Hello and welcome to Monday’s Foundations podcast. My name is James. Thank you very much to Helen for last week’s podcasts. I know it’s half term in Sheffield – I can imagine many of you are tuning in on the way to the beach – blasting this out through the radio – for the rest of us, we are holding the fort – we’re hardcore. Well done for making the space to hear from the Bible today. Today we are picking up in Luke 16: 1 – 15. Let me pray for us before we hear part of the story read out.

Dear God, thank you for the Bible and for each person listening in today. Would you use this time to GROW our relationship with you and to encourage us today. Amen.

REFLECTION:

We are going to read verses 1-9 – and I plan to share some short and helpful comments as we go through the story.

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager

1 Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2 So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’

So there is this Alan Sugar moment where the manager is called in and called out on how he has been careless with this opportunity. He basically gets fired.

3 “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— 4 I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

5 “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

6 “‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied.

“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

Just for the sense of scale, I read, in preparation for this podcast, that this amount of debt is twenty – twenty fives times larger than the annual produce of an ordinary family farm . It is a pretty huge sum.

7 “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’

“‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied.

“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’

8 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.

What a weird response! The manager calls him shrewd (smart, perceptive – often with a mischievous edge). The message version uses a different phrase… it calls the manager street-smart. Painting the picture that he just knew the way the world worked. It seems this story is all about management and mismanagement when it comes to resources and the punchline is use-it-or-lose-it. There is no point holding resources back that will soon be taken away. The manager trades up this financial opportunity to leverage relational capital in the future. You would think the rich man would be furious for stabbing him in the back, but to our surprise he celebrates him.

This has got me thinking about what is celebrated in our day and age. We don’t have Patron-Client relationships like described in this story and we don’t often do deals in olive oil and wheat but some of the principles at play here are piercingly true of our day and age.

Our world still celebrates opportunists, del-boys and wheeler-dealers and the phrase “well it’s just business” covers a multitude of sins. Think about the celebrity tax scandals in the last three years or the Panama papers in 2016. Those that can are taking the opportunities afforded to them – and the rest of us must make do. Just thinking about the icons we are surrounded by in the news and the media… it’s not often the faithful and the diligent but those that appear famous for being famous. Their talent lies in their ability to create and/or take...