17 Pentecost A 2023
To read the scriptures assigned for this Sunday, click here: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=160
In our Exodus story God makes a comment we don’t hear much about, that he will give the Hebrews enough for each day, in order to test them. What he means by this is that he will use his providence to teach them about being content with enough.
Each day he would give them enough for each household, but he ordered them not to stockpile any of what they are given. Those that did found that their food spoiled if kept even one day longer. In this way, God taught them about the concept of “enough.”
Perhaps one of the least memorable of the commandments is “you shall not covet”. Envy, God seems to be saying, is spiritually dangerous. If you have enough, why would you want more? Well, you might if you used to have more, or if your neighbor seems to have more.
Clearly, God not only wanted his people to be free from enslavement, he wanted them to form a society in which no one sought to enslave the rest or stand over the rest, a society in which no one envied or coveted someone else’s relationships or wealth.
Today’s parable in Matthew comes right after Jesus encountered the rich young man, who had obeyed all the commandments since his youth, but who couldn’t rise to Jesus’ challenge to share his wealth with the poor. He went away sadly, shut out of the life Jesus came to offer.
Jesus himself was sad, and he remarked that it would be harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than it would be for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The disciples are saddened, but Jesus assures them that even this impossible thing isn’t beyond God’s power.
Peter then asks, “What about us, Jesus? We gave up everything!” And Jesus assures them that in the fulfillment they would sit on twelve thrones ruling over the twelve tribes, and that all those who have lost for Jesus’ sake would gain a hundredfold of whatever they’d lost.
And he sums up this whole teaching with the famous saying: “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”
“Many,” in other words, “who are first,” like that rich young man, “will be last, and the last,” like Jesus’ poor illiterate disciples, “will be first.”
The kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, is like a man, a landowner, who made it his business during a time of widespread unemployment to give every unemployed worker he could find a decent day’s pay.
Matthew’s audience, and Jesus’ original audience as well, would have recognized this as a common scene in urban centers under the Roman Empire. Rural workers displaced from their ancestral farms through predatory taxation, crowding the city’s many marketplaces trying to get work, and often failing, even to work the lands they used to own.
This landowner is a strange one, however. He begins by negotiating with the earliest hires what a good day’s pay would be. This is an important fact, because it comes up later. They name a price and he accepts it. It’s the workers who name what they need for a long day’s work in the hot sun, and this landowner agrees to pay it.
He then goes back and forth to the market all day, as unemployed men float in from other marketplaces where they’d had no luck. The Greek word translated “idle” in our text actually just means “unemployed”. It has no moral connotation. These men want to work, but no one is hiring them. As the day goes on and no one hires them, they become more and more desperate, and more and more despairing as well. Even if they were hired, they would get less pay, not enough even to feed themselves.
The landowner takes all the unemployed men he can get, right up to the last hours of the day.
And then he does what he’d always planned: he pays everyone that previously negotiated good day’s pay, no matter how long they worked. He starts with the last first, presumably because they were the most dispirited. They expected to receive a pittance, but bang! They receive a day’s pay, and not only a day’s pay, but a good day’s pay! The pay they’d expect to get for working a long day in the hot sun.
Jesus says the kingdom’s like that.
But the kingdom is also like the angry people at the end of the line, the ones the landowner hired first. They are miffed. But the landowner calls it. They’re envious. They wish it had been them. They’d agreed that morning that what he’s paying them was a good day’s pay, and that’s what they’re getting.
He finishes once again: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.
The parable for Matthew expands this saying into two teachings. The first is that God prioritizes those most in need, as we preached last week as well. The little ones are God’s priority, the lost sheep, the sick that need a physician, and the big ones, the ninety-nine that haven’t wandered, the ones who are “well”, are lower on God’s list.
The second aims at the danger to the big ones, the ninety-nine who weren’t lost, and the spiritually “well”, like the big brother in the parable of the prodigal son. The danger to them is envy.
In Jesus, God came near to humankind. He went first to his own people, Israel, to those among them most in need of forgiveness and healing, and passing over the well-to-do and the religious elite. He took quite a bit of flak for spending so much time with the unclean and the sinful, focusing on marginal people like lepers, the disabled, Gentiles, Samaritans, women, children, prostitutes and tax collectors.
Then as now, the important don’t like the unimportant in the spotlight. The powerful don’t like the powerless getting power. The hardworking don’t like the unemployed to get resources. The loud don’t like to hear from the silenced. The privileged don’t like the oppressed demanding privileges. To them it feels like someone is taking something away.
I’m not commenting on whether Obamacare was a good thing or not, but I remember a friend of mine, who was in a union, enraged that a benefit that the union had fought for would now be given away to people who didn’t do the fighting. For him, it was as if the benefit had been taken from him, even though he still had it, because someone had it who hadn’t, in his mind, deserved it. I recognize this is a less than perfect example because the benefit in question wasn’t given by God but by the government. Still, it illustrates the point. Nothing had been taken from him, but he felt robbed.
Another debate I’m not getting into is the whole black lives matter/all lives matter/blue lives matter slogan battles. What I can say is that Jesus very intentionally paid attention to those his society had turned its back on. In a world where Samaritans, women, children, lepers and the disabled were oppressed or exploited, Jesus, in essence, said Samaritan lives matter, women’s lives matter, children’s lives matter, and the lives of lepers and the disabled mattered. But good Jews, men, people with clean skin, adults and the abled all thought, just as the privileged do today, “what about me?”
What about us who are powerful and wealthy and righteous? Doesn’t God love us enough to reward us more than those others? Aren’t we more blessed because we’re more deserving?
And if we’re not blessed because we’re more deserving, then why have we been blessed?
The work of the generous landowner, who used his privilege and his wealth to makes sure every unemployed worker got a full day’s wage, might give us a clue.
Amen.
