Liberating Forgiveness: Rereading Luke 16:1–13 with Jesus’s Economic Philosophy

This article revisits the notoriously difficult parable of the shrewd (aka dishonest) manager (Luke 16:1–13), arguing that its interpretive difficulty stems largely from the capitalist assumptions modern readers bring to the text. Reading the parable within Jesus’s broader economic philosophy—rooted in the biblical jubilee, the widespread cancelation of debt, and a preferential option for the poor—it contends that the manager is not a dishonest schemer but a figure who forgives sharecroppers’ debts to cross over from an extractive economy of “Mammon” into a relational economy of “manna.” Recovering this economic reading, the article proposes a liberating practice of forgiveness, understood literally as the remission of financial debt, as a way out of the oppressive systems that entrap communities today.