How to Read a Parable

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 21, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Luke 16: 1-9

It may be you understand what it means to be in a home where you don’t feel safe, and where you fear if you speak out of turn or even drop your guard for a moment you could be subject to verbal or physical attack. You’re trapped – you can’t leave for fear of exacerbating your predicament, and you have no perceptible means of resistance. Or maybe you’ve been in a workplace where similar factors are at play: you experience intimidation, ridicule, and cruelty, and you see no way out. Or perhaps you’ve lived in a country where an oppressive regime or suffocating social norms mean you feel like a member of the underground and the best you can do is speak in riddles and codes to those you trust to share your point of view.

Such circumstances are distressing and drastic. But naming them belongs at the beginning of a sermon about a parable, because they’re situations the Bible regards as normal. You could almost say unless you’ve experienced such conditions you’re not well placed to read the gospels; because the gospels weren’t written for you. In the words of Martin Luther King’s teacher Howard Thurman, Christianity is originally and fundamentally directed towards those who stand ‘with their backs against the wall.’[1] Thurman examines Jesus’ ministry by setting it alongside the alternative approaches to Roman occupation in the first century. For the first disciples, it was a straight choice between nonresistance, pursued in different ways by Sadducees and Pharisees, and resistance, pursued violently by Zealots and nonviolently by Jesus. It’s not hard to see Thurman identifying first-century Palestine with the racial reality of early twentieth century America. The choices were more or less the same.

Thurman highlights Jesus’ phrase ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’ and takes this to mean we can determine the capacity of events or people to exercise power over us by the way we react to them. (18) Thurman concludes: ‘The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.’ (18)

Thurman’s analysis provides vital context for how we are to read an opaque parable like the story of the dishonest manager in Luke chapter 16. The parable seems baffling because we’ve somehow had hardwired into us that parables are like Aesop’s fables – in other words, they’re moral tales telling us to be good boys and girls because every good boy deserves favour. Such an approach to interpreting this parable renders it impossible because the parable appears to commend lies, deception and fraud. But assuming there’s a moral is exactly how not to read a parable. Doing so centres our own context as normal and presumes the parable is about us. Let’s reconsider how to read a parable by looking more closely at this story in four stages.

Here’s stage one. What does this parable say? A wealthy man employs a manager and entrusts him with all his affairs. The rich man hears the manager is squandering his possessions and fires him. But before the manager leaves, he visits the clients to settle their accounts. The manager starts writing off the debts of the creditors. He’s in desperate trouble, but he starts making friends who will welcome him into their homes after he loses his job. Finally the rich man says, ‘You realised that generosity is the best investment. You’re better at this than I am.’ The ending is a shock. We expect the rich man to be furious. But instead, he’s impressed and complimentary. He says, ‘I can see you’ve discovered the secret of real wealth – generosity.’

So that’s what the parable says. Now, resisting the temptation to try to derive an instant moral from dubious dealings and breach of trust, let’s see what the parable is really saying. It’s a story about two economies.[2] The rich man’s economy is what the Bible calls mammon. It’s the economy of scarcity. There’s not enough to go round. If there’s going to be enough for me, that probably means there won’t be enough for you. This is an economy that only includes certain people, only buys certain things, only lasts a limited length of time. The manager’s economy is very different. It’s an economy of abundance. This is what the Bible calls manna. Remember manna is the food God gave Moses in the wilderness. There was always enough; it only went sour when the people tried to take too much. Manna is for everybody, gives what money can’t buy, and never expires. This is a parable that describes what happens when we transfer from the realm of mammon to the realm of manna. It’s telling us, the path to joy is learning to love the things God gives us in plenty. What might it be like to transform our desire so what we long for is what God is giving us in abundance? This is a bigger economy than the rich man’s economy – it offers what money can’t buy, turns debt into friendship and changes anxiety into grace. In the end the rich man realises he’s looking at a change of heart, a change of mind, a change of life – for which the only word is conversion.

