How People of Privilege Can Become Trustworthy

A window into a new commentary on Luke's Gospel By Ched Myers

This post is an interval in the Sketches in Messianism series.

Some months ago I received something in the post from my friend over the sea, Ched Myers.

In 1988 Myers published his paradigm-changing commentary on the Gospel of Mark, Binding the Strongman. It opened the door to a world of anti-empire New Testament studies, viewing the messianic movement in the context of brutal Roman colonisation. I am one of many who have followed on in this vein.

We’ve corresponded here and there over the last decade, and I’ve been very grateful for his thoughts and contributions to my own work.

Earlier this year he sent me a copy of his new book Healing Affluenza & Resisting Plutocracy, a commentary on the Gospel of Luke. This is the first Biblical commentary he’s published since shifting the discourse nearly 40 years ago. He hinted to me that it might be his last, though he was up to his eyeballs in writing the (very extensive) footnotes at the time, so who knows? In any case, it felt like an event to have a copy arrive in the post.

Myers’ reading of Luke is rooted in sabbath economics:¹ the radical economic vision of the Torah, in which wealth inequalities were an evil to be mitigated and ultimately reset every forty-nine years. The Hebrew prophets planted themselves in this ground and raged tenaciously against the hoarding powers thereafter.

When Myers reads the Gospel of Luke, with the question of sabbath economics in mind, the results are fascinating; overwhelming even. Healing Affluenza… is both accessible and scholarly. Not unlike Binding the Strongman, it is knotty with rigour and wit, rooted in Myers’ North American context and the tradition of its most notable prophet, Martin Luther King. The book hums and bubbles over the edges. It soon becomes impossible not to see the economic picture that runs through the gospel text, everywhere in plain sight, hidden only by a long and wilfully deaf tradition.

I’d like to lean into Myers’ reading of one particular parable: The story of the shrewd manager, from Luke chapter sixteen. A wealthy man hears that one of those managing his affairs has been dishonest, so he sacks him and demands a full account of his doings. The manager stares fearfully into the abyss of poverty, but then he comes up with a plan. He meets up with those indebted to his rich master and fiddles the records, reducing all the debts, one after another. And so, once he is indeed dismissed, he finds he has many friends to help him out among all those who had been indebted to his master. The messiah figure concludes the tale, saying: “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth…” Well, there is a puzzle for any preacher who values honest and obedient citizenship.

Myers writes:

“I interpret Jesus’ extraordinary pronouncement here as an endorsement of improvisational monkeywrenching. Like the bureaucrat in the parable, disciples caught and complicit in the mammon² system must figure out ways to defect from it while working to rehabilitate the traditional ways of the Great Economy. ‘Defect’ is a double entendre, both noun and verb: to defect is to be dismissed by the dominant culture as defective. But this is the only way people of privilege can become trustworthy.”

Myers describes a world of two economies. An occupied agrarian culture is being ruled by the economy of Roman power and taxation, in which a plutocracy of wealthy men grab land and push the indigenous poor into debt and servitude. The defective manager is the middle-class figure: he is both complicit in this despoiling economy but also chained and subject to it. This is a story about some such person, who defects and throws his lot in with what Myers (after Wendell Berry) calls The Great Economy, in which relationships of trust and goodwill (pistis) are the beating heart; the village economy natural to the occupied culture, a realm of improvised reciprocity between neighbours.

The manager is dishonest, but in a context of colonial theft, dishonesty might be the more honest course of action. Would he have jumped if he wasn’t pushed? This ambiguity, this lack of neatness, is important to the story, as Myers reads it. “Attempts of the managerial class to redeploy capital to rebuild community are necessarily ambiguous and partial but nevertheless meaningful… small experiments in trusting sabbath economics matter.”

From here he concludes:

“We must figure out how to act creatively and concretely to use whatever economic means are in our hands to rebuild social relations with those oppressed by the system. Our best efforts will only ever bring partial relief or justice to a world ruled by capital. Nevertheless we must persist, knowing that the system is ultimately unsustainable, and in the conviction that every experiment in re-centering the community in all economic decision-making helps build alternatives.”

1. Myers coined the term in a short book, entitled Sabbath Economics in 2002, which has been in and out of print. In a lovely synchronicity it was recently re-published by my friend Chris Donald from

The Passio Project

on Lab/Ora Press. This book was the jumping-off point for my No Debts, No Masters.. series.

2. First Century slur for rotten money.