Why in the world would Jesus tell this story? On casual reading it seems as though he is making a hero out of a villain. What does it mean? To help us answer that we put the spotlight on three verses; but first, a bit of background.

In Palestine there were absentee landlords who employed overseers to manage the property in their absence. The tenants paid their rents "in kind" - that is, with a portion of their produce; in this case, a hundred measures of oil, a hundred measures of wheat. Any thought that Jesus lived in an ivory tower, unaware of the hard and often sordid facts of life, is banished by this parable.

This overseer was a rascal. There can be no doubt about that. He wasted his master’s goods and he falsified the entries in his master’s books. Furthermore, he was dealing with a lo…