Notice how we’re still looking at what the parable’s saying. We haven’t rushed ahead to making it a moral tale for our ethical edification. Stage three is where we say, I wonder if this parable might in some way be about God. What gave us the idea all parables had to be about us? Let’s look at this parable again and see what it might be telling us about God. I’m going to take this bit slowly in case anything rings a bell.

Let’s examine the structure of the parable. It’s a story about one who is very powerful and has been very generous. Into that story comes some other ones who are colossally and unredeemably in the first one’s debt. In between the generous one and the indebted ones comes a mediator. The generous one gives the mediator a chance to sort things out. The mediator chooses to lift the burden off the indebted ones and place it on his own shoulders. The mediator then returns to face the generous one with the fault removed from the indebted ones and seems set to face the cost that was rightly due to them. I wonder if this story is starting to sound familiar. Far from being a crazy fable about misusing our employers’ money, we begin to see it’s a story about God. Jesus is the one who stands between the judgement and mercy of God and the plight and folly of humankind. But it’s not a simple ‘Jesus dies for our sins’ story. The things we discovered at stage two are still true. This is a parable that shows who Jesus is. He’s the one who turns the economy of scarcity and punishment into the economy of relationship and grace. With elegant simplicity the parable shows that Jesus is with us but a short time, and he uses that time to demonstrate an utterly different way to be with one another. Jesus literally is the abundance of God, the one who uses the time offered by God’s patience in delaying the world’s end to transform scarcity into abundance and inaugurate the economy of grace.

By seeing this as a theological parable about God rather than a moral fable about us we see that the manager in the story is Jesus. We’re the debtors. Jesus is the one who’s turned us from resentful and entitled antagonists and nervous and anxious sinners into joyful and thankful friends. And we live in the joy of God’s abundance by welcoming Jesus into our homes, knowing that he will welcome us eternally into his.

Now finally we’re ready for stage four. It’s time to think about what this might mean for us as we seek to live in a world where we feel we don’t have enough money, where rampaging masters and dishonest stewards seem to be gaining ascendancy in one country after another, where trust is scarce and friendship seems naïve, and where we fear for those facing starvation and bombardment every day. Let’s read the parable through the lens of Howard Thurman. This is a story about people with their backs to the wall: because their domestic life is intolerable, because their working conditions are unbearable, or because their society is a prison. They’re all in a level of trouble they can’t see their way out of, and the most powerful force in their life is one that aims to destroy them.

If this is the context, what does this parable tells us? It tells us Christ turns mammon into manna. It tells us the Holy Spirit transforms oppression, fear and exploitation into surprise, companionship and hope. It tells us we may not be able to control our environment, but that needn’t make us passive and powerless, because the way we react to such things is our own. It tells us we’re not defined by our victimhood; we’re defined by God’s grace. It tells us the Holy Spirit is present in our lives turning scarcity into abundance and impossibility into promise. It tells us Christ turns judgement into mercy and cruelty into friendship. It tells us if we want to address social deprivation, we can start by showing mercy and making friends with those who have their backs to the wall. It tells us when we welcome Christ into our homes today we’re anticipating the way the Holy Spirit will welcome us into God’s eternal home forever.

So the way to read a parable is not to centre ourselves in the story and not to assume this is a fable to guide our moral righteousness. Instead it’s to realise this is a story about how God in Christ disrupts our context, our expectations and our fears, and brings wonder, love and joy where we only perceived despair, injustice and entrapment. If you read this parable thinking it’s an ethic for managers, don’t be surprised it seems bizarre and immoral. If you read it feeling your back’s to the wall and your only hope is God, then this parable can change your life.

[1] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Nashville: Abingdon 1949; Reprinted Boston, MA: Beacon 1996) 1.

[2] Wendell Berry, ‘Two Economies,’ in Review and Expositor, 81 (2), 209-223 (1984). I owe this second interpretation to Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Philadelphia: Fortress 2025)