Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 25], rcl yr c, 2022
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

“Quiet quitting” has been making the news, a not-so-new phenomenon where employees and workers do no more and no less than what is asked of them in work agreements or job descriptions. Quiet quitting doesn’t mean you actually quit your job so much as you quit going the extra mile, or going over-and-above what’s asked of you.

And a quick look at some recent headlines gives a sense of who thinks “quiet quitting” is a good thing or a bad thing: Forbes wants to “fight against ‘quiet quitting’”; Harvard Business Review thinks “Quiet Quitting Is About Bad Bosses, Not Bad Employees” but they still don’t particularly like quiet quitting and want it to stop; Fast Company thinks everyone misunderstands quiet quitting except for Fast Company; and Vice News says “Act Your Wage,” and that quiet quitting is a pretty good idea, actually.

At its heart, though, “quiet quitting” is nothing new. “Quiet quitting” is what used to be called “work-to-rule,” and is about pushing back on a work culture that demands that workers go the extra mile, a work culture that expects employees to go over-and-above, all the time.

And as much as that sounds fair, don’t we often act as though we value that extra mile? I read and write enough job references to know that what I often like to see, and what others like to read, is things like “she will do what’s asked … and more!” Because that’s what is most respectable, and will lead most surely to success, and winning, right? Not people who do “their job but not much else around here.”

If the managers and the corporate labour pundits (and most of us if we were to look closely at ourselves) think that “quiet quitting” and “work-to-rule” is not a good and positive thing, what would we think then of the Unjust Steward in this parable. The Unjust Steward doesn’t do his job at all! When the Unjust Steward does things that aren’t in the job description, they are unsavoury things, so unsavoury that we could easily see him as the bad guy, and if not that, then at least not the good guy in this parable. And he’s most certainly not and couldn’t be the Christ figure.

The Unjust Steward is an accountant that, at the beginning of the story, gets fired for “squandering the property” of his boss. Then after he’s fired—he appears to not only steal the rich man’s books, but then he most certainly cooks those books. “… summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe…?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of … oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill … and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’”

He’s not even a quiet quitter, or work-to-rule employee who does only what’s in the job description; he goes over-and-above in all the wrong ways. Without anyone’s permission, and most certainly not the permission of his former boss—the rich man to whom the debt of oil and wheat is actually owed, and whose books the steward has apparently pilfered—this now-unemployed scoundrel has unilaterally, on his own, and without legal counsel, cancelled debts that weren’t even owed to him. This is most certainly not bookkeeping according to the standards of the Chartered Professional Accountants of Palestine. It’s practically thievery.

So how in the world could this reprobate swindler ever be a Christ figure?

Robert Farrar Capon points out that seeing this unjust steward as a Christ figure or not, tells us a lot about what we think not of the steward, but of Jesus. And he’s right, we often want Jesus to be respectable, a saviour in a three-piece suit with a gold watch and a fountain pen. A Chief Financial Officer to a fatherly divine CEO, someone that is fair and dependable, with impeccable references, hardly a quiet quitter but rather a man who works well into the evening.

But Capon points out that the Jesus of the Gospels would be very unlikely to get a good letter of recommendation. Question: “Does the candidate work hard and go over and above?” Answer: “Well … it’s quite often that he disappears and we find him alone. He says he’s praying but it looks a lot like napping.” Question: “Is the candidate trustworthy with company property?” Answer: “Well … he seems to think it’s ok for questionably-employed women to pour extremely expensive perfume on his feet. Question: “Is there any reason why the candidate wouldn’t pass a Criminal Records Check?” Answer: “You do know he’s about to get crucified, right?”

This is how Capon puts it: “ … the unjust steward is the Christ-figure because he is a crook like Jesus … Respectability regards only life, success, winning … it will have no truck with the grace that works by death and losing—which is the only kind of grace there is.” Jesus “was not respectable … he consorted with crooks. And he died a criminal. … He became  sin for us sinners, weak for us weaklings, lost for us losers, and dead for us dead.”

Grace is, after all, the greatest feat of cooking the books we’ve seen on either side of heaven or hell. Grace is precisely owing more than we can afford and someone else making a payment that we are unable to pay. At least not until Jesus dies and rises again, and in so doing saying to us: “sure you were born in sin, sure you’ve committed all sorts of sins that you can’t fix. But I’m here to say that in my death, and in my resurrection, you can have a life like you’ve never imagined, a life in which all that sin is lined out, retired, expiring in me. It will no longer appear  on the heavenly books or even in hell’s ledgers.”

Eventually I will have to preach more on repentance, and on the limits we experience in Christian communities when it comes to acting gracefully; as creatures in a fallen world we still need to make difficult decisions for the sake of others. But even that can’t ever change just how extraordinary God’s grace is towards us and towards our communities: there is nothing we cannot come back from, nothing in our past or our present that could ever limit God’s grace in Christ toward us, no history we can’t face, and nothing that we would now need to look away from.

And why? Because Christ the crook, Christ the consorter with criminals,

Christ the one who lost it all, he died that we might live, and do so with courage.

The Revd Dr Preston Parsons