Year C, Proper 20 | Luke 16:1-13
St. James’ Episcopal Church
September 21, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, including the sermon, please visit this page.
“No slave can serve two masters…” – Luke 16:13[1]
Today’s parable might just be the most confusing one in the Bible. A wasteful manager, who’s about to get fired, uses his last bit of authority to embezzle money, reducing other people’s debts so they’ll be more willing to help him out once he’s lost his job. And then the boss praises the thief! It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially if we’re looking to the Bible primarily for guidance on morality.
Now, there are a few things that might be going on here. One is that this illustration contains a bunch of 1st Century Middle Eastern colloquialisms or might be a variation on a then-familiar, now-lost event or story that Jesus is somehow adapting and inverting. If either of those are the case, we might never be able to figure out the real point of what he’s saying.
Another possibility is that Luke is trying to use this tale as a bridge between the previous chapter’s parables and upcoming ones. Last week we heard about the owner hunting down the lost sheep and the lady sweeping her house clean in order to find a coin. For some reason I can only guess at, the Lectionary skipped over the third in that series: the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
We think of those stories as comforting expositions on how God seeks out every last one of us and welcomes us home, but that interpretation, popular as it is, doesn’t account for some key points. People in Jesus’ time would have thought these characters were idiots. “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”[2] No one, that’s who. Without fences or oversight, livestock don’t stay put. Risking ninety-nine perfectly good sheep for one that probably already got eaten is foolish. After all, your ninety-nine are likely to produce a lot more than one in the next few months anyway.
The same goes for the woman and the coin. Growing up, I remember preachers talking about how valuable the coins were and how this money would allow the woman to survive for the rest of her life if her husband died. But none of that is true. The coin was worth about one-third of a day’s wage—enough to feed one person for one day. While not being nothing, completely upending a household would probably have been more work than the coin was worth. And then throwing a party—as the sheep owner also did—would more than consume the value of what the people had recovered.[3]
And rather than the sort of touching family reunion we’ve been taught to imagine with the Prodigal Son, the story is really more of a farce. The younger son callously severs all connections to his family, essentially rejecting his entire history, culture, and community while throwing away every last bit of security and status society of that era might have offered him. The standard—and appropriate—response would have been for the father to formally disown him.[4] Bringing him back on, even as a slave, would have been a stroke of incredible generosity and compassion. To welcome him back the way he does would have been utterly absurd, even shameful. The older brother, then, is the only one who behaves like people would have expected, yet his choices leave him out miserable in the cold.
Those three tales, rather than being about seeking out the lost or God’s boundless love, seem to be shining a light on people’s willingness to participate in (or throw) a celebration despite others’ foolish behavior, something directly in keeping with the reason Jesus told the stories in the first place: people questioning his character because he, in public, enjoyed the company of people others assumed had questionable character. So it’s really more like he’s saying, “Look, you’ve got two choices: you can fuss about the other guests, or you can enjoy the party. Either way, the event’s already started, and we’re all still here together.”
Having said all that, since Jesus’ upcoming parables revolve around wealth and greed, squishing in today’s story about the victim of a robbery foolishly praising a thief’s generosity with the stolen goods could be a not-quite-successful attempt at a segue.
However, even that doesn’t seem to be quite the right point. These narratives might not be tales of God’s efforts to recover what’s lost or nudges for us to take the opportunities we can to enjoy life even when others might judge. Behind it all, I think this might connect with Jesus’ love/hate sayings we read a few weeks ago—another attempt to lead us into questioning our words and behaviors around what we say is important to us.
Our society really likes to talk about “the sanctity of life,” but when it comes down to it, most of us treat others—especially people we don’t know—as commodities, as items meant to be consumed, rather than as children of God. What we value are things—money, fancy gadgets, and other stuff. We then use people as a tool for us to obtain those items. I think Jesus is trying to flop that right-side-up, challenging us to recognize it’s more appropriate for us to use things as a means of demonstrating how much we value people.
Which do we actually love, our neighbor, or our property? Which do we spend our lives facing and to which are we turning our backs? Which dominates our lives and consumes our time, effort, energy, and focus?
I regularly remind St. Andrew’s that the Great Commandment, which we read together earlier in the service, isn’t meant to set up a hierarchy: it doesn’t tell us to first love God and then choose how and when we find it appropriate to love our neighbor. It’s a statement that balances truth, that sets the two we often treat as conflicting into full equivalency: how do I know if I truly love God? Look at how I treat the people around me.
So take an honest look at your life and consider, what do my actions show is actually my god? What dominates my thoughts and draws the majority of my attention? To what do I readily and frequently offer my time and interest? On what do I spend my resources? Toward which does my energy actually go, and which do I tend to ignore or set aside for later?
And seeing that, what, then, must I do to change?
“No slave can serve two masters….You cannot serve God and wealth.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Luke 15:4 | emphasis added
[3] I’m guessing the guests at the first party probably would have eaten the sheep!
[4] We call the process in Roman culture “emancipation,” but it had little to do with someone celebrating newfound freedom. It was more about dropping dead weight from an extended family.