Do you know the story of the Gordian Knot?
According to Greek myth, there was a knot in a rope that was so tight and so massive, that, an oracle declared, the person who could undo it, could be declared king. According to legend, Alexander the Great was presented with this knot.
People looked on. Could he untie it?
They expected him to roll up his sleeves and begin sweating out the long frustrating task of teasing out the tangle.
But Alexander simply pulled out a sword and severed the knot in half.
He became King.
The term “Gordian knot” then, does not refer to the knot itself, but is shorthand that describes a scenario in which an innovative solution unexpectedly and quickly resolves a daunting problem.
**
When the current President won a new term in office, back in January, I spoke the President’s name and proclaimed, from this pulpit, that when he, the President, acted in ways that were contrary to the teaching of Jesus Christ, I would not remain silent.
In response, two people left this church.
Others approached me and spoke to me respectfully about my intention. They come to church, they said, to get away from the barrage of the week’s horrible news. They wanted our church to be set aside from all that. The sanctuary, they said, was a sacred space, where we, as a community, find refuge from our troubles and are renewed in our faith.
Was I really going to insist upon bringing the tangled mess of American politics, with all its pettyness, recrimination, and moral depravity into this sacred place?
I found this argument to be very compelling. It strongly resonated with my own sense that worship – though occupying a central part of the lives of people of faith – must somehow be different from our regular lives. It must be separate from our crazy lives, but at its best, our worship together should leave you with something – some small tenderness that can take root in your heart… a little of God’s love to sweeten your daily lives.
The sacredness of Sunday mornings, is protected from the profanities of everyday life, by the little agreements we make. I’m no sailor, but I’ll sometimes swear if I forget an appointment or hit my thumb with a hammer… but you won’t hear me uttering such a curse from the pulpit. We might think uncharitable thoughts about our neighbors now and then when we are going about our daily lives, but here at church, we practice the art of giving them the benefit of our respect. We might feel depressed and overwhelmed with a tsunami of bad news during the week, but here, in this sanctuary, maybe, just maybe, we can take a long deep breath, fill our hearts with the humble beauty of the place, and escape from the madness.
Dear God, how we need this time and this place. Bless us Lord with this simple sanctuary – this clearing in the dark woods, this safe harbor in the storm, this oasis in the desert wilderness.
**
A rich man hears a rumor that his business manager— the man he has left in charge of his affairs—is cheating him.
So begins the Parable of the Dishonest manager.
When I read it in the lectionary earlier this week, I had a sinking feeling because I remember wrestling with it in the past. Just when you think you might begin to understand it, it turns in on itself and leads you in a different direction.
But these are the words of Jesus.
I sometimes think, rather begrudgingly, that the words of Jesus are all the more worthy of consideration when they are hard to understand.
The longer I write about the Gospel the more aware I am that it wasn’t written to make me feel comfortable.
There are plenty of words out there that flatter us,
words that accessorize with our outfits —
But the Gospel story is not so obliging. It is not convenient or efficient. To be nourished by it, we may need to do some work.
But it’s worth it.
A rich man confronts the manager.
‘What is this that I hear about you? he says. Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’
Interestingly, at this point in the story, the parable shifts over to the the point of view of the dishonest manager himself. We even go into the dishonest manager’s head:
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.
Concerned about his prospects, the manager settles upon a plan of action. He summons the merchants that he has been working with on the rich man’s behalf, and starts wheeling and dealing. To the merchant who owes his boss one hundred jars of olive oil, the manager quickly settles for fifty jars. To the debtor who owes ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ the manager says: ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’
By doing this, he figures, the rich man may lose money, but he, the manager, will at least have a handful of associates who will think well of him when he is out on his own. “When I am dismissed as manager,” he says to himself, “these people may welcome me into their homes.”
Yikes!
What a tangled mess!
Talk about Red flags!
This parable is a veritable parade of red flags!
The people who are listening carefully to Jesus – his audience when he told the parable, and you and I, more than two thousand years later… we recognize this manager, don’t we? This manager is one of those despicable bottom feeders who has no problem playing free and loose with other people’s money – and doing so entirely for his own advantage.
If this Parable was written today, I could imagine it could be renamed the “Parable of the Scam Artist.” This man is a bad actor from start to finish. At the beginning of the parable he is described as “squandering” the rich man’s property, and when he is discovered, he does not change his ways. He doubles down, creating an even bigger loss for his boss.
