Sometimes Jesus says the darnedest things.
He says he has a story to help us understand the kingdom of heaven. He starts by describing a perfectly normal situation – a kind of situation that happens every day between people, where we think we know what the good outcome will be. Then he throws us a curve ball, and has the whole story turn out very differently from what we expect. Matthew 20:1-16 is one of those stories.
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day [about 20 cents today, and the normal daily wage for a soldier or a day labourer in Jesus’ day] and sent them into his vineyard.
“About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.
“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
“‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
“When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’
“The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
“But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Reflection
Commenting on today’s parable of the gracious vineyard owner and the grumbling workers, Kate Lasso – a member of the 8th Day Faith Community, a small ecumenical community in Washington, DC, writes this:
Riding the bus, I rejoice when a stranger squeezes on just as the doors close. A victory that all bus riders can appreciate. I’m likely to call out to the driver if I see someone trying to make it on, who is not quite there. I mourn if someone comes up just as we pull away. On board, we give no further thought about how we got there. We all made it on the bus.
So why do I struggle with the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard? Richard Rohr, [she says] suggests it’s due to “living in a world of meritocracy, of quid-pro-quo thinking, of performance and behaviour that earns an award.”
Given the age of this parable – it’s over two thousand years old, it seems this way of arranging the world, and deciding out who gets how big a slice of the pie, or any slice at all, is as old as the hills. And it’s still strong today. It’s deep in human nature as we know it.
And it shapes so much of our life. It shapes social policy, in the way we distribute education and health and recreation resources around our cities. It colours our charitable impulses and programs, whenever we start to sort out who is deserving or not of a community’s generosity. It shows up in our politics and big-picture policies that give preference to the voice and the needs of some, and counts others as dispensable and not as important. This ethic of meritocracy and of people being rewarded according to their performance and productivity also shows up in our own characters and personalities and personal behaviours.
Years ago when I studied theology and lived in Toronto, I helped out at a dying church just on the edge of downtown near Christie Pits, and one summer the tiny membership of the church decided that if they were going out, they wanted to go with a bang. A party for the neighbourhood that was no longer white European, Protestant and United Church, but still their neoighbourhood. We contacted neighbourhood artists and cultural groups, and arranged a day-long party of music, dancing and food.
One of the groups – a Ukrainian dance school required a stage to dance on, rather than just the church lawn. So we arranged to borrow some used plywood and built a stage the day before the party. Then the night of the party, after it was over – and it was a great day, all we could have hoped for, after the party was over we had to take the stage apart, load the plywood sheets into a truck and have them ready to return to their source the next morning.
It was a lot of work late into the night after a long and tiring day, and as I walked back and forth from lawn to truck with sheet after sheet of plywood, all I could think of was that it seemed the others helping out weren’t making as many trips back and forth as me. And instead of being grateful for all the help that was there, and that these people stayed into the night to help out, I grew only increasingly resentful that they were not working as hard as me.
Or there was the time when I was ecumenical chaplain at McMaster and one year I sat down over coffee with the student leaders of the IVCF and Navigators groups, and one of the programs that came of the conversation was “Church at the John” – a brand-new venture that took off like hotcakes, which was a monthly Sunday-night praise service sponsored by IVCF in the campus pub which was called “The John.” It was fantastic.
Except, every time it was mentioned by the IVCF staff person, she described it as the brainchild of the IVCF student leader, when I knew full well (at least in my own mind) that it was my idea and I even needed to convince him a little of its value. Not only resentful of not getting credit, but jealous of it going to someone else who didn’t deserve it as much as me.
And of course, the knife-edge of this ethic of comparison cuts the other way as well, often convincing me that I’m not worth as much as the others. That it’s me who offers less, produces less, achieves less, is less, and is therefore worth-less. And maybe not even missed at all if I don’t even show up.
Oh, how the joy of something good and of unity in God’s good work are lost, when we worry as we do about credit, and reward. When we insist that payment – even if it’s only in the currency of recognition and approval, be doled out according to performance and productivity. We love to compare. Or, even if we don’t love it, we find it hard to avoid it.
Which is why Jesus’ parable, and his version of a happy ending for the story of the differently engaged vineyard workers, is so challenging even now two thousand years after its first telling.
Because what Jesus proposes as the ethic of the kingdom of God, in contrast to an ethic of comparison of worth and accordingly different rewards, is an ethic of completion, and the equal reward and shared celebration by all of what has been achieved.
I can’t help but think of something I learned about being a village, when I lived and worked up in Paisley – a small town up north in Bruce County. Prior to that time in my life I had lived, studied and worked only in big cities – Winnipeg and Toronto, and the ethic of comparison was what we all lived by. If you worked hard, succeeded and did something good, you were rewarded; if you didn’t work hard, accomplished little, or even failed, you got less. It seemed to make sense in those big-city settings.
But, as a member of one of the Paisley churches put it one day, a village is different. Not because there are any fewer alcoholics, failures, or troubled souls in the village than in the big city. But because here in the village they are our alcoholics, our failures, and our troubled souls, and we will take care of them because they are part of us and we are part of them, We are one community, and we belong to one another.
Which means we will not let them starve or be thrown out into the cold. We will be sure they have what they need. As much as we can we will be sure their children are fed and clothed, have an equal education with others, and have as good a chance at a good life as others. We do not look down on them, and keep them down. We look at them as our neighbours, and we are aware of all the ways we are the same in this boat we are in together, and we either swim together or we slowly sink one by one.
Now, I admit that I am over-idealizing the village life of Paisley. This was, after all, what one church member in that town saw as the goal, and the way of the village at its best. But I wonder if this comes close at all to what Jesus is saying in the parable about the way of God in the world, and what it means to live in the world with the heart and the mind of God no matter where we live, how big the community is, and what variety and diversity of people live in it.
Franciscan scholar Ilia Delio has written extensively about how compassion – a major part of any spiritual ethic, and a way of living God’s life on Earth – stems from knowing that we belong to one another. He says,
We long to be for one another and to give ourselves nobly to another, but we fear the cost of love. We long for oneness of heart, mind and soul, but we fear the demands of unity. Sometimes I think we choose to be alone because it is safe….
Compassion overcomes isolation because the truly compassionate person recognizes the other as part of oneself in a way that is beyond explanation and rational understanding. It is not a rational, reasoned-out caring for another but a deep identification with the other as brother or sister… Compassion, then, is realized when we know ourselves related to one another, despite the differences between us.
And as Kate Lasso concludes in her comments on the parable, in the unfolding of the kingdom of God in the affairs of the world and of own churches and communities,
it doesn’t matter if we got on the bus at the beginning of the route, close to the end, were waiting ten minutes ahead of time or had to sprint half a block. What matters is that the bus came, and we got in. What matters is that God invited us [each in our own time, as was possible and right] to be workers in the field [each in our own way as we were able], and we said yes.
Thanks be to God.
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