Luke 16:1-13, a man robs his employer, gets caught and then on his way out the door, robs him a second time, bigger and nobody stops him. The master does not reverse it, the master does not punish him, the master does the one thing a robbed man should never do, he claps. And then Jesus, the one telling the parable, claps too, no thunder clap, no. The steward was cast into outer darkness, the rebuke you are bracing for the entire parable never comes, that missing rebuke is the whole key, hold on to it. This parable confused people so badly, that the early church fathers wrote entire treatises trying to make it behave, medieval commentators argued over it for centuries and most modern preachers, when their reading plan drags them into Luke 16:1-13, quietly turn the page and preach something safer.
Three groups, 2,000 years, one parable nobody wants to touch, on the surface, it says something Christianity cannot possibly mean, that dishonesty pays, that cheating your boss is clever, that Jesus tips his hat to a con man, that cannot be what is says and it is not. But to see what it actually says, what Jesus’ first audience heard in their bones the moment he opened his mouth, you have to walk into the world this parable is set in. The estate, the honor system, the legal power of a household manager in the Roman world, the strange bond between a wealthy master and the slave who ran his entire fortune.
Once you see that world, the parable stops being an embarrassment, it becomes one of surgical things Jesus ever said and it ends with the cleanest dividing line in all of scripture, you cannot serve God and mammon. Why does the master commend the steward, he just cheated him, he just cost him a fortune in oil and wheat and the man he robbed turns around and calls it well done. Notice the first four words of verse one, “and he said also,” also, this parable does not start a new subject, it continues one. But first, to understand the crime, you have to understand the criminal’s job, you have to know what an the Greek word “oikonomon” actually was.
Steward is oikonomon, it is the root of our word economy. Oikos, house, nemo, management, the one who manages the house, but do not picture a butler. In the first century Greco-Roman world, an oikonomon was not a servant who poured the wine, he was the legal manager of an entire estate, the chief executive of the household, he handled the finances, the contracts, the land leases, the labor agreements, the buying and selling of grain and oil and wine across an operation that could span a region. Most often the oikonomon was a slave, a trusted slave with breathtaking authority.
Three groups, 2,000 years, one parable nobody wants to touch, on the surface, it says something Christianity cannot possibly mean, that dishonesty pays, that cheating your boss is clever, that Jesus tips his hat to a con man, that cannot be what is says and it is not. But to see what it actually says, what Jesus’ first audience heard in their bones the moment he opened his mouth, you have to walk into the world this parable is set in. The estate, the honor system, the legal power of a household manager in the Roman world, the strange bond between a wealthy master and the slave who ran his entire fortune.
Once you see that world, the parable stops being an embarrassment, it becomes one of surgical things Jesus ever said and it ends with the cleanest dividing line in all of scripture, you cannot serve God and mammon. Why does the master commend the steward, he just cheated him, he just cost him a fortune in oil and wheat and the man he robbed turns around and calls it well done. Notice the first four words of verse one, “and he said also,” also, this parable does not start a new subject, it continues one. But first, to understand the crime, you have to understand the criminal’s job, you have to know what an the Greek word “oikonomon” actually was.
Steward is oikonomon, it is the root of our word economy. Oikos, house, nemo, management, the one who manages the house, but do not picture a butler. In the first century Greco-Roman world, an oikonomon was not a servant who poured the wine, he was the legal manager of an entire estate, the chief executive of the household, he handled the finances, the contracts, the land leases, the labor agreements, the buying and selling of grain and oil and wine across an operation that could span a region. Most often the oikonomon was a slave, a trusted slave with breathtaking authority.
