Kingdom Calculus 101
I have a good friend, a very faith-filled friend, named Terri. She said something to me one Sunday that I will never forget. We were talking about God and justice. And she said to me, “I was always told that God is just, but not fair.” I was flabbergasted. You see, I understand the words just and fair to mean pretty much the same thing. I found myself wondering, as I prepared this sermon, if she was referring to this parable, to the way it had been explained to her, that somehow it gave her the idea that being fair and being just were very different things.
When we read scripture, we bring with us all the baggage that we carry, all our life experiences, and our God experiences, our ideas about right and wrong, our hopes and our prejudices—we bring our whole selves, along with everything we remember learning in church and Sunday school, even past sermons. Sometimes all that baggage gets in the way, gets us trapped in a particular interpretation. Sometimes it helps us to hear something new, something different and brings us to a new insight.
That’s what happened when I was preparing this sermon. One familiar phrase stuck in my head, and it challenged everything I had ever heard preached, and every commentary I could find about this parable.
How you react to any parable depends on where you see yourself in that parable. Who do you relate to? Are you the disgruntled worker who feels cheated? Or are you among the last hired, who works only one hour for a whole day’s pay? According to every interpretation I could find or have ever heard, we should all see ourselves as the last hired, and celebrate the good news that we get the same rewards as Peter and James, John and Andrew, Thomas and Matthew. But that assumes that the Kingdom of Heaven referred to in the parable is… Heaven, the afterlife. OK. If that’s what the kingdom is, then sure, that makes sense. We all get the same reward, because there is only that one reward—eternal life in heaven in the presence of God.
But, that’s not how Matthew understands the Kingdom. That’s not how Jesus understands the Kingdom. That’s not how I was taught to think about the Kingdom. If you can remember back a whole month to my last sermon, the Kingdom is the Already—Not Yet rule of God on Earth represented and exemplified by the church. It’s not a place. It’s not a reward. It’s not the after-life. It’s a way of life—the Christian way of life. This is the Way of Jesus. This is the Way and the Truth and the Life that the Bible—that Jesus himself claims he is. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom, he isn’t talking about the end of the world when he returns riding on the clouds in Glory.
Jesus is teaching the disciples how to live as disciples, how to live according to God’s wishes, how to be disciples. Jesus is giving them, and us, a choice between living as citizens of the world according to the laws and dictates of flawed and sinful human beings, or living according to God’s will, but in either case, the time is now, in this life, and the place is here, on this earth. Because salvation isn’t something that takes place at the end of life, or at the end of the world, but here and now, in following Jesus. As the church, we are supposed to live in the way of Jesus, according to the Law and the will of God, bravely, without fear of failure, because we know we are living in Grace, already and always forgiven, always loved. When Jesus meets Zacchaeus, he declares that salvation has come to his house today. Jesus came that we might have abundant life, the most fully flourishing life possible, starting here and now.
This parable isn’t about rewards for being faithful in this life. This parable is lesson—to be perfectly honest—it’s a math lesson. Yes, that’s right. This is one of those word math problems that we all hated in school, because they were always so hard. This is a lesson in what I like to call Kingdom Calculus, the way God equates worth. Remember that Matthew suggests this is a reversal, because the ways of the world are often inverted, turned upside down from the ways of the Kingdom, the way God wants them.
The sentence that signals it’s a math problem is ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ Did you hear it? You have made them EQUAL to us. Making things equal that are not equal to begin with requires a mathematical operation, an addition or subtraction, multiplication or division by some factor.
The workers hired first assume they deserve more, they assume they are superior, that their effort is more valuable simply because they did more, or did it longer. And that is certainly how our economics works today. Our capitalistic economy values us by what we can produce, and how fast we can produce it, and by how much we can consume. Higher skills mean higher wages, and we are generally paid by the hour. So, the last hired are being paid eight times the hourly wage as the first. By our system this seems astonishingly unfair. If you see it this way, then God doesn’t seem fair. I have to admit, I have always struggled with this. But what the owner actually promises to pay them is “whatever satisfies justice” not just what is right or fair.
But then I stopped to wonder “Why?” If God is just and fair, doesn’t God value everyone the same, love everyone the same? So why pay this group so much more, or the same for so much less? For that matter, why go back and hire people over and over throughout the day? And why weren’t those last people hired to begin with? Weren’t they there at the beginning? Why weren’t they hired sooner, or by someone else? These are important questions, and yet, they are questions I have never heard asked, much less answered. Why is that? Do we just assume they are just lazy? The text doesn’t say that. The text says they are idle, because they haven’t any job to do. They haven’t been hired.
We Christians in the US tend to identify with the first workers, who feel cheated, undervalued. But the secret to understanding a parable is to imagine yourself in the place of each character, to see it from each perspective. So put yourself in the position of the worker who wasn’t hired until the end of the day. Why weren’t you hired? Maybe you’re elderly, or feeble. Maybe you’re lame or injured or disabled. Maybe you have a poor reputation. Maybe you’re a single parent, and you couldn’t find daycare that morning. Maybe you’re a twelve-year old orphan with younger siblings to look after. Maybe you’re malnourished and homeless. Maybe you are ill. Or maybe you are foreign. Maybe you don’t speak the language, or your skin is the wrong color, or you are an illegal alien without a work permit. Maybe you’re a woman, an elderly widow, or a mother with a sick child. Maybe you had no transportation and had to walk 5 miles to the city gate where day laborers are hired. Maybe you are handicapped or disfigured… a leper. Maybe you have a disease and you can’t afford the medicine. Maybe you are deaf, mute or blind. Maybe you’re an ex-con just released from prison, maybe you weren’t even guilty. Can you think of other reasons? The point is—you were there, you wanted and needed a job, but no one hired you. And maybe you were too humiliated to go home, empty-handed, passed over, again, for the umpteenth time. Until this vineyard owner showed up and showed you mercy, and gave you dignity.
What I see in this parable is equity. We don’t all come into this world in equal circumstances. We don’t all start out whole, healthy, strong and educated, and we don’t all stay that way. We aren’t all valued or treated the same. Some of us are practically invisible, sometimes just because people find it hard to look at us, to acknowledge we exist. We aren’t all the same, and we aren’t all equal. We don’t all get treated equally. We don’t all have the same opportunities, the same social and economic advantages. Yet, we all have the same needs: food, shelter, healthcare, friendship, dignity. It still costs us just as much to survive, to supply these things—even more for those who have an illness or disability, who need special care, special equipment or medications. In God’s eyes, each one of us is just as deserving of the next. But not in this world.
To have true equality and justice, requires equity—and that’s what I see in this parable. I see God recognizing that some people have limitations, and can’t work as long, as hard, do as much, but still need just as much to survive, and still have the same right to thrive, to experience abundant joy, purpose, respect. So, the owner of the vineyard gives them the more that they need to flourish. Not because they earned it. But because the owner of the vineyard is both just and fair.
Kingdom calculus requires that we open our eyes to see people through God’s eyes—to recognize their value, to see in them the image of God, the face of Christ—and to do our best to see that those who fall between the cracks of the system, those discarded, disregarded and disabled (or as I prefer to call them, differently abled) receive the equity they need to live dignified and fulfilling lives. God isn’t saying we have to empty our pockets to do so. Although, that is precisely what the first Christian communities did.
Acts testifies to the fact that the disciples understood this lesson. “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Acts 2:44-45. The Disciples learned to do Kingdom calculus. The question is, can we? Can we now place ourselves in the role of the owner of the vineyard? Can we love like God? Can we be graciously generous? Can we stop grumbling in jealousy over worldly things and share our wealth so that all God’s people can flourish?