Tag Archives: justice

Working with Unjust Wealth

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There is much puzzlement about the parable of the mid-manager who is dismissed from his office. (Lk. 16: 1–9) Not least is the question as to whether we should called him “the Dishonest Manger,” as does the NRSV, or the “unjust manager” as many other English translations have it. The Greek word here is adikaios. This is in the dikaios word group which normally is translated as “justice “ or “righteousness.” Here, it is preceded by the alpha privative so that literally it means a manager without justice or righteousness. Dishonest mangers do have that lack, but since the word dikaios occurs frequently in the New Testament meaning justice and/or righteousness, I think it is preferable to say that the manager is unrighteous rather than dishonest. The unjust Judge who would only do justice for the widow when pestered by the widow was also described by the word adikaios, which is clearly best translated as “unjust.” (Lk. 18: 6) There is a significant difference in the two English terms and since this parable is very opaque, we can use all the clarity we can get. This understanding of the word gains more credence when we note that the unrighteous manager is not accused of embezzlement but of squandering the property of the rich man who had hired him. There is also the matter of the rich man acting on hearsay without apparently doing any independent investigation.

The unrighteous manager’s inner dialogue is realistic and pragmatic. He is quite clear about the ulterior motive behind his scheme of lowering the debts of his former boss’s clients: that these people will welcome him into their homes for what he has done for them. It appears that the unrighteous manger is cheating his former master, but it is possible that he was receiving a commission on the notes and was deducting what would have been his share. That the former master chuckles over what his fired employee has done suggests that he had not suffered further loss over these transactions. It’s hard to see how the Kingdom of God can be like this sort of moral muddle, and Jesus does not, in fact, say the Kingdom of God is like this. So what does a parable like this have to do with the Kingdom of God?

The parable suggests that handling money is intrinsically problematic, and the greedier one is, the more problematic it is. Both the rich man and the people who owe the rich man material goods come across as wanting best value for their money. Almost all of us do that and that is why this parable mirrors our involvement with money and other material goods. Calling the wealth “unjust” rather than “dishonest” better captures the systemic injustice of the world’s economic system. The unrighteous manger is the only one in the parable who acts generously even if that is only under duress: unless the “squandering” of the rich man’s property involved being generous with the goods he was responsible for. Given recent events, I can’t help but think of the refusal of some politicians to “squander” money on helping those most in need of assistance.

Indeed, Jesus shifts the focus from handling money in this world to the relationship between how generous we are with money in terms of our eternal destiny: “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.” (Lk. 16: 9) Jesus then goes on with a few other comments, the most pertinent being “No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (:Lk. 16: 13) The rich man and the clients who owe the rich man goods are caught in serving wealth, while the unrighteous manager seems to have freed himself from it to some extent. By mirroring the morally chaotic life of pursuing wealth, Jesus alerts us to the need to escape this rat race by aiming for “the eternal homes.” So where is the Kingdom of God? It isn’t here unless we all practice the generosity of the unrighteous steward which disrupts the system he was living in up to the time he was fired.

Unjust Judges and Widows

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crosswButterfliesThe introduction to the Parable of the Unjust Judge tells us that we should keep on praying and never give up. At the end of the parable, Jesus tells us that we should keep on praying even when our prayers go unanswered for so long that we think we are praying to one who does not care and perhaps is not even just.

It happens that in life, nagging and nagging is often the only way to get justice, or what we think is justice. There are some people who are eager to help and will hop to a request as soon as it is spoken, but many people are rather slow to do what is asked of them, and many people have vested interests in denying pleas for justice. These are the people who have more power than others and they usually use that power to take advantage of those who are weaker. Do the people with power take an initiative in renouncing their power for the benefit of others? Do people with power renounce it when politely requested to do so? We all know that doesn’t happen very often. Even in the top-down case of Czar Alexander II freeing the serfs in Russia, the class structure in Russia didn’t change very much.

Most of us instinctively identify with the widow who is trying to get justice. As widows, we expect that God’s granting of justice involves God strong-arming the unjust judges of the world until all of us widows get our rights. But that is not what happened with Jesus. Far from dismantling the unjust rule of the Romans, Jesus himself was condemned to death by the unjust judges among the Jewish leaders, the Roman governor, and the rest of us in the crowd. As the culmination of the persecuted prophets, Jesus reveals God to be the widow who is pleading with us, for justice.

