Reading Parables Otherwise: The Disrespected Worker (8th Sunday after Pentecost; Matthew 20:1-16; July 30, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Disrespected Worker

8th Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 20:1-16
July 30, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

So far in this series we've had four examples of parables, four examples of my peculiar approach to reading them, born of frustration with traditional interpretations and my interaction with recent scholarship about the parables and about Jesus' ministry in general.

So far, here are the results: We had the parable of the impossible harvest in which the seed that fell into good soil yielded a hundred-fold harvest. God's dream doesn't look very likely, but it has a way of bearing unexpected fruit. Like the wild mustard God's dream wreaks havoc with the smooth operation of the world's domination system. The dream itself belongs to a God whose love is more than a little unbalanced. Part of that dream is for us to be freed from the oppressive debt system.

So far it hasn't been too hard to see how the parables could yield the results that I have found in them. But this week we run into a bit of a problem. That's not because the parable is hard to read, but because we are so accustomed to one way of reading it that any other way feels so wrong!

We are used to reading parables in a way that English teachers call allegorical. The parts of the parable are all supposed to stand for something else. In this case, and in any case where the parable has a character who is male and powerful, we assume that the powerful male character really stands for God. So the landowner--rich, and powerful, and male--in the story is God. The laborers hired at various times during the day are Christians who might have been Christians all their lives or might have become Christians late in life. In either case, those of us who have been at this Jesus-thing all our lives are not to feel resentful of those who become Christians late in life and then die and receive their reward after having worked as God's laborers for a few months or years while we have been at it all our lives. Or perhaps, the laborers hired early in the day are the Jewish Christians who had already been at work before they became Christians and those hired late in the day are the Gentile Christians converted from paganism and God-knows-what sort of lives. Jewish Christians in the community should not resent the Johnny-come-lately Gentile Christians. All of God's laborers will receive the same reward and should have equal status. God is generous and we shouldn't question God's arrangements.

This learning is transferable to other areas of life, too, and the parable becomes a moral lesson that, if heeded, will make Christians good, solid, docile citizens who cause no trouble.

If we think that this was what Jesus was trying to do, then the traditional reading of these parables might be the way to go.

But the evidence strongly suggests that Christians in the ancient world were not good, solid citizens. Christians were a constant pain in the backside, anything but docile, and caused no end of trouble for the authorities, whether they were the Jewish authorities of the synagogue and Temple or the Roman authorities of the Empire.

The problem as I see it begins with the assumption that the landowner is a God-figure. Why is this assumption made? The landowner is male and, in popular imagination, so is God. The landowner is powerful in a direct sort of way and, again in popular imagination, so is God.

But there the similarities end. For Jesus' hearers wealth was not evidence that a person was a faithful observer of the Torah and lived a moral and upright life. Quite the contrary. The assumption for them was that great wealth was automatically suspect, that it had been accumulated by ruthless practice, and by buying the justice system. Read the whole Bible carefully and we discover that rich people are not the good guys. There are some exceptions, but they are startling precisely because they are exceptions.

It is we modern Americans who have become so enamored of wealth that we assume that a wealthy person has done something right, so right that they deserve the wealth that they have. It is one of our blind spots, this adoration of the wealthy and aside from causing us to give far too much deference to the rich, it makes it harder to read the Bible.

No, in my reading, this is not a story about God's generosity and our patience. It is a story about a scornful rich man who shows contempt for his employees and about one of those employees who stands up for his own dignity.

The rich landowner and the hired day worker were certainly familiar figures to Jesus' audience. We have already described the landowner. The day worker deserves some attention, too. Nobody aspired to becoming a day worker. It was something that was forced onto people. This is how it happened.

Roman Palestine was being being gentrified. The land there, especially in the valleys, was useful for producing luxury goods: figs, dates, olive oil, and the strong, sweet wines that the region was known for. There was real money to be made in Palestine. The trouble was, then as in the recent past, the land was already occupied by peasants who owned a few acres to grow barley and some vegetables to support the families that lived on the land. Sheep were grazed on village common lands in the hills. It was a sustainable way of life and had been for centuries.

But no longer. The Romans looked for tax revenues to pay for the "peace" that they provided. The peasant economy was not based on the exchange of currency, so they often had to borrow money to pay their taxes. Combine that additional cost with a bad harvest or a string of them, and peasants would lose their land. Others were simply bought out. Farms were becoming plantations in the valleys. Subsistence farming was forced into the hills for smaller and smaller yields at the same time that food was becoming more costly because less land was being used to raise food crops.

When a peasant family lost its land, its members lost their social status. Unless they had a trade that they could sell, there was not much of a future for any of them. The women and children would likely be sold as slaves. The men had essentially two choices. One was to live the short and violent life of a bandit and either die by the sword or by crucifixion. The other was to become a day worker, selling the animal strength of their bodies. This was only a temporary stopping place in their long fall. Their daily wage was not a living wage. Their bodies would weaken. One day, even if jobs were available, they would be too weak to work. And then all that was left was begging and that was only a way to postpone by a few weeks or months a death by disease and starvation, the object of pity and disgust.

