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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)
What it does do is commend the manager for his shrewdness in using managing accounts to create relationships for him to fall back on when his current employment ends.
What I glean from this story is a call to look at my priorities within our system as I imagine and work toward a different iteration of our world. What am I prioritizing? Is wealth, creating more capital in order to create even more capital, my priority? Or am I prioritizing people, using the current world and its resources to create relationships with others? Am I prioritizing relationships with people over and above the rules that capitalism continues to try to program us with as to how to play its game? If we do this, in the end, we may make less and our net worths may be less, but our investments in people and in relationships will be greater or possibly developed in a different direction than our present capitalist system would have sent us.
I mentioned Biden’s modest student loan forgiveness program last week. For some parts of the country, Biden’s approval ratings have shot up as a result of him doing exactly what we read about in this week’s story. In the story, a steward told people who owed money to cancel portions of their debts to increase his favor with them, and the manager doing this was not moralistically scolded but commended as being wise.
The uproar among some Christians about Biden’s recent actions reminds me of how this story attributed to Jesus has troubled wealthy Jesus followers from the start. But to those scratching out an existence in the 1st Century and the economically marginalized who comprised most of the early Jesus movement, this story must have resonated deeply. It was this demographic, like today, who deeply wished someone would step in and simply cancel or forgive their debt.
I like that we have an example from our sacred stories of Jesus that mirrors what we see happening around us in our modern society here in the U.S. It’s nice to see our U.S. government economically doing something I actually agree with, which is a rarity. I like the idea of forgiving debt for people who are victims of predatory loans for something as valuable as an education. I wish all of it was forgiven! I want to live in a more educated society and support using part of our society’s wealth to create a more educated populace. It encourages me that despite those Christian friends who are up in arms about this small amount of loan forgiveness, this week’s story tells us this is exactly the kind of thing we should favor as Jesus followers.
So which value system have we allowed to shape us more: Are we capitalists first or are we Jesus followers first? Have we allowed the values and ethics of the Jesus story that we hold so dear to shape the kinds of people we are becoming, or have we allowed the value system of capitalism to shape how we see the world.
These questions are far more than partisan politics. They help me to question what it is that I’m choosing to shape the way I live.
What is shaping you?
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