Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Not What You’d Expect
Scriptures: Exodus 16:2-15
The parable of the vineyard, like all of Jesus’ parables, can challenge us deeply.
For the people that Jesus first spoke to, some things were familiar. The Denarius, a single Roman silver coin, was the standard pay rate for a casual labourer who would be expected to work a 10 or 11 hour day in the sun, roughly corresponding to working from sunrise to sunset. There were no unions in those days.
The behaviour of the vineyard owner is unusual. He keeps going to the market for new labourers. Maybe there’s a labour shortage, or he has a lot of ripe grapes to be picked that day. None of that is explained, but to be hiring someone with just an hour before the day ends is pretty exceptional.
And then the truly outrageous thing happens: he pays each worker a full day’s wages no matter how long they laboured in the sun.
The injustice is obvious: the workers are not being rewarded equally for their time or effort. The vineyard owner, when challenged, basically says “Quit whining, I didn’t break the contract. It’s my money and I can do what I want.”
And Jesus tells us that this exemplifies the kingdom of God – that new order we are asking for whenever we pray “Thy kingdom come”.
You could try explaining it in terms similar to a universal minimum salary: the vineyard owner, representing God, is providing enough so that each labourer has enough not to starve.
That message corresponds with the idea that God loves all people and wants everyone to have enough. But Jesus is also saying that our concepts of Justice are just not enough; that God operates on a level beyond us. God is the vineyard owner of the universe. God can do anything and is not subject to our outrage when we feel like an injustice has happened.
There is lots of Biblical precedent for this message. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to love our enemies because God provides sun and rain to both the evil and the good. God does not use the basic gifts of life to reward justice and punish injustice.
The whole book of Job challenges us the same way. Faithful Job is tested by Satan, stripped of all his blessings and made to suffer. Job remains faithful, and is eventually rewarded by God but when Job demands that God explain this injustice, God basically says: You can’t understand; my reasons are way above your pay grade”.
The second season of the show Good Omens re-frames this answer in a delightful way: “Come back and ask again when you can make a whale”.
We find that kind of answer offensive. It feels patronizing. It puts us in our place. We don’t like to be treated like children: sent away from the table when grown-up things are being discussed.
The idea that we don’t get to judge God is not the whole point that Jesus is making. At the very least we are reminded that God is changing the definition of “fair”: everyone is getting enough to live on; no one is getting rich; of course the day-labourer’s wage isn’t much but it is enough and everyone gets enough.
Jesus is reminding us that God is still providing for us whether we feel like we are getting our fair share or not. Changing the whole notion of “fair share” is at the core of this parable. After all, it’s not that far off from coveting, is it? Looking at your neighbour and feeling like you deserve what they have too? Jesus is calling us to re-imagine our expectations. Not to measure our situation in contrast to the people around us but to ask, instead, whether we have what we need rather than what we want.
In social terms, thinking this way has been seen as a way to support injustice. It lets the 1% exploit everyone else. It’s why Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses”. And that’s a fair criticism if we compare the rights of the vineyard owner with the rights of human landowners and other powerful people.
The church has done that in the past: “It’s my money; I can spend it as I see fit” has been granted as a right to those in power and peasants have been told not to question their social betters.
But that’s absurd. Jesus would lump human landowners in with the workers in this parable. None of us get to claim that superior position.
And frankly, using this parable, anyone with a position of power would be called to follow God’s generous example and make sure that everyone has what they need. The whole system that pits owners and bosses against workers, so that it’s okay for those who own the business to want to “extract the maximum milk with the minimum moo”, are completely violating the principle Jesus is teaching here.
Our sense of justice needs to go beyond concepts like dollars per hour or “did this person produce more than that person” however basic that kind of justice may appear.
In this parable, Jesus puts God’s logic above ours, not to make us feel belittled or inadequate, but to challenge us to think greater thoughts, to go beyond jealousy or covetousness, certainly, but even to go beyond human ideas of justice that pit us against each other.
God’s justice never stops reaching out into the market place, inviting even the latest of latecomers to the task at hand. And God’s justice provides enough for everyone no matter what we feel like others deserve, or what we feel like we deserve.
Jesus challenges us to think beyond these traditional ideas of justice, that have been in position since before the Roman Empire, to a set of values that is more worthy of the word “divine”.
How will we make this work in a world where we are told that resources are scarce? How will we live out the message that God provides enough, when we are taught to be jealous of anyone who looks better off than we are?
History has taught us that it is not enough to teach the poorer majority this lesson, the CEOs have to buy into it as well.
It won’t be a simple process. We are trying to refine human nature. As long as we ignore this lesson of Jesus, as long as we buy into the traditional, competitive model where we fight over the resources God provides instead of sharing them, we will not achieve the vision Jesus offers us.
Let’s try and get our minds around this higher concept of justice and shape our world to reflect the generosity of God that is already in place if only we learn how to see it.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 