I smiled when I read our Gospel lesson this week, because last Saturday at the Parish Retreat at All Saints’, one of our clever teens happened to have spontaneously quoted verse 16 during our “Silly Olympics” games! Adults and kids had all been divided up into teams to compete in such demanding feats of skill as pushing a candle across the floor with your nose or racing to wrap a team member up in toilet paper, and there was good-natured cheering and bragging and ribbing throughout. Finally, when one team had been declared the “winner,” this quick and clever teen (who was not on the winning team) cried out: “Well, it says in the Bible that the first shall be last and the last shall be first! So there!” Everyone was very impressed that she had had the last word. I don’t think that I was the only one of us, though, who, after having had a good laugh at the put-down of the winners, was struck by how completely ridiculous this concept sounds in our competitive world. What’s even the point of playing games if the losers are the winners?
The reversals that God makes in the status quo are well-known throughout the Bible. Our God is a God who frees the Hebrew slaves and drowns the proud Egyptian army in the sea. Our God is a God who makes tongue-tied Moses the leader of his people, who uses slim, young David to fell the mighty Goliath, who picks a humble stable as the birthplace of His Son. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek,” we say with Mary in the Magnificat. And of course, we all know that Jesus’ teachings are all about turning the world upside down—doing crazy, counter-intuitive things, like loving one’s enemies and giving away all one’s possessions. Matthew also has Jesus telling us that “the first will be last and the last will be first” before today’s reading, in Chapter 19, in order to make clear that everyone who gives up his or her family and livelihood and possessions in order to follow Jesus will win eternal life.
Today’s parable, however, seems to be making a different point than the topsy-turvy reversals with which God seeks to topple social injustice and to cure us of our grasping ways. Today’s parable doesn’t take the losers and make them the winners; it doesn’t make the poor rich and the rich poor; it doesn’t kick out the workers who have worked hard all day and replace them with the 11th hour workers; neither does it say that the losing team will replace the winning team as first in line for lunch at All Saints’. Jesus’ message in our parable is even more radical than that. If Jesus’ words in verse 16 were truly to fit our parable, he would say instead: “the last will be like the first and the first like the last.”[1] Somehow, says our parable, categories like “first” and “last” have no place, no meaning at all, in God’s Kingdom.
Let’s look at the story.[2] In ancient Israel, landowners would often go out to a common gathering place and hire day laborers to work in their vineyards, especially at harvest time. Day laborers were cheaper than slaves, because landowners didn’t have to feed and house them. A denarius was a common daily wage for such a hired laborer: it was a subsistence wage, but it would have been considered “fair” pay for a day of work. The relationship between the landowner in our story and the workers whom he hires is this kind of formal relationship between a patron and the lesser men who work for, and depend on, him. As the story progresses, with the landowner going back every 3 hours or so to hire more laborers, our imaginations assume a hierarchy among the workers based on the time of day at which they are hired. Because we think in hierarchical terms, in listening to the story, we assume, like the workers, that the ones hired first are going to get more money than the ones hired later in the day. When the landowner ends up paying the workers hired at the end of the day a whole denarius, the amount that he had promised to the first workers, we automatically assume that we are dealing with a super generous lord who is going to give a “bonus” to those workers hired early in the morning, too. Surely they are about to get at least 2 denarii for their work, if the people who only worked for an hour or two have been paid one denarius. At this point in the story, though, the landowner speaks up. Instead of addressing the complaining workers as a group, lumping them together impersonally like he had done up until this point, he addresses just one single worker, one who feels as if he has been cheated. “Friend,” he calls him, reaching out in a personal way. “Friend, I am paying all of you the same thing. You assume a kind of fairness based on a hierarchy of labor that simply does not exist in my vineyard. Every laborer is needed at every hour, and every laborer is rewarded in the same way.” The landowner sighs. “Take what belongs to you and go. All along, you have been in my presence, on my land. You were invited. You were welcomed. But if you insist on your own version of justice, then your justice demands that you must go. Justice here has been leveled. In my vineyard, the last is like the first, and the first is like the last.”
