The Tale of the Cheating Servant
This story was given in place of a sermon at our 10:15 service on Sunday 22nd September. The gospel that day was Luke 16:1-13 , a particularly tricky parable of Christ's in which he commends a cheating manager for looking out for his own future. Lots of very learned people have written lots of clever stuff about the passage, and the one thing that people agree on is that it is just very hard to understand! In the past few weeks, I've read lots about it, and tied my thoughts up in knots! One piece I read compared the parable to a particular trope in Roman comedy, in which a cunning servant tricks his master, and everything works out fine in the end (think Frankie Howerd in ' Up Pompeii '). There does seem to be a similarity, and that got me wondering whether the parable might actually have been based on a play that Christ saw. I then (in turn) reimagined that as a real-life situation that Christ happened to come across, and... well, the result is below. I hope that f...