Every instinct, every reflex, every fiber of our twenty-first century American morality demands that this dishonest manager be caught and punished for his misdeeds!
**
Eleven days ago, a man pulled a trigger.
So started the chain of events that has dominated the news in the last several weeks. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that I’m referring to the death of Charlie Kirk, a right wing activist, entrepreneur and media personality.
The man who pulled the trigger was angry at Kirk for all of the horrible and dehumanizing things that the famous man has said about other people.
He killed Kirk.
I did not agree with anything that Kirk stood for. However, it would be cheap and disrespectful if I criticized him now. First of all, he cannot defend himself. Secondly, the dead, rightly, command a certain respect – a respect that they might struggle to achieve in life. Third, and perhaps most importantly, criticizing Kirk now could be interpreted as condoning the assassin’s heinous act.
And I will not do that.
To disagree with Kirk is one thing. To take up a gun and shoot him dead, is another thing altogether.
Make no mistake, Kirk was not killed to satisfy any personal vendetta. He was killed because of his ideas.
He was silenced.
Or, at least, that’s what his killer hoped to do.
Ironically, Charlie Kirk’s death seems to have had the opposite effect. The airwaves, the internet, the headlines, the pundits, the politicians, the late night comedians, and this morning, no doubt, a lot of religious leaders, cannot stop talking about him.
**
If the Parable of the Dishonest Manager was told today, the knot of the narrative would be untied like this:
Upon learning that the Manager continued to squander his goods even after he confronted the Manager about it, the Rich man would promptly contact his lawyer.
Evidence would be gathered, and legal proceedings would be taken against the manager. The Rich Man would have a strong case. By settling for 20 percent, and in some cases, 50 percent losses, the manager had, in effect, stolen from his employer. The court would, almost certainly rule in the Rich Man’s favor and the manager would be compelled to somehow recover the money to his employer. Or he might be sent to jail.
Or both.
And isn’t this exactly what the manager deserved?
I can’t imagine any other outcome – that is, if the story was told in America in 2025.
But as clear an outcome as that seems to us, that – as you know – is not how Christ’s parable is told.
Christ does not bother to untie the knot. Like Alexander the Great, Christ pulls out a sword.
**
Even though his name is all over every form of media, I will not name the young man who shot Charlie Kirk.
In this, I follow the example of the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ahearn, who refused to use the name of the man who killed 51 people in a mosque in Christchurch…
By pulling the trigger, this young man made a tragic mistake that tied multiple knots – some of which are likely to affect all of us for sometime to come.
There was, first and foremost, the moral outrage that he committed by killing another human being.
His act also contributed to the recent increase in political violence in the last year – a reality that has us all on edge.
Purely from a practical standpoint, if, by killing Charlie Kirk, the shooter intended to “silence” the kind of hate speech that was his victim’s stock and trade, he failed. The assassination seems, instead, to have emboldened it.
In an ironic twist, the act seems to have succeeded in silencing someone. Not so much Charlie Kirk. Instead, the bullet has silenced the popular and influential comedian and vocal critic of the President, Jimmy Kimmel.
A bullet is a little metal piece of hate. And you cannot untie the tangled knot of hate, by adding more hate.
**
There is a Gordian knot solution to this parable.
You can untangle the problem of this parable by understanding one thing. But to understand it, you have to be able to sever your knee jerk assumptions about how we, in our modern life, judge right and wrong. To untie this parable you have to simply have to know, as you read it, that the bottom line is not the money.
For us, in our capitalist consumer culture, we are trained to always think that the bottom line is the money.
And so we just assume that the ethical problem in this story revolves around the way that the Manager squandered his master’s property, and as a result lost him money.
But the parable does not try to address the ethical problem of wasting money. That’s not what it is concerned about. Rather it addresses the ethical problem that arises when someone makes something (in this case, money) more important than God.
The biggest sinner in Christ’s parable, is not the dishonest Manager, for swindling his master. He did what he did so that he could succeed in the service of something that Christ considers important – developing relationships with others.
For Christ, the biggest sinner in the parable is the master himself, who serves money rather than God.
This is the sword that Christ used to sever the gordian knot of this parable.
And when he did so, he sought to break us free of the ropes that bind us to the illusion of wealth – something that, ultimately, has no value.
Because, after all, when we die, we cannot take our checking accounts with us.
And so we will not be answerable to the bank.
We will be answerable to God.
Amen