d pray. I’d give thanks that I was alive and that my wee phone was still safely tucked away in my back pocket. I would also know that this all was not what God would like at all, and not because of the money I lost.
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God obviously does not despise money or wealth itself. What God despises are two things: first, putting your whole trust in your wealth, as if wealth could save you, or love you, or even give you emotional comfort; and second, the regular practice of “dishonest”—half-hearted— generosity. Pop a coin in a beggar’s cup, but never a paper bill.
The mental calculation might go something like this: AFTER I have my yacht, my mansion, my diamonds, my fortune, my business, my high moral standing, my religion, my politics, my comfort, THEN I will become a philanthropist and give generously and unconditionally to works of justice, the arts, and the needs of others.
Is philanthropy, the name we often use to describe the generosity of BIG donors to benefit good causes, and a word derived from philos + anthropos, meaning man-loving or human-loving, in line with divine open-hearted generosity? Or is God’s generosity something we desire but that we are sure is unattainable, because, after all, we are only human? Ah yes, and we are also rich with grace, beauty, love, wisdom, and hope. Are these not the riches of God?
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Can we, in partnership with God,
be trusted then to waste,
to lavish, spread, fling far too wide
the riches of God’s grace?
-hymn text by Episcopal priest, Michael Hudson, Songs for the Cycle, 2004
