Every time I read or hear this story, I get an itch in my fingers or the back of my neck at the unfairness of it all. I love to know that God is excessively generous to people who don’t earn it, but why not be crazy generous to people who put in the time, also?
Then in this story, Jesus reminds me I don’t get to choose God’s generosity to fit my preferences, and I don’t get to be indignant about the distribution of grace. I want to love what Jesus is up to, but it still feels… itchy. My shoulders twitch. And I have to learn to embrace my discomfort – to love not just God’s overwhelming generosity, but also the fact that divine generosity doesn’t follow my rules or expectations.
But the nice thing (and the frustrating thing!) about parables is that they are never about just one idea, one truth.
Every time I have read this story in a group, while I’m wrestling with my sense of unfairness about the pay scale, someone else asks “Why are there all these laborers who weren’t working all day?” “Why does that landowner keep going out and hiring more people?”
There’s another unsolved God-mystery in this story, a mystery in the marketplace.
And that mystery is part of our God story – yours and mine – too.
We don’t really know why that landowner keeps going out to the marketplace. Matthew and Jesus explain other things in this story, but not that. Biblical scholars and historians say it doesn’t make any more sense in the practices of the time than it does now. We don’t know – can’t know – but we can speculate.
If you had a vineyard – a business or some other asset – that could feed everyone who walked through the gates, regardless of how much anyone works, would you go out and invite people in? Would you go out just once, or over and over? Why?
It’s a question many of us have probably never considered, or thought we needed to consider.
But asking it may change something about the way we see the world, or ourselves.
Many of us do have assets – financial or physical, or skills and talents – that can benefit more people than we need to make those assets work. All of us share one thing like that: the church and the gospel, which spiritually feed more people than the folks who volunteer or are paid to tend them.
What would motivate you to keep inviting more people in, to share the spiritual food, or the physical benefits of what we have, with people whose work we don’t really need in order to experience those benefits ourselves?
Why does that landowner keep going out? We don’t know, but it’s a good question to ask ourselves. It’s a God question to ask.
So is the question of why there are people in the marketplace waiting to be hired at noon, three, or even five p.m.
The five o’clock laborers in Jesus’ story actually give us part of the answer to that question. When the landowner asks “why are you standing here all day?” they say “because no one has hired us.”
Not because they didn’t want to work. Not because they’re bad workers. Plainly and simply “Because no one has hired us.”
We need to hear that that also means “Because you did not hire us.”
That landowner has been hiring people all day, and still didn’t hire this group, who have waited and waited until the end of the day.
I don’t know – we can’t exactly know – what the labor market was like in first century Palestine. But it might be worth asking ourselves who doesn’t get hired today, or who gets hired last.
We generally don’t hire the people who don’t seem to fit the job. Sometimes that means, very practically, that you don’t hire a priest to do brain surgery, or a veterinarian to re-wire your house.
But we also know – because the news keeps turning up studies that demonstrate this – that two identical resumes get different results depending on whether the name at the top of the page sounds male or female, Asian or African-American or ‘white’ or Native or immigrant. That a job offer or salary offer or invitation to leadership often depends unconsciously on whether the person in question is tall, or attractive, or “looks gay”, has lighter or darker skin, or is visibly disabled. All these are things that unconsciously play into who we think “belongs” or “fits”.
Those are hiring trends of the early twenty-first century United States, not of first-century Palestine, but they make me remember who is telling this story.
Jesus, who tells us this story, broke every barrier and taboo there was in his day about who is worthy, who fits the job, and who belongs. Jesus brought “unclean” lepers into the community of the righteous. Jesus sought out “sinners” and helped them see themselves as God’s beloved; sought out “unqualified” people like tax collectors and fishermen, and made them religious leaders. Jesus numbered women – hardly considered real persons – among his friends and disciples, and put the news of resurrection in the mouths of those most likely to be doubted, ignored, and overlooked.
It helps me to remember that this story was not primarily told to the powerful leaders of Jesus’ day. It was told first to a messy bunch of the marginalized and average; to a group of the oppressed mixed with some comfortable people who were willing to step out of their comfort zone for love of Jesus, and be ridiculed or punished for it by their peers.
It may help to remember, too, that the latecomers in the community that handed the story on to us may have been people who’d heard the gospel many times, but just weren’t ready to accept God’s grace until late in their own day, and want to extend the same invitation to you and me.
We don’t know – can’t know for sure – why there were still laborers to be hired in that marketplace at noon, at three, or at five in the evening. Maybe it’s because we – you or I – did not invite them to share our vineyard. Maybe it’s because they were well-qualified, but everyone believed they wouldn’t “fit” the job; maybe it’s because they wanted to work but did not know how until the right person came with the right invitation.
We don’t know, but these are good questions to ask ourselves. These are God questions to ask.
These are questions God might ask of us:
Why are there people left out of the kingdom at this late hour, my friends?
or
Why are you still standing out here, outside the kingdom, at this late hour, dear friends?
God doesn’t answer all the questions we have – about this story, or about anything else.
Jesus consistently raises questions we can’t quite solve.
But God and Jesus give us answers, too, to the questions we don’t know how to ask, or might not dare to ask. To the questions in this story, and in our own stories.
Yes, God will keep looking for you, coming back again and again until you, too, are brought into the vineyard, the kingdom of heaven.
Yes, God sends us out, with Jesus, over and over, to seek out those who have not been hired, to bring more people in, until all the barriers that keep people out are erased, and we have shared God’s work and grace with everyone.
Yes, God delights in giving us more than we can earn or deserve. And, yes, we are called share that generosity ourselves, not be tied down by anyone’s rules or feelings about fairness, including our own.
Yes, early or late, righteous or sinner, oppressed or privileged, uncertain or convinced, happy or sad, we all belong – equally and without merit – in the love and grace of the kingdom of Go
No comments:
Post a Comment