That is. we are the unjust judges. Even people with little power overall tend to be unjust judges over those (such as children) who have even less power. This portrait of humanity raises the question as to whether it is God who delays justice. If humans act unjustly and delay justice to the point that injustice is a longstanding epidemic, then God could have been working overtime since the dawn of civilization and still have no hope of keeping up with the injustice.

Jesus as the crucified widow who died at our hands, the unjust judges, is not what we were looking for when we thought of ourselves as widows. But that is what we got. Not only that, but we also got the resurrected widow who still pleads for justice without ceasing. As the resurrected widow, Jesus has offered us, the unjust judges, forgiveness and the offer to enter into the kingship of Jesus. The parable suggests that we enter as importunate widows who plead with forgiveness and love for the unjust judges as some of our greatest leaders have done, leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Desmond Tutu. But we also enter the kingship of Heaven as repentant unjust judges. In the parable, the Unjust Judge only relents because he is more miserable from being hassled by the widow than he is with any power he might lose by giving her justice. But at least the Unjust Judge finally does the right thing, even if his motives are as selfish as those of the Dishonest Steward in the earlier parable. (Lk. 16: 10–13) Maybe if we start to do the right thing, however grudgingly, we might find that doing the right thing, of granting justice to those weaker than we, isn’t so bad after all. Maybe giving justice can become a habit.

What does this parable teach us about prayer? It surely teaches us to pray constantly like the importunate widow, and to thirst for justice, as the Sermon on the Mount would have us do. However, we are not praying to a strong man who will manhandle the bad guys for us. (We would be among those so manhandled in that case.) We are praying with God the Crucified and Risen Widow who offers us freedom from our own injustice so that we can spread justice to others with a burning desire.

See also Jesus the Helpless Widow for another post developing the same ideas with a different slant or two.

Principalities and Powers

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WilliamGuestsChurch1Jesus was not crucified by just one person; he was crucified by a social system. The Gospels and the apostolic preaching in Acts show clearly how hostile social systems in Jerusalem came together to create a larger social system that was united solely by the agreement to put Jesus to death. By quoting from the persecution psalms, these sources suggest that persecutory social systems have always been a part of humanity. René Girard has demonstrated how mythology covers up and yet still points to this same persecutory mechanism. It is such social systems that Paul calls the “principalities and powers” of the world. These principalities get their power from the collective cohesiveness of persecution. This collective power is overwhelming to the individual within this system. Hence the transcendent power they have for Paul. However, Paul also says that the principalities and powers have been dismantled and nailed to the cross by Jesus. The forgiving victim is gathering a radically different social system that not only does not require the sacrifice of the victim but totally precludes such a thing. Paul says that if the principalities and powers had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. Because they did, we have some ability, by the grace of God, for seeing the fundamental signs of a society that is still run, at least in part, by the principalities and powers and for seeing what are the signs of the Kingdom that the Risen and Forgiving Victim has opened up for us.

A society run by the principalities and powers is punitive. Some people may think that is a good thing, but in  a punitive society, somebody must be to blame whenever anything goes wrong or even seems to go wrong. That is, somebody must be punished. When a society needs to have somebody punished, then this need takes precedence over justice. It is better for an innocent person to suffer than for the corporate rage of the society to suffer for lack of an object of that rage.  It follows that the Law of Tit for Tat reigns. There is no room for mercy. Every offense must be met in equal measure. As long as this Law reigns, there is no end in sight to the spiral of retaliation. In Jesus’ Kingdom, restoration of relationships is the corporate desire when things go wrong. The pain of this restoration might feel like punishment for some, but the pain is remedial, moving toward reconciliation.

In the society of the Principalities and Powers, somebody is always expendable. Caiaphas’ dictum that it is better that one person die than that the whole nation should perish is “gospel.” Collateral damage is an acceptable price to pay for objectives deemed good to those who are running the show. Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep that the shepherd seeks until he finds it and brings it back to the fold shows that in Jesus’ Kingdom, nobody is expendable.

The society of the Principalities and Powers is dualistic.  There has to be an “in” group and an “out” group. The society’s identity is based on what is wrong with those people, the enemy.  If we are to love our enemies, as Jesus teaches, then enemies do not define us in any way.

Most devastating of all, the society of the Principalities and Powers is mendacious. The need to cover up the truth of collective violence in primitive societies carries over to the most sophisticated of modern societies. Part of this mendacity is to blame the victim. The blame that many US politicians cast on women who are raped is a particularly grisly example. Victims of lynching, too, were blamed for what happened to them.

Here is the choice. Where is our treasure? Where is our heart?