Jesus develops the narrative in
such a way that it focuses on the issue of trust between the rich man and his
steward;
in other words, on the interpersonal basis of
their relationship.”
Trust in a relationship. Trust, with the ones you
know. Trust, with the stranger.
I believe, for all of my
dull-witted thinking and weak-willed heart, the parable was firmly about “the
rich man.”
After all, it bluntly began
with its main subject: There was a rich man….
But it doesn’t matter that he’s rich.
So, it’s really about a man
but it also doesn’t matter that
the lead character was masculine.
It’s about how humans live with
other humans.
How does the rich man act?
How does the manager act?
Nothing the manager did revealed him as a loving,
vulnerable human. Instead, the manager was manipulative and selfish.
In Jesus’ tale, we were given a glimpse of the
manager’s thoughts: What will I do, now
that my master is taking the position away from me?
What! His master didn’t take the position away!
The manager screwed himself by squandering the rich
man’s property. But, ah, how humans craftily blame another.
I’ve met people
like the manager, who casually and consistently blamed others for their
failures.
Do you wish me, in my faith, to sally forth and be
like the manager?
No. Thank. You.
There was a flawed, curious, hopeful, forgiving human
in this story.
And that person was the story’s focus.
The rich man’s essential question to the manager will
be: What is this that I hear about ___?
What’s the word the rich man used?
Was he concerned about his possessions, pride, and
prestige or about how others saw him, or did he fret about his retirement fund
and stock options?
Nope. Instead, his odd, personal question was: What is
this that I hear about you?
The rich man was wounded;
the steward had wrecked their relationship by his greed/incompetence/laziness/silence.
But there were no accusations from the rich man to his
manager about the manager’s “work.”
We, the reader and hearer of this troubling tale,
discover and rediscover how Jesus felt about the value and vulnerability of
relationships.
I have long believed Jesus didn’t call anyone to
follow him into a particular religion.
Jesus, after all, was never Christian (in any of Christianity’s
thousand variations).
And as a Jew,
Jesus unsettled his fellow Jews by claiming he didn’t come to change a single
“iota” of the law and yet kept exposing the flaws of the laws.
Turn the other cheek and (by the way) don’t think you
only have two cheeks.
Forgiveness
trumped finances.
Intolerance was
intolerable.
The institution of any religion was and is never as
precious as the individual.
Why does this parable trouble me so?
It invites me to prioritize relationship over religion
and persons over property.
It demands I
trust you.
And when I do, I believe that makes me rich.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add