Our Gospel reading for today continues what seems to be a series on some of Jesus’ more difficult parables. This one is called the Parable of the Unjust Wages. In it, a landowner hires some workers early in the morning and puts them to work. A few hours later he hires more workers and puts them to work. Then again, in the afternoon he hires still more, and they start working. When it comes time to pay at the day’s end, he pays the late-comers first, giving them the same wages he gives to those who arrived early in the day. So no matter how long you worked that day, your paycheck was the same.
The parable speaks for itself, but to get a better sense of how outrageous this is, I came up with some modern-day takes on it: the colleague who comes onto a project late but gets the same amount of credit and bragging rights on his resume as those who worked on it from the start. The co-worker who receives the same pay but doesn’t have the degree (or graduate school debt) that you have. The woman who works twice as hard as her male colleague but whose paycheck is the same. These are ways this parable might play out today, and when you think about it in contemporary terms like this, you see why it got his hearers so riled up. In fact, in a lecture on this parable that I listened to this week, the lecturer guessed that this parable is what got Jesus killed.
I’ve heard several sermons over the years trying to mute the parable. For instance, maybe Jesus was talking strictly about how things work in heaven, not on earth. Or perhaps God, like the master in this parable, might favor generosity over justice, but that’s not how we’re supposed to structure our work places or societies. I’m not sure those are distinctions Jesus would have drawn, but in any case, I’d like to put to one side the question of how we relate this parable to the real world (in that sense, at least) and focus instead on a couple other, simpler, lessons it has to teach us.
The first about coveting and contentment. I’ve never read this in the context of a recession before, but doing so brought to mind some of the things people were saying when it all started in 2008. Bear in mind, this was long before we knew how terrible this recession was going to be. Long before we’d heard the word “double-dip” in connection with it. Long before we or at least someone we knew lost a job. Long before whole countries started going into default. Long before all this, some of us more naive folks were sort of romantic about the recession because we thought of it as way to get away from the pressures of keeping up with our neighbors, or a chance to scale back and focus on what really matters.
In particular, I remember one friend of mine, a freelance writer who was forever complaining about her finances and how she couldn’t ever go out or do anything fun, saying how glad she was that everyone else would now have to live more like she’s always had to live.
Comments like that really made me aware of how much our contentment and sense of what is enough is based on what others have, rather than on our actual needs. We all know it’s a hard impulse to fight, the impulse to compare ourselves with others and to let their possessions dictate our needs. And maybe something a little like that is going on in this parable. Each person receives his wages at the day’s end, and nowhere does the parable say that the first worker to arrive received a meager or insufficient wage. As far as we know, he wasn’t upset because he couldn’t go home and feed his family or pay his bills; he was upset because his neighbor who worked fewer hours got the same thing. He began to compare and to covet, and that’s where his problems started, as they often do with us. Again, this parable may be about much more than that, but that’s an aspect of it that I can understand and relate to.
Another lesson the parable might have to teach is about how God values each one of us equally, at whatever stage we are on our Christian journey. Which may be a good transition into the baptism of little Chloe Jean. Like the workers who started out early in the morning, some among us have been following Christ for eighty or ninety years (Teresa and Jean); others fifty, others twenty; and others, like little Chloe, are just setting out. But no matter how early or late, long ago or recently, we began to love him, the wages of God’s love in return are the same. And those wages are surely enough - and more than enough - for us. Amen.
The parable speaks for itself, but to get a better sense of how outrageous this is, I came up with some modern-day takes on it: the colleague who comes onto a project late but gets the same amount of credit and bragging rights on his resume as those who worked on it from the start. The co-worker who receives the same pay but doesn’t have the degree (or graduate school debt) that you have. The woman who works twice as hard as her male colleague but whose paycheck is the same. These are ways this parable might play out today, and when you think about it in contemporary terms like this, you see why it got his hearers so riled up. In fact, in a lecture on this parable that I listened to this week, the lecturer guessed that this parable is what got Jesus killed.
I’ve heard several sermons over the years trying to mute the parable. For instance, maybe Jesus was talking strictly about how things work in heaven, not on earth. Or perhaps God, like the master in this parable, might favor generosity over justice, but that’s not how we’re supposed to structure our work places or societies. I’m not sure those are distinctions Jesus would have drawn, but in any case, I’d like to put to one side the question of how we relate this parable to the real world (in that sense, at least) and focus instead on a couple other, simpler, lessons it has to teach us.
The first about coveting and contentment. I’ve never read this in the context of a recession before, but doing so brought to mind some of the things people were saying when it all started in 2008. Bear in mind, this was long before we knew how terrible this recession was going to be. Long before we’d heard the word “double-dip” in connection with it. Long before we or at least someone we knew lost a job. Long before whole countries started going into default. Long before all this, some of us more naive folks were sort of romantic about the recession because we thought of it as way to get away from the pressures of keeping up with our neighbors, or a chance to scale back and focus on what really matters.
In particular, I remember one friend of mine, a freelance writer who was forever complaining about her finances and how she couldn’t ever go out or do anything fun, saying how glad she was that everyone else would now have to live more like she’s always had to live.
Comments like that really made me aware of how much our contentment and sense of what is enough is based on what others have, rather than on our actual needs. We all know it’s a hard impulse to fight, the impulse to compare ourselves with others and to let their possessions dictate our needs. And maybe something a little like that is going on in this parable. Each person receives his wages at the day’s end, and nowhere does the parable say that the first worker to arrive received a meager or insufficient wage. As far as we know, he wasn’t upset because he couldn’t go home and feed his family or pay his bills; he was upset because his neighbor who worked fewer hours got the same thing. He began to compare and to covet, and that’s where his problems started, as they often do with us. Again, this parable may be about much more than that, but that’s an aspect of it that I can understand and relate to.
Another lesson the parable might have to teach is about how God values each one of us equally, at whatever stage we are on our Christian journey. Which may be a good transition into the baptism of little Chloe Jean. Like the workers who started out early in the morning, some among us have been following Christ for eighty or ninety years (Teresa and Jean); others fifty, others twenty; and others, like little Chloe, are just setting out. But no matter how early or late, long ago or recently, we began to love him, the wages of God’s love in return are the same. And those wages are surely enough - and more than enough - for us. Amen.
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