That’s not fair! It
doesn’t take too long working with kids (or adults, for that matter) to hear
those words. We have this innate sense of the fairness of the universe that
doesn’t match up with many of the things that actually happen to us. Perhaps
that’s why we have this feeling, after all. We look out at a world that is
patently unfair and set our sights on making the little bit of life that is
under our control as fair as possible. In that way, it might feel like we are
shining a little bit of light into the darkness.
The parable of the landowner is a
parable about life’s unfairness, but Jesus doesn’t lead us toward the place we
might expect. Jesus doesn’t show us a world governed by fairness. If he did,
the landowner would act differently, more rationally, more fairly. Instead, he
shows us a world governed by grace. Fairness is everybody getting paid for the
work they did; fairness is getting paid what you deserve. Grace is everybody
receiving the whole lot of it, regardless of whether they worked long and hard
or short and sweet.
As we deliberate on how best to be a
society, we often have this conversation in our own way. What is fair? Where
does grace fit into our society? Does it? These are questions that can divide
us along political lines.
But the thing about fairness is that
it’s always judged by the lord of the land. The landowner is always able to
pick the best, who in turn got to be the best by some unknown combination of
hard work and luck. Meanwhile, the least are left behind—working less on the
one hand, having less opportunity on the other, and the cycle continues.
Beneath the surface, this one little parable says a lot about the world we live
in. Haves and have nots; hard workers and the poor, who may work hard too… or
not… I suppose that may lay bare our
assumptions. But this is not a parable about how to govern, or about economic
structures, or capitalism, or socialism, or anything like that. That’s the
trap. We quickly mold God’s economy into our own when God’s economy is absolutely,
completely other.
This parable is a story of God’s
economy. At the heart of this word—economy—is the Greek word “oikos,” which
means “house.” The economy is the law of the house, and the law of God’s house
is not “Stay awake during the sermon” or “Get baptized or else.” In fact, the
law of God’s house is not a law at all, which is the first surprise. The
kingdom of God is governed by a strange law called grace, meaning that God’s
economy is anti-everything our economy stands for. It is not built on supply
and demand, and it doesn’t care one wink about scarcity, because God’s economy leverages
grace for grace’s sake, which means that ALL ARE WELCOME. Like it or not—take
it or leave it—but even when you leave it, you take it. Grace is like the pink glitter
Natalie has scattered all over our house; once you have it, you can’t get rid
of it, even when you try, and it makes you shine, even when you don’t want to.
God’s economy is that stupidly
shiny. It doesn’t care about market trends, and it doesn’t care about what it
can’t afford, because it demands everything, and then it gives it all away in
return.
When we talk about economy, it is so often about
balancing the things we can and cannot afford—security against healthcare,
welfare against enterprise, you name it—it’s a constant bickering about what it
is that we should be united in achieving and what we should be free to do as
individuals. I don’t know about you, but that debate drains me. Everybody digs
in, and it quickly becomes less about the common good than it is about scoring
political points. Soon, words like “healthcare” and “defense” and even “life”
have political connotations.
The great news about God’s economy
is that it despises this economy of ours, because God’s economy is always both/and,
and, yet, when it looks at the balance line at the end of the day, it still
shows every penny right where it started, because since the currency of God’s
economy is grace, it is a wellspring that never runs dry. Never.
So, why does this matter? Because
you are going to live and die being governed by this economy that you are a
part of—like it or not. And, at the end of your life, you will have a credit
score, and you will have a dollar amount in the bank, and you might even have
creditors—hey, if I die at eighty, I have
a sporting chance of having those student loans taken care of!—and you will
also have various other numbers and figures that will attempt to describe you
in terms of the economy. How much did you spend… how wisely did you save… how
generously did you give… Every one of those numbers tells a story that will be
incredibly unsatisfying when your time has come. Your life surely amounted to
more than the thousands of dollars in the bank account.
God’s economy, on the other hand,
only starts when the bookkeeping is done.
As
Robert Farrar Capon wrote, “The
human race is positively addicted to keeping records and remembering scores.
What we call our ‘life’ is, for the most part, simply the juggling of accounts
in our heads. And yet, if God has announced anything in Jesus, it is that he,
for one, has pensioned off the bookkeeping department permanently.” (Kingdom,
Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus)
That’s
so hard for us to believe, because we are so addicted to it, but God does not
give a damn about bookkeeping. Actually, it’s the one thing he really cares to damn. Keeping score is our thing; God’s
thing is forgiveness and mercy and grace. The currency is still grace, whatever
else we try to make it.
The hardest part of
this parable is probably that this is not a parable for living; it’s a parable
for understanding the glory of God that underwrites all the things we have
messed up. It’s a parable that is unfathomable, because we can’t understand how
you can have both/and—for us, our lives are so often either/or. It’s a parable
that catches us off-guard, because it is not fair and that’s the point.
Because fairness is a messed-up thing to pursue when it comes down it—fairness
is not the thing that Christ followers are after. Fairness is death—the wages
of sin—because every economy leads to death but one. That glittery one. That
pie in the sky. That grace. It’s it. It’s all there is.
And it still
offends us, because it isn’t fair. That’s life. It ain’t fair—just not in the
way we complained to mom. It isn’t fair because our economy is messed up, and the
thing that is better is too good to be true.
And, yet, it is.
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