Luke 16:1–13
Ok, let’s be honest. This parable is weird. Parables often elude easy interpretation, but this one seems to keep twisting and turning.
First things first: It seems unlikely that Jesus meant for the “master” to stand in for God. Let’s take that interpretation off the table.
With that out of the way, what is happening here? While the Roman imperial class system was very different from contemporary capitalism, one possibility is that we could have a parallel here about the choices faced by those in “middle management.” We have a parable about a manager who has to choose whether to put his trust in his boss, or in the people he has been trasked with extracting wealth from. He has to choose who he will serve: God, or money.
Earlier this month, the renowned organizer and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich passed away. Among her many contributions to contemporary liberation movements is her concept of the “professional managerial class”—those whose social function is as an intermediary between workers and owners.
While people have endlessly debated the meaning of this term in the forty-five years since she introduced it, Ehrenreich wanted us to understand how people’s class aspirations can undermine solidarity. In an interview before her death, she said,
“Sometimes, like in healthcare, it’s very hard to get nurses to form alliances with the technicians and even the lower-level nursing staff. And that’s because nurses have such a fragile grip on professionalism themselves. They’re still not taken seriously by doctors and administrators. I can understand it, but these are the things organizers have to work on step by step.”
Who do we build with—our bosses, or workers? Who do we serve—God, or money? While people in the PMC are rarely given as clear a choice as this parable presents, there are myriad small choices every day. And we must choose who to serve.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.