This morning’s gospel lesson is the parable of the laborers in the vineyard; the parable that everyone loves to hate![1] It evokes pretty strong reactions from folks, because it offends our sense of fairness. Reading this parable from within the paradigm of the dominant culture – our shared worldview – we are scandalized by the idea that equal pay is given for unequal work. I suspect we are even more offended by this than the far more common practice of unequal pay for equal work! But the point of parables is to break open our usual assumptions and usher us into a whole new world: the kingdom of heaven.
Albert Einstein is reported to have said, “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.” Parables provoke metanoia, a shift in consciousness that profoundly reframes our worldview and gives us new eyes to see. Parables are in the service of spiritual awakening so that we can participate in the conscious evolution of our species. If we try to force a parable to fit into the old framework, we distort its meaning and miss the point.
This is the problem with most allegorical readings of the parables: they operate from within our current level of consciousness, the consciousness that caused us problems in the first place. Too often, we read a parable, like this one, and immediately assume that God is the wealthy landowner; or, as in other parables, the king. While that may be a comfort to real estate tycoons and autocratic rulers, it doesn’t exactly subvert our normal way of seeing the world. Sometimes a king is just a king, and a landowner is just a landowner.
So, let me suggest a couple of rules of thumb for reading parables before turning to today’s doozy. This first is to consider that when Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is “like” something, it means that it is “likened to” or can be “compared to” something else. It is both like and unlike what it is being compared to. Parables may be most instructive in helping us to see how the kingdom of heaven is not like the world of the parable – the world we live in.
The second rule of thumb is to translate words like “kingdom” and “vineyard” into an idiom that we relate to easier. People of Jesus’ time lived in actual kingdoms, and the image of a vineyard was often used to describe the kingdom of Israel. It connotes not just a geographic area, but a community, a way of life. Today, we would probably say “culture” to describe this reality. So, the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God can be understood as the “culture of God”: again, what is at issue here is a divine worldview in contrast to our “normal” worldview. How might we come to see the world as God sees it?
Both Matthew and the lectionary gives us a little help with today’s parable. The lectionary pairs this gospel with the final passage from the Book of Jonah, which our Jewish siblings will read a week from tomorrow as part of their observance of the Day of Atonement.[2] The prophet Jonah is filled with resentment, angry enough to die, because God has shown mercy on the people of Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian empire, Israel’s bitter enemy. It is isn’t fair! They don’t deserve the chance to repent! God should be punishing them, not forgiving them!
Jonah is stuck in his friend-enemy paradigm and an idea of
justice that leaves little room for mercy. Jonah can’t be
Jonah and Israel can’t be Israel for him unless Assyria remains Assyria – the
identity of the one as holy and the other as evil is essential to Jonah’s identity
and perception of reality.
In Matthew’s Gospel, today’s parable follows the story of the young man who came to Jesus and asked him, “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?”[3] The young man represents the dominant worldview. We are human doings, and reward is based on merit. Jesus tells him, “Keep the commandments.” Great, the young man says, I’ve done that! What else do I have to do?
Then Jesus throws him a real curve ball. “Sell your possessions, give them to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” The young man went away grieving, because he had many possessions. He was locked into the paradigm of reward and punishment. He was identified with his possessions as a sign of his virtue and source of his security; poor people deserve their suffering. He was not willing to have this worldview shaken. Jonah was filled with resentment. The rich young man was filled with grief. Neither was willing to be in the flow of mercy. Neither of them was ready to embrace the culture of God.
The world of Jonah, the world of the rich young man, is the world of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. It is a world in which the sabbath economics of the Jewish Covenant are ignored, making indebtedness, landlessness, and servitude permanent fixtures of life. It is a world in which day laborers displaced from ancestral lands must travel from one place to another in hopes that someone will hire them. It is a world in which a rich landowner make the rules, plays cruel head games with people making a subsistence living by forcing those who worked all day watch the guy who only worked an hour get the same pay, and then brags about how generous he is in the process. It is a world in which those who have little are envious when their neighbors have as much, because of rivalries among the have-nots fomented by the powerful, and designed to keep people distracted with arguments about who deserves what, instead of asking questions about the arbitrary and unjust exercise of power.
Life is not fair. Bad people prosper. Good people suffer. And God allows it. We may respond with resentment, we may respond with grief, but are we willing to have our worldview blown open? Are we willing to let go of our identification with our tribe, our status, our possessions, our sense of entitlement, our sense of victimization? Can we imagine a whole new world, the culture of God?
We are scandalized by this parable because, as Richard Rohr argues, it confronts us with the possibility that God is not the guarantor of our paradigm of good and evil, reward and punishment, friend and enemy. Rather, God is the “Great Allower.”[4] This is the God who, as Jesus said, “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”[5] This is the God, as Jesus reminds us, quoting the prophet, Hosea, who “desires mercy, not sacrifice.”[6] The culture of God is a culture of mercy; a mercy so great, so all encompassing, that it explodes our dualistic paradigms and our fierce attachment to identities that pit us against each other and justify sacrificial violence.
God allows everything. This is a scandal to us. But God also gives us everything. Everything! God is not like the vineyard owner in the parable, who gives stingily only to foment rivalry, enhance his ego, and preserve his status. The vineyard owner does not give nearly as much as he takes. God gives us everything and asks nothing in return; God gives us everything, not because we have earned it, or deserve it, but because we are. Life is not fair. Life is. And it is all gift.
To enter the kingdom of heaven is to enter into a great sea of mercy, and to discover ourselves as one wave on that immense sea, intimately related to the whole. Are all questions of justice dissolved in that sea? I don’t know. What I do know is that in the flow of mercy, in which I cannot tell where I end and my enemy, much less my friend, begins, the question of justice is radically reframed.
Pastor Paul Neuchterlein tells a true story that illustrates this radical reframing.[7] When Paula D’Arcy was 27 and pregnant with her second child, her husband and first child were killed in an accident by a drunk driver. This shocking tragedy left Paula completely undone, challenging everything she thought she knew about God and the world. The recognition that life is not fair set her on a spiritual journey that continues to evolve into a deeper acceptance that life just is. Through great darkness, Paula came to experience life as a gift.
Paula’s dear friend, Susan, came through the tragedy of a painful divorce to discover healing in a second marriage. But it so happened that Paula was visiting Susan when Susan received the same terrible news that had upended Paula’s life: on his way home from college, Susan’s 22 year-old son, Mark, was killed by a drunk driver. Paula accompanied her friend to the hospital but initially gave her the privacy of going into the Emergency Room alone to be with her son. After a long time, Susan called for her friend to join her, gently saying to her when she arrived,
“Please tell me the truth. He never was really mine, was he?” Paula answered simply, “Susan, none of them are ours. It’s all gift.” “If that is true, then he can’t be taken from me. If he was gift, then at this moment I will give him back.” And Susan took Paula’s hand and one of her son’s hands, raised her eyes to the heavens, and prayed, “God, before me is the greatest gift you ever gave me. And now I give it back. Thank you. Thank you for all these years.”
My son is 22 years-old. I don’t know that I could pray this prayer in the emergency room. But what I do know is that beyond the laborers’ rivalry and the landowner’s privilege, beneath the resentment of Jonah, deeper than the rich young man’s grief, there is a wellspring of mercy: for ourselves, for our beloved, even for our enemies. And in that mercy, the question of who deserves what is eclipsed by the wonder that we have been given everything. Will we seek to possess what is given, to cling to it, to grasp it? Or will we let it flow?
The difference between the culture of God and the world as we know it, may be as thin as the wall separating our resentment and grief from the mercy that flows just beneath the surface of our ordinary awareness. The problems of our current culture can only be resolved by our willingness to receive a new consciousness, a profound awareness of the sea of mercy upon which all of reality exists. And so we pray, “thy culture come on earth, as it is in heaven.”
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