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| Salomon Koninck "Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard" (Dutch, 17th Cent.) |
“So the last will be first, and the first
will be last” (Matthew 20:16)
Man! Don’t you just hate this parable (Matthew 20:1-16)?! I mean, where does Jesus get
off saying the Kingdom of Heaven is like this whopper of a tall tale he’s
telling us? For lots of folks this story is nothing short of infuriating. It
violates our sense of justice to see undeserving
people get something they haven’t earned. You might say that Jesus is preaching
downright socialism, by God! How dare he?!! Doesn’t he know that here in
America good, decent people work for a living and earn their rewards? It’s all the others—lazy welfare cheats and
illegal aliens—who expect something for nothing. And, while we’re on the
subject, what’s up with student loan forgiveness? We had to pay back our debts, and these kids should too, dang it!
The same with universal healthcare. If they want it, let ‘em go out and work
for it!
Isn’t this the way we feel sometimes? We’d
be more comfortable with deserving folks being deprived than we are with someone
we think is undeserving getting blessed. If we’ve struggled or suffered, we
look down on those who haven’t. I’ll admit there’s something to be said for
suffering. At best, it has the power to ennoble us. But: it can also make us
self-absorbed, mean, and petty. The first-hired laborers in our Gospel story
feel entitled. “We have born the burden of the day and the scorching heat,”
they say. But perhaps they have not considered the struggle and the suffering of
the late arrivals. The landowner asks those in the marketplace at the shank of
the day, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” Their mournful reply is, “Because
no one has hired us.” They’re unemployed, and no work means no food for
themselves or their families.
When I was about ten years old my dad was
laid off from his job. He was a middle-aged engineer, the victim of an
industry-wide slow-down. He was out of work for the next fourteen months and
had to apply for government assistance—a necessity which was murderous to the pride
of a man who believed that good people went to work and only bums went on the
dole. He worked off and on for the next fourteen years until he was able to
take his Social Security and pension. He went from one company to another,
following the fortunes of government contracts and the shaky economy, never
again feeling that he would have the job security the American Dream had
promised. I learned early in life that unemployment brings its own special kind
of suffering.
The behavior of the landowner in our
parable is as disturbing as the grumbling of the “entitled” early hires. He
tells his foreman to gather the workers and pay the most recent hires first.
This violates a rather common sense rule of business: Don’t let an employee
know what other employees are paid. Doing this can only incite comparison,
envy, and discontent. Nevertheless, this landowner acts like a show-off and
parades his largess to the late hires in front of the whole workforce. Predictably,
the griping ensues.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with
what the landowner has done, even though prudence would dictate that he follow
the advice about almsgiving Jesus gave us in the Sermon on the Mount.[i] His show of generosity,
you see, forces all the workers to confront the issue. Do they value their
sense of justice and pride over the welfare of others? Are they choosing to weaponize
their own struggles in order to prove their entitlement? What do they value
more—compassion for fellow human beings or their sense of personal superiority?
And how, do you think, would Jesus want them to answer these questions? How
would you?
God’s way often makes us unsettled, and
forces us to ask questions of ourselves which we might be embarrassed to
answer. We all have a little bit of Jonah in us, don’t we?[ii] It galls us to see the “undeserving”
spared.
I love that the book of Jonah ends with a
question and not an answer. In this stressful, precarious moment in history it
might be best that we let ourselves be challenged by the scriptures.
God be with you.
[i]
See Matthew 6:2-4.
[ii]
See Jonah 3:10-4:11, our First Lesson for Pentecost 16.
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