Hinging on Forgiveness

DAILY BYTE

There is something in the parable of the Dishonest Manager that is both striking and powerful. It is a key, or a hinge, upon which the parable hangs and by which it offers to transform and redeem all the mess and squandering that the story mirrors back to us.

This hinge is forgiveness. It is amazing grace. It is reckless and undeserved mercy.

Now this may surprise you, but have you yet considered exactly what it is the manager does (that later earns him praise), albeit without authorisation and with deception? Well, simply put, the manager forgives debt.

He forgives even though there is no purity in this act, no clean lines and sharp angles. He forgives things he has no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, such as personal gain and to compensate for past misconduct.

Yet, despite all this, this act of forgiveness seems to bring meaning, purpose, balance and sense to even the very worst messiness of this story.

And herein lies the Gospel hope of being found for you and me.

Here is the core message of the parable to us. Here it cuts through our rubbish and pretences, all our false pieties.

For you see, it doesn’t matter if forgiveness begins through purely selfish motives. Do it anyway! Get involved in God’s abundant generosity programs of crazy grace and undeserved forgiveness.

This is because doing this, whether from pure reasons or not, will actually be a fundamental part of finding you.

The act of forgiveness transforms us. We can have no love for our enemy, and the only reason we forgive is to set ourselves free from our own prisons, and really, that’s ok, because we find it somehow lightens our load, eases our pain and soothes our hate.

It ends up making us less selfish really. Now, surely, that is Gospel work in action.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Holy God, you have recklessly lavished your grace upon me. Much of the forgiveness I have received from you is totally undeserved. Help me to extend to others the same grace I have received from you. Amen.

FOCUS READING

LUKE 16 : 1-8a NRSV

Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, 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.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly;