Charity Is Not Justice
Matthew 20:1-6
2nd Sunday in Lent
March 1, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Jesus taught in parables. Everybody knows that. Even people who don't know much about Jesus know that.
Most readers of the New Testament assume that these are what our English teachers call allegories--stories in which each element has a non-obvious meaning--so that the story ends up not being about what it seems to be about. Our story today, then, is not about a "landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard." It's about something else. Maybe it's about God. Maybe the the vineyard is really the world where God's work is being done. And the workers are not workers--they're the followers of Jesus who start out early or late to work in God's world, God's vineyard.
We're so accustomed to this way of reading--that the story isn't about what it's about so it must be about something else--that we can hardly imagine any other way of reading it. So I know that proposing a different way of reading this parable is going to meet with stiff resistance.
The resistance doesn't just come from our long habit of reading parables as allegories--stories that are not about what they're about. We read a story as an allegory when we find a story unacceptable but can't get rid of it. Ancient Greeks had stories about their gods in which the gods behaved immorally. They found this unacceptable, but they couldn't simply get rid of the stories. So, they changed the way they read the stories so that the stories were no longer about what they were about. Of course, simple uneducated folk still read the stories the old way, so those who knew what the stories were really about could smile condescendingly down on the uncultured and say, "No, no, my good man, that isn't the point at all!"
So let's see what's so offensive about this story that we have to pretend it isn't about what it's about, and pretend so hard that we forget we're pretending.
Let me propose that this story is about what it's about. It's about "a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard."
All these elements were familiar to Jesus' hearers. The rights of peasant families to keep their small farm plots and to pass them to their children was enshrined in Jewish law. The covenant people had a right to the land needed to support themselves.
But it had been centuries since these laws had force--if they ever had. And Romans were not inclined to respect Jewish law. Small holders were being forced off their land. The small plots were being joined together into large farms and given over to the production of luxury good--like wine--for export. These plantations existed to grow money, not food. The landowner was part of the elite, the very top of the social pyramid.
The day workers were at the very bottom. Peasants forced off their land had very few choices. Most had no skills that would let them support themselves as artisans. Most had no choice but to sell the labor of their bodies. When they worked, which was not every day, they earned a denarius, that could at least in theory but food to live for another day. A prayer to God to provide "daily bread" was not a pretty bit of pious poetry; it was the thread by which their lives hung. But, of course, they didn't work every day. Going without food, they were weakened. Weakened, they got sick. Sick, they couldn't work. It was a vicious circle.
To fall from the peasant class to the ranks of the day laborer was to lose any status and respect in the community. The only dignity that remained was the dignity of labor, the only value their lives had was the value of the physical work they could still do.
When they could no longer work, there would be nothing left to them but the life of the beggar as an object of charity.
Jesus' hearers knew all this. There was nothing strange here except that the landowners went out in person to hire laborers. Landowners did not hire workers; they did not have any dealings with people who had fallen off the social grid. They had their managers do that.
We know from the very beginnings of the story that the parable will collapse the huge social distance between the one percent of the one percent and no-status day laborers. Therefore, I suspect that the subject of this story is the social relation between the top and bottom members of the society.
Day laborers gathered in the town market at day break where they could be hired. The landowner went and hired workers for a denarius a day. Obviously this landowner was pretty careful with his denarii, since he under-estimated how much labor he needed, not once but four times. The last round of hiring took place nearly at sunset. The landowner hired the last of his workers, but not before insulting them. "Why are you just standing around here doing thing all day long?" This rich man imagines that the poor are lazy. But they are not lazy, just invisible. "Because nobody has hired us," they said aloud and no doubt added under their breath, "Jerk!" But they didn't say it out loud. The poor handle the rich very carefully.
The sun set and it was time to pay the workers. As exploitative as employers were then, they would not have dared to withhold their wages for a week, or two, or even three as employers routinely do today.
As we know the wages were given first to the last hired and they were paid a denarius each, the usual wage for an entire day. When the last were paid, those who had worked the longest, they expected more. And they grumbled about it. In reality, their grumbling would never have reached the landowner's ears, but the parable has put him in the scene and none too pleased.
"Friend," he began, speaking to one of the grumblers. He did not mean it. The worker is not his friend. No, the worker is being set up. He is about to be destroyed. "Friend," he said, "I did you no wrong. Didn't I agree to pay you a denarion? Take what belongs to you and go. I want to give to this one who was hired last the same as I give to you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with what belongs to me? Or are you resentful because I'm generous?"
The grumbling laborer has been dismissed. The word will get out. He'll not be hired again. His life has been shortened and made more miserable by this rich man who addressed him as "friend."
But he is wrong about why the laborer was grumbling. The landowner claims he is being generous. But that is the problem. He had made his relationship with his workers a matter of charity. But that makes beggars out of day laborers. A day laborer doesn't have much but he does have his bodily strength and energy. He has work that is of some value. He doesn't need charity.
Charity is the landowner's way of trying to cover up his responsibility for displacing these former peasants he has hired. No charity is going to fix that. It's not the landowner's generosity this day laborer needs; what he needs is justice. He needs his dignity restored, the dignity the rich man stripped from him by treating his work as a matter of charity. He needs his land restored, the land the rich man is using to produce wine to sell to other wealthy Romans to make himself even richer. The rich man is no job creator; he destroys lives to increase his own wealth.
And that is what the story is about, if we assume that the story is about what it is about. But Jesus says, this is what the kingdom of God is like. So where is the kingdom of God? Not in the demeaning so-called generosity of the landowner. Is it in the grumbling of the day laborers? Maybe. There is, after all, something quite remarkable in a worker's being able to sing, "Take this job and shove it," but that's not exactly what happened here. What happened is that a system masquerading as a system of generosity is unmasked as an arrangement that strips workers of decent lives and dignity. What was hidden is now uncovered. Truth has been spoken aloud. The first has become last and the last has become first. That's what the kingdom of God is like.
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