Steward of Injustice

Proper 20C: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9

1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

September 21, 2025

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.  About a month and a half ago, at the beginning of August, you may remember we were assigned a passage from Luke’s Gospel that contained what is known as the parable of the Rich Fool. Amid an overabundant crop, that parable’s protagonist tried to luxuriate in his wealth by building bigger barns just as his life turned out to be demanded of him and his possessions left behind. He had not heeded the warning that Jesus had uttered at the outset of the parable: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15). His story becomes an object lesson in the injustice of storing up treasures for oneself but not being “abundant toward God.” As protagonist of this morning’s parable, like the rich fool, wonders, “what should I do?” that same warning applies.^[1] Or as the closing line of today’s passage declares, “you cannot serve God and wealth” (16:13). And so I wonder with you, as I did in early August, what might it look like to practice abundance towards God, to participate in the inbreaking of God’s just reign even in the midst of an unjust world?

 I want to say at the outset, this morning’s parable does not provide us with a straightforward answer to that question. Not by a longshot. But I want to wade into this most fraught parable with an emphasis on God’s just reign and our call to practice its abundance, as a kind of framing tether. Because this parable is as slippery as a banana peel, as sole-sucking as quicksand.

 Jesus’ parable is a scenario of wealth disparity in which everyday actions are filled with moral ambiguities and injuries that flow from systemic injustice. The action centers on a middleman variously referred to in the commentaries I perused as the “unjust steward,” the “dishonest steward,” the “shrewd steward,” and even “a commendable scoundrel.”^[2] As this range of descriptors suggests, it is and has long been unclear how positively or negatively this middle person should be judged. Was he a hero? A villain? The commentaries tend toward either/or readings, but perhaps some combination? But first, what was this person’s role? He was an οἰκονόμος, one who managed a household on behalf of a wealthy person. While his rich boss went about his life among other elite, wealthy people, this man managed his affairs. In this case it seems the manager or steward handled the contracts of those indebted to the rich man. The debtors may have been tenants who tilled his fields or took care of his orchards and paid rent in the form of some portion of their crop.^[3]Alternately, they may have been merchants from a nearby town who worked with the steward to store crops from the rich man’s estate.^[4] Either way, their contracts were negotiated and enforced by the steward. When he came calling, payment was due. Meanwhile the middleman had the ability to mark up the amount, unbeknownst to the rich master. The addition could simply represent a commission – not necessarily unfair – or it could be a kind of price gauging, a get-rich scheme.

The steward may have been in the middle of all of this, but it was the tenants, the merchants, who were truly getting squeezed.^[5] This was an exploitive economy that benefitted the wealthiest, as well as those who enabled the maintenance and growth of that wealth, at the expense of those who did not have access to it. The biblical scholar William Herzog observes that because the tenants in this situation “are virtually powerless… [they] must find ways of resisting their oppressors that do not subject them to the jeopardy of open revolt. Therefore, they turn to forms of ‘passive noncompliance, subtle sabotage, evasion and deception.’” Herzog notes that “since they had little access to systemic factors that dominated their lives because they could do very little about them… they tended to focus on people who were within their reach, such as the steward or estate manager.”^[6] And so they begin a campaign. The charges they bring against the steward are not, in Herzog’s view, “moral charges that cast a shadow over the character of the steward.” Rather, they are “tactics in the endless resistance that is part of everyday life in agrarian societies. The charges are brought to sabotage the steward, undermine his authority, and place the villagers or merchants in a stronger bargaining position.” Regardless of whether the steward was forced out or remained in his position, the person in that role would have to reckon with their collective power.^[7]

This is when the steward gets shrewd. He goes to each of the debtors and cuts their bills. Is this cutting a removal of the steward’s reasonably moral commission or a cessation of price gauging? Hard to say. And actually, as Herzog argues, the individual moral character of the steward is not truly the point. The NRSV translation calls him the “unjust steward” and later refers to “dishonest” or “unjust” wealth (16:8, 9). But in both cases the term being translated as an adjective is actually a noun, ἀδικία, meaning unrighteousness or injustice. The phrases are τὸν οἰκονόμον τῆς ἀδικίας “the steward of injustice” and τοῦ μαμωνᾶ τῆς ἀδικίας “the wealth [or mammon to use the King James term] of injustice.” The point is systemic injustice, systemic sin if you will. The manager is a steward in the midst of an unjust economic system, embedded in “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf.”^[8] He is indeed an individual agent, but the sin is also much larger than him. How clearly does he know this? In what way, if at all, do his actions reflect a desire to mitigate the effects of that system, even if he does not, cannot on his own completely transform it? Is he simply looking out for number one as he repeats the question asked by the rich fool, “what will I do?” He seems fearful as he contemplates his fate and his unpreparedness for it. If he was to be turned away from the home of his employer, he would need to be received in the homes of those whose collective power had put him on notice. And so he cuts everyone’s bills significantly.

