There's a Strangeness in God's Mercy

Evan D Garner

Sep 21

September 21, 2025 – The 15th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 20C
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

“Clever girl.” Those were the last words ever uttered by Robert Muldoon, the game warden of Jurassic Park, who was played by the late actor Bob Peck. As you may recall from the film, Muldoon had left the bunker in the visitor’s center along with Dr. Ellie Sattler to go and switch the power back on after the decision had been made to reboot all of the park’s computer systems in an attempt to regain control after a security breech. The reboot had worked, but someone had to go out to the electricity shed to flip the power back on manually.

As Sattler and Muldoon approached the electricity shed, they noticed that the high-voltage fence around the velociraptor enclosure had been chewed through, confirming the warden’s worst fear. A renowned big game hunter, Muldoon knew that he had never encountered anything as intelligent and deadly as a velociraptor. Sure enough, after taking only a few steps into the jungle habitat, Sattler said to Muldoon, “I can see the shed from her. We can make it if we run.” But her counterpart, through clenched teeth, replied, “No, we can’t…we’re being hunted.”

After telling Sattler to make a run for it, Muldoon stealthily approached the raptor he had spied between the trees. Once it was in his sights, Muldoon unfolded the stock on his shotgun and took aim at his prey. But, before he could get a shot off, a rustle in the trees to his left caught his attention. A second velociraptor had flanked his position, using the first as a decoy. “Clever girl,” he said, in admiration of the predator, which then swiftly attacked and killed him.

I think you can respect—even admire—a terrible thing without celebrating what it does. I think you can separate the art from the artist, the ingenuity from the genius, the shrewdness from the dishonesty. But, as Jesus teaches us in the parable of the dishonest manager, no matter what it requires of us, we cannot separate ourselves from our place in the kingdom of God.

“There was a rich man who had a manager,” Jesus said to his disciples, “and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property.” This must be among the most difficult of Jesus’ parables to understand. Upon learning that he was about to be fired, the manager panicked. “I’m not strong enough to dig ditches, and I’m too proud to beg,” he said to himself. “I know what I’ll do: before I’m out of a job, I’ll curry favor with all my master’s debtors by cancelling large portions of what they owe so that they’ll take care of me when I’m in need.” When the master learned what his manager had done, he commended him for his shrewdness. And, if that weren’t confusing enough, Jesus then said to his disciples, “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.”

This is why I love parables. They are like thought bridges between this world and the kingdom of God, which only those who belong to God’s reign are able to traverse. They give us glimpses into the strangeness—the otherworldliness—of God’s reign, and only when we immerse ourselves in that reign do these parables begin to make sense. To the children of this age—the citizens of the kingdoms of this world—Jesus’ parables are often impenetrable stories that become harder to understand the more you push against them. But, to Jesus’ disciples—to those who are content to rest in the strangeness of God’s kingdom—the meaning of parables begins to flow freely. In that way, parables are a little like oobleck—that strange mixture of corn starch and water, which, as a non-Newtonian fluid, has a viscosity that increases when you apply force to it. The harder you push, the harder it becomes.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about parables in general and see if this particularly difficult example can provide a model for how accepting the strangeness of a parable helps us receive the otherworldliness of God’s reign. As I read the parable of the dishonest manager closely and compare it with the wide range of interpretations that have been offered throughout the centuries, I think we can identify three basic guidelines that help us make sense of Jesus’ parables and thus help us hear what he is really trying to say.

The first principle is to resist allegory. Not every parable is an allegory, and when you try to make each character and every element line up perfectly with some aspect of the economy of salvation, you often lose the point. For example, in today’s parable, you might be tempted to associate the master with God. He’s clearly the one with the power. He gets to determine the fate of the manager. But, if the master is a stand-in for God, what does that mean for those of us who are the stewards of God’s resources? Are we, like the manager, supposed to lie and cheat our way to God’s good pleasure? Some interpreters are so eager to turn parables into allegories that they end up saying things about God and humankind that just don’t make sense.

