This week I preached on a passage that never shows up in the lectionary cycle: the parable Jesus told right after his encounter with Zacchaeus. It is not an easy story to digest, but it felt worth talking about.
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If you were to pick up a poetry anthology for a high school or college class, one of the poems that would most likely be in it is a short poem by William Carlos Williams called “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Teachers and professors love to read it with students, one, because it is only sixteen words long, and two, because it sounds simple and enigmatic all at once. Listen to the poem:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
You can rest assured that there are volumes written to explain what Williams was saying in these sixteen words, even though the whole thing sounds pretty straight forward because the words are so simple. I will leave you to chase the meaning down on your own time; I simply want to use the poem as an example of something that is not as apparent as it seems because that is what we are dealing with in our parable this morning. We are going to have to do some work to get to the heart of what Jesus was saying in our passage for today.
To do that, we need to remember where we are in the story of Jesus’ life as told to us by Luke. As Mark noted when he read the passage, Jesus told the parable right after Zacchaeus made his promises of repentance. He was still standing next to Jesus, waiting for him to come over for dinner. But we need to back up a little more.
A quick recap: Jesus and his disciples were on their way to the town of Jericho (a stop on their way for Jesus’ final visit to Jerusalem) when Jesus started talking about prayer and told the parable about the persistent widow and the judge who had to learn how to listen; then he told the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple, underlining that God listened to both of them; then a bunch of little children came to Jesus and the disciples scolded their parents, saying Jesus had more important people to see, but Jesus corrected them and said there no was no one more important that those little ones; then came the ruler who had a good question about how to have eternal life but wasn’t willing to live with Jesus’ answer to give away everything; then, on the outskirts of Jericho, came the blind man who called out to be healed and Jesus told him his trust in God had given him his sight; and then came Zacchaeus, who climbed a tree and ended up seeing the world in a whole new way.
And then Jesus told this story.
A wealthy and powerful man—who had inherited his wealth and power—was planning to travel to a distant land to declare himself ruler there. Before he left, he called ten men whom he had enslaved and gave each of them one mina, the equivalent of four months wages, and told them to “do some business” while he was gone. He was not offering them a chance to get out of their enslavement; he just wanted them to make more money for him. When he got to the other country, the people there rebelled, but he seized power anyway. When he came back, he called the servants in for a report on their efforts. The first had earned ten more mints–1000% return–and the king put him in charge of ten cities. The second made five minas–not too shabby–and was given authority over five cities. The third (and we only hear about three of the ten) said, “I knew you were the kind of person who takes stuff you didn’t earn for yourself and harvests things you didn’t plant, so I just kept your money safe. Here it is, just as you gave it to me.”
The ruler went ballistic. He took the mina and gave it to the one who had gotten the biggest return, saying, basically, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (the ruler’s words, not Jesus’), and then he called for the people who had rejected him in the other country to be rounded up and killed.
Hey, Happy Thanksgiving.
If you search online for sermons about this passage, you will find any number of them that move quickly to talk about how the enslaved men invested the money and were appropriately rewarded or punished, but much like the poem about the wheelbarrow, we need to be willing to dig deeper because that seemingly obvious interpretation doesn’t add up.
First, if we read the parable that way, it makes the ruler is a symbol for God. The problem with that is the ruler is a ruthless, greedy, and arrogant man. He even admits he takes what he didn’t earn and harvests what he didn’t plant. God is nothing like this man.
Second, even though the enslaved men are “rewarded” for their return on investment, nothing really changes. They are still enslaved. This is not a story about how God rewards a strong work ethic, or that poor people are poor because they did it to themselves. Remember, one of the key threads that runs through Luke’s gospel is that God is unequivocally on the side of the poor. Jesus said that over and over. His message didn’t change here.
What, then, do we make of this parable?
To answer that question, let’s turn to the one in the story who is considered a failure, the one who simply returned what he had been given and basically said to the unethical ruler, “I know how you do things and how you treat people, how you have built an empire by taking advantage of others, and, even though I am fearful of you, I chose not to play your game. Here’s your money back.”
I wonder how Zacchaeus felt as he stood there, having just broken his ties with a system where he had inherited power and wealth and made more at the expense of others, but was now choosing to set himself apart by sharing rather than stealing. The way Jesus ended the story makes it seem, in a way, as though the servant’s integrity didn’t have much impact beyond his own actions, but he did what he could do, which is what Zacchaeus did also, once he realized the damage he had been doing. If we do the math, Zacchaeus must have come close to impoverishing himself by giving away half of his wealth to the poor and then repaying his debts four times over.
The very next thing that happens in Luke’s gospel is Jesus gave instructions about getting the colt so he could ride into the city on what we call Palm Sunday as one who was responding to an unjust ruler and an unjust system by saying, “I choose not to play your game.” Within a week, the Roman government had executed him.
Two thousand years later, here we sit, counted as among those who trust the story still matters, even when it feels like we are caught in the whirlwind of greed and violence, and we stand in the lineage of person after person down all the generations who did what they could do as they heard God’s call on their lives, who found their way to say, “I choose not to play your game.”
William Carlos Williams said so much depended on the red wheelbarrow; Jesus said so much depends on us and our willingness to take a stand and to do what we can. Amen.
Peace,
Milton