Mercy brings mercy

The footnotes in the edition of the New Revised Standard Version published as the Jewish Annotated New Testament are always worth a look, but I wasn’t much helped preparing to preach on Luke 16.1-8 this morning by its The parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation. 

The writings of Kenneth Bailey can also produce significant alternative perspectives, but his opening many commentators affirm that this parable is the most difficult... the seeming incongruity of a story which praises a scoundrel has been an embarrassment to the Church since Julian the Apostate used the parable to assert the inferiority of the Christian faith and its founder didn’t promise well either.

Both sources turn out to be sniffy about the very popular suggestion that the steward might simply have been removing exorbitant interest charges, something Bailey traces back to a single 1902 Expository Times article which makes groundless assumptions about the original social context.

Anyway, as a fool rushing in where angels have failed to point out where the stepping stones are, I attempted a re-write.

There was a huge corporation which had a credit-control manager.  Suspicions were raised that this manager was allowing serious losses to occur.  So he was summoned and told, “bring your passwords and access codes along to Human Resources first thing in the morning” and he knew he was losing his job.

 

He asked himself, “What can I do without it? I am not good at anything else, and I could never pay my mortgage on social security.  Perhaps there is one thing I could do so I could still hold my head up high in this industry.” 

So, from a lap top at home, one by one he accessed the accounts of those who owed most.  He contacted the first at home and asked, “How much can you actually pay?”  He got an answer and he said, “if you’ve paid that by direct transfer overnight, I’ll close your account as fully paid at the start of business tomorrow.”  He did the same thing with a lot of the others. 

The following morning he turned up at Human Resources at the appointed time and found his line manager was also there.  Spread out in front of him with a print out of all the accounts which had been altered and closed overnight.  They both knew exactly what the situation was.  They looked each other in the eye.

Just how many different ways might this story end?

Suggestions at West Lane Baptist Church this morning included the sacking of the credit-control manager, his prosecution, his praise for bringing in a flow of cash just as the corporation was about to go bust, and the sacking of his line manager for extreme failures in supervision.

His line manager said, “we have never before recovered this amount from our bad debtors in a single week, and we’ve never found anyone so aware of the weaknesses in our computer systems;

I tell you what, we would actually benefit from you coming on board in a new role to deal with our worst defaulters and to ensure our computer network is much more secure – if only the people in corporate social responsibility and those on our ethics committee had half your understanding of the lives of our clients and the weakness of our systems and a quarter of your problem solving skills”.

The problem of securing the viability of this or any other interpretation is the loss of the original context in which the Galilean rabbi spoke the story. 

Bailey does have an intriguing hint in his close reading.  The two striking elements of the story are the steward’s ruse of having the bills altered and the master’s commendation of this dishonesty.  Just perhaps, it is this parallel (irresponsible remission of what is owed financially on one side and radical forgiveness on the other) which is the clue – extraordinary mercy shown, unexpected mercy received.

If so, the final sentence has a striking tone.  The master commended the dishonest steward because he had acted shrewdly - for the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light becomes not so much if only the people in corporate social responsibility and those on our ethics committee had half your understanding of the lives of our clients and the weakness of our systems as much as if even those involved in corrupt business practice are often onto the mutual value of forgiveness, mercy and remission, why are so many religious people (for the avoidance of doubt, that would include me) not only not onto this but actually mired in judgmental strictness instead?

The top picture is the relaying of track this week on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway a few hundred yards from our house and from the ‘Railway Children’ tunnel.

The bottom picture is the discovery, at yesterday’s Heritage Open Day, that the 1848 church school room at Stanbury (now our St Gabriel’s church) also had its own badged crockery.