The worst of all of this was that a peasant who had lost his land, his dignity, his family, and his place in the community would find himself working for the rich scumbag who had pushed him out on the very land that he used to own and work with pride.

Now, of course, these two people never actually met face-to-face. This is where the parable went off the rail. A landowner never went to the town square to hire day workers. A landowner never paid the workers at the end of the day. The whole point of being a landowner was to have people to do the dirty work of running a business. There might have been two or three layers of people between the landowner and the day laborers who worked for him. The dirty work would be done by a steward or, more likely, a foreman. So the parable being told the way it is allows us to see the real relationship between two classes that the real world hid behind intermediaries.

A landowner, whose plantation produces wine for export, needed workers to harvest his grapes. This is where we should begin. He needed workers. He cannot harvest without them. No harvest, no wine. No wine, no money. No money, no comfy lifestyle. He needed workers. In a more just world this need of his for workers would have given the workers a little bargaining power. But it wasn't just world. Labor was plentiful. The peasant displacement program had seen to that.

There were lots of workers, so he went to the Day Laborer Hiring Area and recruited workers.

But he needed more. He had underestimated how much labor he could get from those he had hired, so he went back and hired more. And yet again, close to the end of the working day, he went back.

This time he begins by insulting them. "Why are you just standing around here doing nothing all day long?" They have not been working because they are lazy. Calling poor people lazy is not something invented in our day.

The first hint that things will not go smoothly comes when these laborers refused to accept the insult. "Because nobody has hired us," they answer and add, "you jerk" under their breath.

The landowner needed workers. So these, too, were hired.

At the end of the day it is time for these men to be paid. The Torah is quite clear about this. In this Christian nation we seem to think that it's perfectly okay to withhold someone's wages for a week or even two, but even this landowner can't get away with withholding wages overnight. Quitting time is the time to settle up.

So the landowner tells his manager to pay the workers, beginning with the last ones hired. Why the last ones first? So that everyone will see how much they get paid. Already the landowner's supposed generosity is called into question: if it were simply a matter of generosity, why arrange things so that all the workers will see how much the last men hired get?

He pays these last men hired a denarius each. That's the standard daily wage, and bears about the same relationship to a living wage as $7.25 an hour in our day. Then, when the manage got to those had been hired first, he paid them the same wage.

The first group of men thought, given what the workers who had only worked part of day had gotten, that they would get more than a denarius. When they didn't they complained.

Well, we say, it's the landowner's money. If he wants to spend it that way, he can. And that, in essence is what the landowner tells them. "Friend," he begins. Nothing is more ominous than being called "friend" by someone with power over you and in that tone of voice that tells you that you are about to be destroyed. "Take your money and go." (We should hear the menace in these words: the man who spoke up has worked his last day as a day laborer.) But how can we disagree with the landowner's argument? The money belongs to him. He can do as he pleases with it as long as he fulfills his contracts. So why are the men complaining?

That is precisely what we need to understand. Just as the landowner had insulted the last group of workers by accusing them of being lazy, so now he insults the first group of workers by turning the payment of wages, a process that should be governed by justice, into a matter of charity, governed instead by generosity. Why not pay them a just wage instead?

These laborers are men who have lost nearly everything: family, land, and respect in the community. All they have left is the strength of their bodies. Their physical labor and the recognition of the need for that labor and their deserving of its compensation are all their only source of dignity, the dignity that is the birthright of every human being. To dismiss that dignity and its call for fairness is to attack the last vestige of their worth as the sons of Adam. Even the oxen are treated with more dignity than that. Paying those who worked all day long the same amount as those who worked only an hour is an insult. It's the sort of insult that poor people endure all the time from the wealthy.

Most of the time they stay silent. After all, if they hope to be hired again, by this man or by any of his friends, it is wiser to smile and say, "Yes, boss. Thank you, boss." Go along to get along. But that's not what happened here. The disrespected workers resisted the contempt of the rich man, first in the Day Laborers Hiring Place and again in the pay line.

This parable began, as many of them do, with the words "God's dream is like..." We are left to decide what it is about the story that is like God's dream. The traditional reading suggests that we ought to be uncomplaining and docile in the face of apparent unfairness since it is all in the charge of a generous God. But another reading points at the workers who reject the indignities of an oppressive system, who speak the truth to power even at great expense, convinced that their God-given dignity authorizes their protest.

So where is God's dream at work? Is it visible in the rich scumbag who uses his wealth to get power and his power to get more wealth and who gets his kicks from insulting those who are weaker and poorer than he is? Or is God's dream visible in the refusal of the oppressed to accept their oppression as a God-given reality and instead demand justice even in the face of the swaggering threats of the rich?

Listen, all who have ears to hear.

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