Canter Bridge

Seldom does one of Jesus parables defy quick comprehension like the one we traditionally have called ‘the parable of the shrewd manager’. Fallen into a crisis that threatens his and his family’s future, this otherwise uninspiring man pulls off a sleight-of-hand that raises the admiring eyebrows even of the boss who had just fired him.

His predicament is not small:

Then Jesus said to the disciples, ‘There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, “What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.” Then the manager said to himself, “What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.”‘

When we find ourselves face to face with a biblical passage that defies easy solution, the most prudent step is often to look back on the history of interpretation. The aggregation of minds wiser and closer to the literary and cultural ground than ours often shows the way or—at least—cumulatively indicates that plausible description lies in this way and in that one but not in any other.

That is what happens as we survey the scene of interpretation of this knotty parable. One discovers, on the one hand, what one might call the ‘be decisive in the critical moment’ interpretation. This angle of approach views just one virtue in the shrewd manager’s conduct: when faced with a crisis, he acted quickly and decisively. The point taken is usually some variant of the notion that any act of God—such as coming face to face with Jesus, as the parables’ first hearers certainly did—requires the reduction of priorities down to just one. In such circumstances, it wise to be quick with one’s ‘yes’, one’s ‘Amen’, one’s ‘count me in’, one’s ‘I am yours’.

Perhaps that is the point of the man’s response to his sudden crisis:

‘I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

Yet many readers will discern that a more sophisticated truth lurks in this story, one that does not reduce the man’s admirable qualities to mere quickness on his feet, no matter how eschatologically charged. A second line of interpretation, endorsed by the prints of many interpretive hands on this story, might be called the ‘street smarts’ interpretation.

This approach allows itself a bit of well-informed conjecture about the economic and social parameters within which the shrewd manager worked his butt-saving magic. For example, a prohibition against lending at interest may have been designed to ward off usury, that predatory lending that places the borrower’s future in question, rather than a more modestly worked out flow of capital from one who has some at the moment to another who needs some, also at the moment. Regardless, anti-interest laws on the books (in this case, the Mosaic legislative tradition) would have been worded as an absolute prohibition. A way around this is not unknown in similar contexts: the bill of loan states a single amount that the borrower owes to the lender, often by a certain date. The sum includes both the original amount borrowed (principal) and any amount to be paid in recognition of the convenience of using someone else’s capital (interest).

In this scenario, the shrewd manager creates a win-win-win situation out of a dire predicament. Rather than denounce his boss for lending at interest, he creates an arrangement whereby the man gets his money back, albeit without the interest he might have anticipated. The borrowers, for their part, go away quite happy at what in effect has become an interest-free loan. And the manager himself has secured friends who represent in large measure his possibilities for the future.

We do not know that this is what Jesus had in mind with his parable, but the plausibility is significant.

Jesus appears to commend the man’s creation of opportunity and future for all parties out of what a less imaginative mind might have understood to be a dead end. Perhaps he discerns as well that the kind of spiritual sensitivity and what he has elsewhere called ‘poverty of spirit’ in those who follow him often seems unwelcoming to the quality of opportunity-forging shrewdness he sees in his parable’s desperate protagonist. This would explain the master’s unlikely commendation of his manager and the apparent explanatory description that is best understood as Jesus’ comment rather than the parabolic master’s:

For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.

In its context, this is not a prescription of how things should be. Rather it is a description of how they too often are.

Jesus appears to consider that the better way is for his pure-hearted followers to hone the street smarts that are all too often more common in ‘the children of this age’, then to invest the proceeds from their entrepreneurial creativity in making friends. One might summarize events to this point like this: it’s a pity that the market makers and opportunity creators belong to this age alone. It would be better for the sons of light to develop those same skills and then to direct their force towards human beings who will simultaneously be blessed by the results and become a community and safety net for when we all upon hard times.

To some, this may seem egotistical and self-protective. Jesus seems not to balk at whatever elements of those qualities are present in this very shrewdness that he commends to his own.