Paul Ricoeur calls our insistence on “fairness” in this world, “a logic of equivalence.” Certain illegal actions receive certain punishments in our penal system. Our productivity in the workplace is weighed, measured, and rewarded; and deep-down, we expect to receive benefits in life according to our merit. We want God’s justice, too, to work with the clear reciprocity of a vending machine: you put in the right number of tokens and your reward plops out into your waiting hands. Such a logic of equivalence certainly promotes and rewards hard work and success in our world. When we are the workers hired first, we whistle with contentment as we head off to our labors, secure that we will be rewarded well at the end of the day. We guard our place at the top of the hierarchy warily, keeping a keen eye on any circumstances that might threaten it. When we are the workers standing around all day waiting for a job, though, watching our brothers and sisters move with purpose and pride, we can feel forsaken by God and by the unfairness of life, lashing out in anger or curling up in resignation. The good news of our parable is that this “logic of equivalence” is a man-made logic, not a divine one. For Jesus, God’s justice has nothing to do with a hierarchical relationship between individuals, some of whom are more worthy than others. Consequently, our attempts to keep track of where we are on such a ladder are totally futile and a waste of our time. In God’s eyes, our worth does not depend on where we stand but on God’s acceptance of us and on God’s generous invitation into the Kingdom. God’s Kingdom functions on a “logic of hope,” rather than a “logic of equivalence.” For God, we are made right through God’s open-ended giving, even through the gift of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ, and not through any closed-off standard of justice.
Often, interpreters of our parable understand the denarius paid to every worker as a metaphor for God’s grace, given to each of us, equally. I prefer Bernard Scott’s interpretation, however. He sees the call to work in the vineyard as the metaphor for God’s grace. Grace is in the need for workers, in the invitation to join in the essential work of God’s Kingdom. There is no unemployment in the Kingdom of God. There are no job qualifications. There are no workers who are better than others, none who are rewarded more than others. Just as the landowner is generous in his need for workers, hiring more and more and more, God is generous in God’s never-ending need for us all to join with him in transforming Creation in hope and love.
If God’s grace is pure invitation, I think that, as the Church, we need to be sure that our invitations are pure grace. Martin Smith writes that "God claims from us our purposeful engagement, our attentiveness, our intentionality ... for opening ourselves through desire to [God's] rich possibilities. [Our right response to a wildly generous God] is active receptivity, hope expectant of undeserved and surprising gifts."[3] As we follow God’s example to invite others to join in this piece of God’s Kingdom here on Westport Road, our parable would teach us to work at abolishing any hierarchies among ourselves. Old members, new members, “real” members, Christmas and Easter members: all are invited equally to labor among us. Priests, deacons, and lay members, all are invited equally to share in ministry. And as stewardship season approaches, does our giving to God of our tithes and our time reflect a logic of equivalence, a logic in which we give to God’s Kingdom based on how much we are getting back from life or from our community (or not!), or does it reflect a logic of hope, a logic of joining in the work to which we are called?
Let’s return to our games at All Saints’. If Sheri, who planned and invited us to the games, were God, she would not have carefully balanced each team with young, agile kids and old parents. She would have grabbed us up as we arrived at the play shelter. Some would have started to play the games at 10 and others at 11 and still others at noon. “Go on out there and play,” she would have said to the first groups of players, “and it will be great.” At noon, she would have looked over at everybody who was late to the retreat, at those of us hanging back and looking down at our clumsy feet, and she would have said, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” We would have answered, “Aww, we’re not good at these games…” or “It’s too late for us to play.” But Sheri would have said, “Get out there and play.” At lunch time, when it was time to stop the games, she would have gathered the team thrown together at the last minute and, no matter what their score, she would have invited them to go to lunch first. When the other teams, who had been playing longer and had more points, came over to hear what was going on, she would have sent them on to lunch, as well. “We had more points,” they would have complained! “We should get extra dessert or something! That’s not fair!” But Sheri might have replied, “The points don’t really matter. You all got to play, didn’t you? I desperately needed each and everyone one of you out there. If any of you had been missing, the games would not have been the same. Your reward was the joy that came from your playing; your worth the very fact of your unique participation. Now go and be fed. You are not in charge of the games, anyway, thankfully. I am.” Sweaty and laughing and enjoying one another’s company, we would have trooped in to lunch together, relieved, actually, that this was a game where points don’t count. But wait--That’s really what happened, anyway! Last weekend, our teen’s comment about the “first and the last” was of course not even a serious reproach. It was spoken with a light and generous heart and really meant, “we don’t care about who won or lost. We had fun together; we gave and laughed and loved and helped each other to accomplish a goal; all of this team stuff was just for show, anyway.” Such is the Kingdom of God.
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