Readings
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Psalm 145:1-8
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16
Today we hear a challenging parable about the nature of God’s kingdom. One that, if we are open to what it teaches, makes available a whole new way of looking at our lives and the nature of reality itself.
Like in many parables, Jesus uses an image that would have been quite familiar to the people who first heard it. We have the story of a landowner who goes out looking for people to work in his vineyard. Early in the morning he hires a group of people to work. Then an hour later he finds more people idling around and hires them. Then he goes out again at noon and hires even more people. Next, he goes out in the afternoon and hires even more people. And, finally near the end of the day he hires those who have found no work all day to work the final hour or two before quitting time.
Now, so far this is neither a surprising or challenging image, either to early hearers or to us, but then things get interesting. To make a long story short, the time comes to pay the workers and the landowner tells the manager to pay them in reverse order of when they started. When those who started last come up, we can assume to their great surprise, they are paid a full day’s wages. This then sets up those who worked longer hours to presume that they’ve just hit “pay dirt,” that they’ll be getting even more. But to their disappointment, when they come forward, they too are paid a day’s wages.
In response those who worked all day begin to grumble because it is just not fair. It’s not fair to work all day in the “scorching heat” and get paid the same as those who only worked for an hour. They, sympathetically to our modern ears, complain against the unfairness of such an arrangement.
But the landowner reminds them that they are not being underpaid. They, in fact, are being paid a full day’s wages. A wage for which they agreed. He names their issue, that they are envious of those who were paid the same, even though the landowner is free to use his money as he sees fit. And Jesus concludes this parable saying, “So the last will be first and the first will be last.”
I don’t know about you. But, even now, on one level this parable is a stick in my craw. I find myself sympathetic to those folks who worked all day and who get paid the same as those who only worked an hour. How is such an arrangement fair? It seems rather unjust that one is not paid according to one’s labor and/or one’s merit.
Whether a wage earner or salaried, we live in a society that believes that compensation should be a reflection of both the labor involved and the merit of the worker. It is for this reason that we compensate more for higher skill and/or education, and we compensate more for longer hours and/or more responsibility. Such a system is bound up in our assumptions that come out of capitalism and meritocracy. Such a system presumes that some are better than others and, as such, deserve more than others. The truth is that these aren’t new ideas. They are as ancient as the Gospels, if not more so.
But Jesus, in today’s Gospel, challenges such assumptions and argues that the nature of the world and the human community are different if we live as if God is in charge. If we are attentive to the finer details of this story, we can discern some important things.
First, the workers in this story, whether the first or the last, are not underpaid for their work. Each of them receives a day’s wages, which would have been enough for them to survive for another day. The wage would not have made them wealthy, but it would have sustained them.
Second, the reality represented by those who grumble may, in fact, be more about their assumptions about merit and the accumulation of wealth than about the idea that those who come late in the day are being overpaid. Either way, merit is at the heart of their argument, and they presume themselves superior to those who have worked less than them.
Finally, the response of the master reframes the issue away from questions of merit, fairness, or superiority into one of generosity. At the heart of the matter is that the landowner desires to treat everyone as equal and to equally share out of his abundance.
You see, in the kingdom of God, if we are to believe what Jesus is saying, all of us have a right to the basics of life. All of us are invited into the work of the vineyard and all of us should receive what we need. In such a reality the value is not so much on the merit of the individual in comparison to others but on the basic dignity of every human being. The value isn’t the accumulation of wealth, but gratitude for all that we have received.
The difficulty for us comes out of living in the values of our dominant culture. How often have we fallen prey to the trap of comparing ourselves to others? How often have we been envious of those who have more, or worse, those who seem to be rewarded for being or doing less?
Such thinking is a trap that keeps us from experiencing the blessings that are inherent in the life that God has given us. Such thinking either robs us of our dignity in presuming our inferiority or robs others of their dignity in our presuming our superiority.
Now that’s not to say there aren’t real issues of economic justice in our society today. Just as the landowner paid enough for all to live, the image of God’s kingdom calls us to work tirelessly to ensure that every person who wishes to provide meaningful work has the right to be rewarded for their work with enough to sustain them. The greed and unbridled inequality in our system that leads to the working poor not being able to sustain themselves does not reflect the values or vision of God’s kingdom. Moreover, the presumption that such people deserve their lot is anathema to the reality that Jesus preaches.
Beloved, today’s Gospel has both implications for us and the world we live in. It calls us to be agents of justice in the world. But it also calls us to look deep within ourselves at the assumptions we carry. Assumptions that inform how we see ourselves in relation to those around us and the value we place on one another. It calls us to nothing less than choosing a position that the world would call the last and the least. By doing so we may well find that, while we are not the most successful or wealthy persons, we will have a deep and abiding sense of our worth that cannot be assailed by the vicissitudes and chances of this life.
What would our world look like if we made respecting the dignity of every human being our primary goal, rather than rewarding merit or the lack thereof? What would our society look like if we stopped comparing ourselves to others in order to have a sense of worth for ourselves and our work?
If we did such things, my friends, I believe our proclamation of the Gospel would have an impact that the Church has not seen for centuries, if not millennia. But more than that, we would become partners with the landowner and know his blessings. And we would be agents of that blessing both now and always.