This Week: Proper 20A
Gospel: Matthew 20:1-16
There’s this dance we do on a Sunday morning when Jesus starts talking about money. Actually, there are a few different dances.
One is the Happy Feet. We start moving ‘em and going “hey, look at these feet go!” so that the people around us forget that we’re talking about money.
There’s the Squirm. That’s where we start wondering if other people are noticing what we’re noticing. This is also related to the “Is it hot in here?” in which we tug at our collar and wonder what’s happening to us—and is it just us?
Then there’s the No He Didn’t—where we become convinced that Jesus didn’t say what he said and if he did say what he said, he didn’t mean what he said.
Of course, when there’s dancing to be had, there are also the people who refuse to dance. They hear Jesus talk about money and aren’t phased. Not because they agree with him, but precisely because they don’t. And nobody’s going to convince them to.
This is a parable about money.
And not just about money, but about paying people money. And being generous in the paying of people money. Paying people the same amount of money regardless of how much they do.
And as much as people don’t like talking about money, they do like talking about hard work.
Some people will talk about communism. And others will try to convince you that Jesus is really a capitalist. He may as well have said it is our least-worst option, amiright?
People will debate economic theory in their heads and be tight-lipped in public. Even after hearing Jesus audaciously challenge our very sense of merit-based income.
We may even all pretend that Jesus is talking about relationships, not money. And that we should all treat each other well…without worrying about whether everyone gets fed.
It’s all about money.
Even as we’ll try to relate it to something else. Saying It’s money and….
Or perhaps we’ll realize that it is truly all about money. And that Jesus doesn’t like our accumulating it. And that all that dancing we’ve been doing was based on the simple fact that we knew that from the beginning.
It’s about money. Our money. The money we have in our bank accounts. And the money that we allow to circulate around us. That we determine how it circulates around us. And we choose to ignore how those choices lead to people starving.
And no, the answer isn’t handing five bucks to every person we see on a park bench.
Jesus just condemned wealth.
Like five seconds before this.
He told a rich guy to sell all of his stuff, give the money to the poor, and follow him. Not because that’s some unwritten rule about following Jesus. But because the guy needed to restore his relationship to the people he exploited.
Then Jesus says
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.
Which is not some snobby dis of a rich people. And it’s not some moralizing about the amoral character of money. Jesus is literally saying wealth makes us stupid and blinds us to reality.
Wealth is a barrier to heaven because it reveals an unrepentant sin.
That we gather resources for ourselves without honest regard to our neighbors.
This is the fundamental sin of the tax collector: they expressly amassed wealth from taking it. But it also represented a traditional view of wealth itself. That it was only possible to accrue wealth by taking it.
We talked about restoring relationships just last week. And now Jesus is reminding us that such restoration includes money.
We make our economy.
This is the unspoken reality Jesus tries to reveal. That the wealthy man is neither given the certainty of salvation nor the assurance that he is, in fact, good. That his action has led to this uncertainty and also that a new action may grant him the assurance he seeks.
The same can be said of the unnamed other landowners in the parable. The ones who refuse to hire any laborers and leave them to suffer without the daily wage that would put food on their tables.
The reason we do the dance about the money is not that we don’t want to talk about money. It’s that we don’t want to face that we can do things differently. That the modern economic theory is predicated on unjust principles.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, conservative economists in Republican and Democratic administrations determined that a healthy economy demands we have 5% unemployment and that many citizens must live an abject poverty. For the sake of the economy. That, for the sake of our wealth creation, we must condemn some of our neighbors to starvation and death.
This, of course, is no law of nature. But an excuse they used to shape the economy in the way they wanted.
And Jesus simply reminds us that we can, in fact, choose to change it whenever we want to.