And now, as the actions of this steward of injustice lessen the systemic load, at least for the moment, the rich master has a decision to make. Would he carry out his threat to fire the steward? Or would he relent, seeing the gift of unrest alleviated, and let the steward carry on? He opts for the latter. The text does not describe it, but it is not hard to imagine rejoicing unfolding at this turn of events. Everyone was likely relieved, from debtors to steward to master. We further hear that the master “commended the dishonest manager” aka the steward of injustice – “because he had acted shrewdly” as the “children of this age” tend to do among their own generation, in the unjust swirl of their systemic contexts (16:8).

How then do we morally interpret the actions of the steward at this point? Commentators are divided. Theologian Justo Gonzalez notes that for Jesus “this dishonest steward [is] an example of the shrewdness he is proposing.”^[9] Robert Farrar Capon, an Episcopal priest and writer, sees the steward as a Christ-like in the metaphorical death he underwent, hitting rock bottom amid the pressure from the debtors, and Christ-like as well in his rising, giving life to others along the way through economic release. “But third and most important of all,” writes Capon, “the unjust steward is a Christ-figure because he is a crook, like Jesus. The unique contribution of this parable to our understanding of Jesus is its insistence that grace cannot come to the world through respectability. Respectability regards only life, success, winning; it will have no truck with the grace that works by death and losing – which is the only kind of grace there is.”^[10] Herzog will have none of it. “The steward belongs to the system of injustice (ἀδικία) and has never left it.”^[11] Gonzalez finally comments, “although perhaps shocking, the parable is for the most part straight forward.”^[12] Oh really?

Though I find Capon’s reading intriguing and am drawn to his zeal for Jesus as a disreputable, even scandalous figure, I am troubled by how that reading can freight the already morally ambiguous stakes in the charge, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes” (16:9). How are we to understand this crucial call? Here I notice that something shifts as I sit with this sentence and with the parable as a whole, and intentionally see Christ in the debtors, in those who are most crushed by this economic system. What if Christ is in their midst urging them to “make friends” not “by means of” the mannon of injustice, not by using “the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house,” to use Audre Lorde’s phrase.^[13] But make friends “in the midst of” this injustice, “from out of” it – as the Greek (ἐκ τοῦ μαμωνᾶ τῆς ἀδικίας) can also be translated. Be wise to that systemic context. What if Jesus urged them, in the words of his mother, to cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, and to send the rich away empty (1:52-53)? What if Jesus inspired their pressure campaign, using what Herzog called “the weapons of the weak,” to expose the exploitation of a crushing system in the actions of the steward, and finally of the master as well. Because of their ingenuity, their agency, their shrewd collaboration, a system much larger than them was able to be shifted at least for a time. “Out of the battle,” writes Herzog, there was “a temporary respite for the debtors, a glimpse of a time when debts would be lowered, and a place where rejoicing could be heard. This may not be a parable of the reign of God,” he concedes, “but it suggests how the weapons of the weak can produce results in a world dominated by the strong.”^[14]

This is a parable of systemic resistance. In all of its moral complexity, there is much to ponder, much that remains, we might say, resistant to resolution. Yet in its resistance, this parable can remind us to look for Christ’s powerful presence, to honor already existing and to cultivate new friendships with those most pressed down in this moment, those most silenced, most cast aside, most vulnerable, most angry, most hurt, most afraid. This may not be a parable that straight-forwardly reveals God’s reign, but the wisdom and power of divine friendship yet shines through it, a practice of abundance toward God.

^[1] Justo Gonzalez also compares these two parables in Luke: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 191-192.

^[2] Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1985, 2002), 302; Fred B. Craddock, “Luke” in HarperCollins Bible Commentary (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), 947; William R. Herzog II., Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 233; Gonzalez, Luke, 190.

^[3] Herzog, 247

^[4] Herzog, 249-250

^[5] Herzog, 253

^[6] Herzog, 252

^[7] Herzog, 252-253

^[8] Enriching Our Worship I. (New York: Church Publishing, 1998), 56.

^[9] Gonzalez, 193

^[10] Capon, 307

^[11] Herzog, 256

^[12] Gonzalez, 193

^[13] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110-113.

^[14] Herzog, 258. And as Walter Brueggemann writes, “The instruction that follows the parable seems to deplore preoccupation with market wealth and also to affirm that there is a very different kind of wealth that is to concern the disciple community.” Money and Possessions (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016), 199.