Comments for Jim Other sermons.                 

In this parable, the laborers hired first had a "contract" with the owner. The rest went to work expecting only "what was right." The law required that salaries be paid at sundown so the workers could then buy food. Common sense dictated that those who came first would be paid before those who came later, and that they would be paid more. However, parables are not about common sense; they are about challenging common sense! Here the owner lines up the last first and the first last, creating a scandal. Not only is the expected order of the world turned upside down, the landowner makes it possible for the first laborers to see what the others are paid.

The landowner in the parable owns the means of production but does not exploit the workers, taking away from them the surplus value of their labor (the total value of their production minus wages and other expenses) to increase the landowner’s profit. Instead, he takes the wealth and redistributes it to the workers, regardless of the amount of hours labored. He compensates on the basis of need, rather than according to the hours worked. While we all acknowledge with relief the utter failure of Marxism in our age, there can be no doubt that there is something "Marxist" in Jesus’ story, a story that was told eighteen hundred years before Marx was born. However we feel about Marx’s successors, he had a ferocious sense of justice that probably derived from the Bible.

This parable challenges our conventional wisdom – equal pay for equal work. It doesn’t fit with our understanding of fairness. And maybe that is the real point, for God’s grace does not make "sense." God’s wish to dispense grace freely and lavishly flies in the face of – and challenges – our whole cultural mindset; one which is based on rewards, punishments, and just deserts.

In our own day, whatever our feelings toward welfare at home and assistance to developing countries abroad, providing a basic standard of living to all is an idea central to our scriptures (and those of Islam as well). In the Hebrew Law and Prophets we find the ideal, for example, of the Year of Jubilee – that of a periodic redistribution of land and wealth, a great leveling of resources for all. When, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus stood to read the scriptures in his hometown synagogue, he reads Isaiah 61 to them, suggesting that he is inaugurating this great social upheaval. They threw him out!

But what Jesus did on that Sabbath is what people of faith are called to do in every age. As recipients of God’s grace, our vision is transformed when we recognize that all people receive this same grace. The logical response to this gift of grace is to redefine what we mean by fairness; then to seek justice, and to walk much more humbly with God. Jesus’ vision of the reign of God, which is an economic as well as spiritual vision, is that we are called in a radical way, to not merely "transact" between one another, but to truly share.

How do we, the wealthy of the world, measure up against this vision that Jesus presents? How do we as people of the Spirit feel about the Enron leaders’ exploitation of their workers; about our measuring the success of welfare reform by how many fewer there are on the welfare rolls; about the tremendous burden of debt that weighs upon the poorest nations; about our leaders’ assertions that our desire for regime change in Iraq has nothing whatever to do with that country’s huge untapped oil reserves? We are already planning our post Saddam Hussein management of Iraq’s resources. But Jesus said, "The first shall be last and the last first." Did he say that simply to haunt people other than us, or to give us a new vision of what the world could be? Amen.

^* Based on "Seasons of the Spirit" Background and Reflection

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