From my reading of Herzog, I actually think that Jesus’ parable of the shrewd manager or unjust steward is a moral tale of an “under-dog” surviving at the hands of a predatory elite through the sheer power of his intellect and quick-thinking.
It is about an ordinary person surviving in a harsh and unforgiving world commandeered by distant elites who reap profits at the expense of the labour of others lower down the pecking order.
The master, in the sociological context of first-century Palestine, would have been an exploitative land-owner. As such, he counted on his steward to watch over his financial affairs while he pursued political power further afield and thus expected steward to realize enough profit to sustain his exorbitant lifestyle.Consider that “rich men” are never depicted otherwise but as oppressors and godless individuals in the Gospel of Luke, which is characterised by a socially egalitarian and ardent anti-elitist ethos that is not so strident in the other canonical accounts.
The steward is therefore in a powerful but vulnerable position for a freeborn male of the retainer class. On the one hand, he has the power to act in the name and with the legal personality of his master. On the other, he is wholly susceptible to being dismissed by his master and reduced to a life of begging or manual labour, if a bad harvest comes and disgruntled debtors and/or tenants use him as a scapegoat to voice their complaints against the master.
In this respect, we can interpret the accusations of financial impropriety against the steward as less moral denunciations of his character than they are typical examples of indirect peasant resistance vis-a-vis the landowner. Since they cannot go into open revolt against their landlord or hope for modern-day rent controls after a strike, their only mode of effective resistance is to spread rumours about the master’s steward that could result in his fall from grace. If the steward can be ousted, the successor will have to tread carefully and so be more amenable to peasant demands. The master will take the accusations badly since his steward is in a position of trust.
According to the parable, this seems to be what has happened. On the basis of rumours that he is squandering his master’s property, the steward has been made redundant and faces near-certain death as a beggar or the prospect of eking out a miserable existence of manual labour that would find him unable to compete in a job market with men who have been “digging” their whole lives. In other words, his dismissal is potentially lethal and puts him in an impossible situation.
The steward represents and acts in the interests of a predatory elite, while the peasants must rely on basic subsistence living to get “by” anyway they possibly can. Their strongest bet is to take down the steward if they can - a fall guy scapegoat who is really only doing his job in an exploitative system over which he himself has little-to-no control, like the hated tax-collectors were doing for the Romans as well.
As Herzog explains:
"Faced with a limit situation, the steward devised limit acts that changed the scenario from a sorry and predictable tale of woe to a scene of rejoicing. The master who held all the cards lost the hand. The weapons of the weak, employed by the debtors were matched with an arsenal of equal strength by the steward, whose weakness was also exposed. Out of the battle came a temporary respite for the debtors, a glimpse of a time when debts would be lowered, and a place where rejoicing could be heard. This may not be a parable of the reign of God, but it suggests how the weapons of the weak can produce results in a world dominated by the strong.”
The cunning of the steward essentially turns the tables of this vicious game back on the master.
He cancels half the debt of the incendiary peasants, thus gaining their trust and approbation.
When the master finds this out,
he is now faced with an equally impossible situation: he can either accept praise and thanksgiving from his pacified tenants who think that the steward had been acting out the master’s wishes (unaware that he had in fact lost the capacity to act in his master’s name), or he can tell them that the steward had actually been fired and that their debt relief is therefore illegitimate and void, thus receiving their inevitable ire.
The master chooses the first option and reluctantly keeps the steward in his job while commending his “shrewdness” towards both himself and the tenants whom he effectively bribed with reductions in their debt. In the end, the cunning of the steward leads to a happy ending for both himself and the peasant tenants. It is the rich man who loses out.
So, in other words, I read it as an anti-elitist parable commending the cunning of an ordinary man placed in an impossible situation by impoverished debtors and one of his society’s “big men at the top” in the context of an exploitative social setting. This reading fits in with Christ’s continual refrain that the “
least among all of you is the greatest”, "
the first shall by last and the last shall be first" in the Kingdom of God i.e.
**Luke 22:25-26New International Version (NIV)
25 Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. 26 But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.**
Exactly.
