the restorative love of Jesus in action
Proper 20A | Matthew 20:1-16
This parable may be the most fascinating of Jesus’s teachings. And most people can’t stand it. It triggers something deep inside of us. Something we might not even know is there.
Maybe we should look into that.
The structure of the story is pretty simple:
There is a landowner who hires people to work for him. He goes out several times and picks up workers throughout the day. When the day is done, he pays them a day’s wage. And he does it in LIFO order—Last In First Out.
When the first people to work finally get their pay, they are surprised to find they are paid the same wage as the people who arrived last. So they speak up.
The landowner reminds them that each settled for a day’s wage. So they each got it.
The landowner also responds to what he perceives is the tension by inviting them to look outside of their own perspective and into his. He asks them why they would begrudge his generosity. Why are they free to condemn and he isn’t free to redeem?
Fascinating, right?
So how do we respond to it? There are a couple of very specific ways.
1) Fairness
The parable doesn’t actually use the word “fair” at any point. But fairness is our word and our assumption. And what does the idea of fairness do to our expectations?
Fair is not a neutral word. We think of fair as leveling the field of play. It is the setting of the boundaries and adjudicating the lines honestly.
But fair isn’t neutral and doesn’t enforce neutrality. A billion dollar corporation like Exxon can spend millions on appeals for decades until the plaintiffs of the Alaskan spill die all to avoid paying out what is owed.
While many of us recognize how deeply unfair that is, a view of fairness as neutral allows corporations a right to outlive and outspend humans through this impression of neutrality.
The concept of fairness is a loaded bag of shifting responsibility.
2) Incentive
While I’m sure we noticed our sense of fairness was triggered by this parable, did we notice the other thing that gets us? The one that is less forward in our thinking? More assumed and less defined?
It isn’t fairness alone that grates on us. Not enough to get riled up here. Otherwise we might say, Let the rich guy do what he wants; it’s his money.
We get riled up because there is an assumption about why he shouldn’t do this that isn’t just fairness.
We’ve bought into an idea about motivation around labor. That, if people weren’t incentivised to work all day, everyone would show up at five and work the one hour.
This is the same assumption we make when we hear in the parable about the people waiting to be hired throughout the day. What is our first thought? You’ve got the word in your mind already: lazy.
But what do they tell the landowner about their idleness? Why are they there at 5:00?
‘Because no one has hired us.’
Our first assumption is laziness, refusal to work, gaming the system.
All things a neutral system does allow. It also allows unnecessary suffering and death. It lets people go bankrupt through medical bills or go into extreme debt to get the education necessary to avoid poverty. [Think that one through.]
This, we call fair. And this is the product of our sense of incentivising work.
This parable scares us.
Because its logic reveals the lies we accept as truth. And the truths we want to avoid.
That the application of fairness can be deeply unfair. And that the cruelties we abide as motivation are just cruel.
Most evidence points to opposite incentives: better pay leads to more productivity. People feel respected, encouraged, and motivated when they are paid well. And far more so than when they have to scrape by. Yet we worry that nobody will show up for work tomorrow—when the real problem is staring us in the face.
We don’t trust the workers.
Which, of course, means we don’t trust ourselves. If we were being honest. But we’d prefer not to be.
That response they offer the landowner is the most revealing line in the parable. And explains precisely why the landowner would keep going out there all day long. Why he keeps recruiting past early morning. And why he is out there an hour before work gets out for the day.
And it explains why he paid everyone, not just the same, but a daily wage. He gave everyone who needed it enough to live on for a day. Every single person.
And when he asked why they were still out there, waiting:
‘Because no one has hired us.’
Other people left these people to starve.
The question at the heart of this story isn’t the personal responsibility of the workers. It’s the indifference of people with money.
While so many of us are listening to this parable like the politician who years ago referred to “makers and takers,” Jesus is turning the attention on all those people supposedly responsible for making who are producing nothing. Hiring none of these people. Leaving them to starve.
Our seduction in modern economic theory is to externalize costs. Which is a fancy way of saying we ignore suffering and pretend the waste we produce is not a cost we must bear. That’s somebody else’s problem.
So we pollute our air and water, strip our soil of nutrients, and pretend this doesn’t cost anything. It isn’t our responsibility. So we don’t put it on the balance sheet. Even when we produce it.
Nothing about this actually sounds fair. At least when we acknowledge it. But this is what we do with fairness. We make it not be about certain things. Like health, wholeness, and equality.
Good thing Jesus doesn’t talk about fairness.
He talks about what is right and what is good.
Right is ensuring everyone has their daily bread and a roof over their head. Paying people a real wage, not the deflated and inflated values of hierarchical systems.
Good is being generous with people, regardless of whether they “deserve” it.
Right is ensuring the health of all people as our basic moral responsibility as a community.
Good is helping restore people to the blessed community with grace and joy.
Right is recognizing the dangerous blindness that wealth gives us and seeking to make amends for it.
Good is making other people’s lives better through our generosity and hope.
Jesus On Wealth
I usually start with context, but I thought I’d end with it this time. Because sometimes we need the why after we learn the how.
The lectionary had us skip over chapter 19 of Matthew which includes the encounter with the pious young man. A man of great wealth and status. Who asks Jesus about his place in the eternal. You know the story.
And Jesus tells him to sell his stuff, give the money to the poor, and follow him. And the man grieves this. Yes, because he has a lot of stuff. But why is this the question?
Because Jesus sees his wealth as dangerous and ill-gotten. That he has exploited others and needs to atone. And selling it and giving it to the poor—the victims of his exploitation—is essential.
He says the wealthy have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel does getting through the eye of a needle. Again, not because Jesus doesn’t think God is fair to rich people, but because they must atone for the poverty of their neighbors.
Peter, hearing this, gets confused and scared. He thinks following Jesus sounds too hard. But Jesus turns the mirror around on him. He’s already following. Has given everything up. The disciples are living in solidarity with all of humanity.
Convicted
We should all feel a bit convicted by this. We probably all do have more money than we need.
But the sin at the heart of these teachings is exploitation—which is abuse in our relationship to other people. It is abandonment of the community for personal gain. It is the rejection of our neighbors so we can live in comfort. It is personal and community sin.
And our response must focus on restoring the dignity of our neighbors and atoning for our financial isolation from them.
So, let’s take down the gates that separate our neighborhoods. But also tear down the financial funnels which draw public funds into the hands of developers and prisons, while leaving nothing for feeding our neighbors. Financial funnels which ensure many of our neighborhoods are uninhabitable while others are pristine.
Living Hope
This is what it means to follow Jesus.
We all want to be good people. And we want to be blessed. But we are blessed to bless others. And our goodness is shown in our generosity. Our courage. And in our faith.
Faith in a Christ who saves. Redeems. Who turns our selfish pride into an engine of public prosperity. For our communities, our neighborhoods, and our church.
And our path is restoration. Being restored as we restore others. Which means making visible what our assumptions would rather hide. To recognize the forgotten as friends.
And our watchword is hope. That our love is enough. That our faith is enough. Hope that darkness is scattered by the dawn. And the resurrection is the tool of God to transform everything. Including us.
Hope that, in Jesus, we, all of us, are enough.