Instead, start by allowing the characters in a parable to stand for themselves. You may have noticed throughout Luke’s gospel account that Jesus doesn’t usually have a lot of nice things to say about rich people, and the fact that Jesus identifies the master of the parable as a rich man probably means that we aren’t supposed to admire him as a God-like figure. While it’s true that some parables are intentionally allegorical—think, for example, of the parable of the sower and the seed—when we force an allegory onto a parable where it won’t fit, it’s like punching a bowl full of oobleck. It resists us. Instead, I like to think of parables more like Impressionist paintings: the overarching sentiment that they convey often carries more truth than an appeal to exacting detail.

The second principle I want to suggest is to resist overdoing it. I think we often encounter Jesus’ parables and want them to do more for us that Jesus intended them to do. Not every story is designed to tell us everything about everything. If you read today’s parable and expect it to tell you how to run a business or show you what the final judgment looks like, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, if you can find the main point of a parable, don’t let go of it. The main point is often the only point that Jesus is trying make.

That means that parables aren’t complex riddles waiting to be solved. They’re specific teachings, often about very specific things. While we do trust the Holy Spirit to teach us things that Jesus did not himself teach, when we force his parables to say more than he intended to say, we usually miss what’s really going on. We must learn to be satisfied with less. What is given to us is enough.

The final principle I want to offer is to trust the gospel. Parables are strange, and they will often challenge our assumptions about how to be faithful in this life, but they will not challenge the clear teachings of God. If we think the parable of the dishonest manager is teaching us to be dishonest, we’ve missed the point. The owner commends the manager for his shrewdness, and Jesus encourages his disciples to approach the reign of God with a similar mindset, but that doesn’t mean that Jesus is telling us to lie and cheat our way into the kingdom of God. If you read a parable and reach a conclusion that sounds nothing like what Jesus would say, you’re probably on the wrong track.

So how do we trust the gospel? By staying immersed in it. By reading it every day. By noticing to whom Jesus is speaking and to what issue he is responding. By recognizing how a particular parable fits in with the overall good news of Jesus Christ. Our interpretation of a parable must stretch our understanding of how God’s reign breaks into this world without undermining the integrity of that reign.

Whenever Jesus tells us a parable, he wants us to see something that the world cannot teach us about belonging to God. The children of this age, Jesus observes, are more shrewd in dealing with earthly matters than the children of light. They are better than us at cutting under-the-table deals with their master’s debtors in order to secure for themselves a comfortable life in this world. But that’s now how Christians behave.

As followers of Jesus, we do not belong to this world, and Jesus wants us to remember that our ways are not the world’s ways. We aren’t as good as our earth-bound counterparts at managing worldly things like wealth and power, but that doesn’t mean that those things are off-limits to us. Jesus tells us to use that dishonest wealth—literally the mammon of unrighteousness—to make friends so that, when there is no longer such a thing as wealth—when God’s reign is complete—we will have used our earthly resources not to make our lives in this world more comfortable but to secure for ourselves a place in heaven.

What does it look like when the people of God use their earthly resources to make God’s reign a fuller reality in this life? What do our lives look like when we use our money to make the sorts of friends who will welcome us into heaven? Jesus was a friend of the poor. Jesus was a friend of the downtrodden. Jesus was a friend of sinners. What would your household budget look like if you devoted your resources to the good and godly purpose of being friends with the friends of Jesus?

I don’t think there’s much about our economy—about the way the finances of the world work—that belongs in the kingdom of God. I’m pretty sure Jesus meant what he said when he told us to sell our possessions and give the money to the poor in order to follow him. But, absent a radical act of dispossession, I think this parable shows us how to use the resources of the world to build up capital in heaven. Wealth itself may be unrighteous, but how we use it doesn’t have to be. That strange way of being may not make sense to those whose hearts belong to the kingdoms of this world, but, to those whose hearts belong to God, that truth pours out as life abundant, flowing as freely as God’s love.