Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 8:4–7; Psalm 113 (sung); Luke 16:1–13
The Scots Kirk, Lausanne, September 21 2025
Klyne Snodgrass says that the parable we have just heard from Ross is “notoriously difficult, so difficult that hardly anyone suspects it could come from the early church.”[1] It must come from Jesus himself, because it’s so outrageous, no one else would have dared to put it on his lips.
So let me talk about Amos.
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Some of you may remember the News of the World – a “red top” tabloid newspaper published every Sunday in the United Kingdom until 2011, until Rupert Murdoch was forced to close it down.[2]
Of course, some of you may not admit to remembering! It was notorious for its sleaze and sensationalism.
Its motto was “All human life is there”.
The odd collection of books we call the Old Testament could say the same thing. So far as we can tell, it began to assume its present form in the sixth century before Jesus of Nazareth was born, when the leading families of the southern kingdom of Judah were exiled in Babylon. It became the Old Testament we know today some centuries later.
In its present form, it gathers up traditions and texts from many periods in the life of the Israelites and the Jews, and these traditions and texts don’t always speak with the same voice. All human life is there; and as always with human life, it’s complicated.
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In Old Testament times, if we may put it simply, the Israelites and then the Jews lived in three different kinds of society. [3]
If we work backwards, the third and latest kind is colonial: the Judeans lived under the thumb of one empire after another: Babylon, Persia, and the Greek or Hellenistic empire that followed the death of Alexander the Great.
Before that was the time of the two kingdoms: Judah in the south, centred on Jerusalem; Israel in the north, richer and larger, centred on Samaria and Bethel.
And before that, there was a loosely organized association of Israelites living in the hill country of Palestine. We don’t know much about this period. What we do know has to be reconstructed for a set of often confusing texts and traditions. But we can say that by contrast with the royal and imperial periods that follow, this was a relatively egalitarian society.
In the book of Samuel, there is a text attributed to this early prophet that spells out what having a king to rule over Israel will be like:
“He will take your sons, and will use them for his chariots and his cavalry and as runners for his chariot. He will use them as his commanders of troops of one thousand and troops of fifty, or to do his ploughing and his harvesting, or to make his weapons or parts for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, or bakers. He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his servants. He will give one-tenth of your grain and your vineyards to his officials and servants. He will take your male and female servants, along with the best of your cattle and donkeys, and make them do his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and then you yourselves will become his slaves! When that day comes, you will cry out because of the king you chose for yourselves, but on that day the Lord won’t answer you.” (1 Samuel 8:11-18)
Whether these words were actually spoken by the prophet Samuel doesn’t matter. They reflect fairly accurately a view of kings and kingdoms found in this early Israelite society.
In the view of Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be the king”.[4] In the view of this text, having a king is not so good for the people. In many and various ways, the king, and the leading families of the kingdom, are going to exploit them.
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Amos was a shepherd and a breeder of sheep from Tekoa, a town in the hill country of Judah, ten miles to the south of Jerusalem. He wasn’t a simple peasant, but “a substantial and respected man of his community”.[5]
Read the book that bears his name, and we may think of him as a dangerous radical, especially if we are not dangerous radicals. In reality, he was something of a conservative. He was criticizing the northern kingdom of Israel from the standpoint of the tribal association that came before it.
When Amos began to prophesy in Israel in the eighth century before Christ, the northern kingdom was living through its “best period of prosperity and peace”. Amos didn’t care. What mattered to him, and in his view what mattered to the God of Israel, was that the older, relatively egalitarian, tribal structure had given way – just as the text attributed to Samuel said it would – to “sharp distinctions of wealth and privilege”.
In the older peasant society, every family owned its own land, and buying and selling played a small role. The rise of the kings, and the rise of city life and urban culture that went with this, changed things – and in the view of Amos, not for the better. Small farmers were forced off their lands into service and labour. Urban merchants did not hesitate to take over a man’s land for his debts or to take him over as a slave. They were able to stockpile grain and to sell to landless peasants at high prices. All of this they saw as progress and good business.
Amos saw it as theft.
In his view, nothing excused these merchants from dealing with their fellow Israelites as neighbours and as members of the same Israelite family. He was, as I say, a conservative.
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With this morning’s parable, with a certain rich man and his crooked manager, we are in the same world as eighth-century Israel, only more so.
As often with Jesus, the details are heightened and exaggerated. Nine hundred gallons of olive oil is roughly three years’ wages for the average worker. A thousand bushels of wheat is equivalent to more than seven years of labour.[6]
Jesus often draws his parables from the life and experience of the peasants of Galilee or Judea. But here, as in the parable of the talents, he goes out of his way to make clear that this is not their everyday experience. It an alien world.
In contemporary terms: it’s not our world, but the world of Elon Musk.
Jesus doesn’t hold up either the rich man or his crooked manager as models for his hearers to emulate. They are, he says flatly, children of the world. They belong to this world.
We, by contrast, are called to be children of light and citizens of God’s kingdom. We are called to live by different values. We are called to serve the one true God and not go whoring after the false gods of wealth and power.
We are called to think about what is really important to us and then to choose.
Luke, as Gerhard Lohfink says in our thought for the week, has major problems with this parable.[7] Luke worries about the danger of its being misunderstood. So he tacks on to the parable a bunch of other sayings about wealth, some of which fit better than others.
The saying that fits best is the last. No servant can serve two masters. Either we’ll hate the one and love the other, or we’ll be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. It’s a straightforward and disjunctive choice: We cannot serve both God and wealth.
What this “notoriously difficult” parable is saying is, in the end, quite simple: we are called to be as single-minded in serving God and following Jesus as the rich man and his crooked manager are in pursuing wealth.
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But before I stop, it’s perhaps worth dwelling for a moment on one of the other sayings that doesn’t fit so well.[8]
“If you haven’t been faithful with worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? If you haven’t been faithful with someone else’s property, who will give you your own?”
This is supposed to be a rhetorical question: If we can’t be trusted with money, who will trust us with genuine wealth – the wealth of the gospel, the wealth of God’s grace? Nobody is going to do that.
But if we zoom out from today’s reading and look at Luke’s gospel as a whole, or zoom out further and look at the Bible as a whole, then the surprising and paradoxical answer is that Jesus does that, and God does too.
We are imperfect people, as imperfect as the disciples who followed Jesus on the dusty roads of Galilee and at the last failed him in Jerusalem. We are imperfect people living in an unjust world.
But Jesus trusts us with the gift of the gospel, just as he trusted Peter and the others. And God trusts us with the gift of grace, because – almost recklessly – God believes that, in spite of everything, we shall turn out alright.
Let’s not prove them wrong.
[1] Kylne R Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Erdmans, 2018), 312
[2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World
[3] Norman K Gottwald, The Politics of Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001)
[4] History of the Word part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vte137Bz7Vo
[5] James L Mays, Amos. Old Testament Library (London: SCM, 1969)
[6] See Stories of Intent
[7] Gerhard Lohfink, The Forty Parables of Jesus (Collegeville, MN : Liturgical Press, 2021), 174
[8] Mark A O’Brien OP, The ABC of Sunday Matters (ATF Press, 2013), C-129