The puzzling aspect of most of the parables is exacerbated, I think, when they are plucked out of their literary context: just an isolated pericope* with none of the surrounding narrative to give any sense as to why the author included it.
The Gospels are not lists of stand-alone readings, like those books you can get that give you a little thought for the day every day for a year. Each of the gospel writers assembled their material in a particular order. Especially when Mark, Luke and Matthew have material in common, it's interesting - nay, vital - to ask why they select and order their material differently, and how they place it in the narrative flow. The little connections - "the tax collectors were listening" "he sat alone beside the lake" "the Pharisees were scoffing" - are often what give the clue to the sense the gospel writer is giving.
Read in isolation, the parable of the unjust steward seems to have a highly confused landowner who first condemns his manager for squandering money, and then commending him for squandering even more. What's going on there?
But read further out from the parable. Who is Jesus talking to? And what else does he say? Luke 15:1-2 names the audience: "Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” There's a double layer of audience here - the crowd of follwers hanging on Jesus' every word, and the religious eavesdroppers who are variously seen trying to trip Jesus up with trick questions, or silence him with ridicule.
Jesus, in Luke's telling, tells this particular audience three stories about lost things, the third of which is the lost (AKA Prodigal) son - which, when you think about it, is another story about one person taking the wealth of a landowner and squandering it for no good reason. Continue in Luke's narrative, and it says, "Now he was also saying to his disciples..." - a phrase that suggests the parable of the unjust steward follows straight on from the prodigal son. Another story about profligacy, this time the unjust steward who is just a bad manager. Money leaking out here and there, he is clearly not taking care of his employer's property, but he is taking care of himself. And so he gets the sack; he loses his place in the safety of employment and, it seems from the text, the tied housing that goes with it. His response would seem, at one level, to be an even worse act - this time he acts fraudulently, not just carelessly. And in a twist we aren't expecting, instead of flying into a rage, the employer is impressed. Note that it doesn't say the guy got his job back. Just that the employer was impressed.
Then what happens? First, Jesus comments that "the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light," and goes on to say you can't serve God and love money at the same time. And then Luke throws us back out to the audience - the disciples who are listening to Jesus, and also: "the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and were scoffing at Him."
So three things strike me.
1) the parable doesn't actually say that the Employer is like God, and the steward is the sinner. That's what we always jump to - we expect to find a God-and-me story. What it says is that an employer who was absolutely loaded, and wanted his money taken care of, was impressed by another guy who used his smarts to look after himself too. "The sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind". Perhaps Jesus means that neither the employer nor the employee were "like God" or "like me" - but that whether you are law abiding or not, if you love money more than anything else you'll miss the point of everything.
2) the person who ends up cancelling debts is not the Employer but the manager. In the previous parable (the lost/prodigal son) it's the father that cancels debts. So while there is profligate waste in each, and while in each parable the person who has just ruined their own lives ends up making a crazy plan to try and save themselves, the dynamic of debt cancelling plays out quite differently.
3) The parable only makes sense if you ask who was listening to it within Luke's narrative - some disciples, including tax collectors (Luke 15:1), and some scoffing, sniping scribes and Pharisees (Luke 16:14). It's perhaps an apt story for tax collectors, who were renowned for extorting unfair commission. One commentator suggests that the Unjust Steward was re-writing the clients' bills in order to remove his own commission, and only charge what the Employer demanded - thus building up some camaraderie with his clients. This is self-serving, not altruistic, but at least it refocused the Steward from money onto community. The one redeeming feature of the story, then, is that the Unjust Steward cooks the books at the end for the sake of relationship with others. But this doesn't make it parallel to the Prodigal son, in which the wronged Father is the main character who rushes to reinstate his beloved, fallen son. Instead, this parable tells a different story in which the employer plays very little part. He commends the actions of the Steward, even though he has sacked him - because he recognizes in the Steward's dishonesty his own tendency to love money more than anything.
Perhaps, then, Jesus is using the story to show that all of us are managers of what we have been entrusted. What are we going to use it for? The love of the things, of the wealth, of the possessions? Treating what we've been given as if we owned it ourselves? Or using it with a degree of profligacy to create community? In the end it's not a story about business ethics, but about a deeper level of motivation: what do I most care about?
And right on cue, the response to the story comes not from the tax collectors, who might have said, "Great idea, Jesus, I'll stop the extortion right away..." but from the Pharisees, "who were lovers of money", who scoffed at him. You can imagine it, can't you? - you know the sort of abuse people always dish out when they are trying to deflect attention away from their own achilles heel:
"Ridiculous story. Stupid idiot."and on and on. They scoffed at him precisely because he'd nailed their deepest motivation: to protect their wealth and possessions.
"Never even went to college, what does he know?"
"Stupid woman, harridan, she should concentrate on getting a man before she loses her looks."
"So out of date!! Hasn't he even read Derrida?"
This is not a sermon; it's not even an essay, just a stream of consciousness jotting of notes. But the point is this: parables aren't necessarily allegories of God-and-me. And if you want to make sense of why they appear in the narrative, check out the whole narrative, not just the little piece that is clipped out of context. The gospel writers weren't just collectors of sayings, they were authors of narratives.
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*pericope ( pəˈrikəpē/ ) is a technical term for a small extract of text, most commonly found in biblical studies.
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