When
we read something, it makes a big difference what we are reading it for. Take, for instance, a historical novel. One might read it for entertainment, and
focus on the characterizations and the plot.
Another might read it for information about the historical period in
which it is set. A third person might be
interested in both. And something
similar goes for the parables of Jesus. Most
often we read them for an encoded moral and spiritual lesson. We take them as metaphors for principles about
God and faith, salvation and forgiveness.
What we are less likely to do is read these stories for a message about the
daily realities of the world we live in.
But
Jesus made his parables out of the stuff of daily experience because he wanted his
audience to do more than open them, like fortune cookies, for message inside. He wanted people to see themselves in the real-world
situations that the parables describe, so that his teaching would alter, not
just the way they felt and thought about God, but also the way they saw the
world. So he used such homely examples
as a farmer sowing seeds and a woman kneading bread and fishermen casting a
net, things that everyone would have done, or at least seen, countless
times.
Jesus
also made parables out of social situations that would have been familiar. And it
is interesting how many of them deal with painful situations, touching the raw
nerves of social experience, oppression and injustice and powerlessness in the
face of them. We might be forgiven for
not noticing this about the parables, because the church’s tradition of interpreting
them has essentially overlooked it until very recently. But in the last fifty years or so, two things
have happened to change this. The first
is that poor and oppressed people in African-American and Latin-American and
African and Asian communities, and communities of women throughout the world,
have found it necessary to put aside the Bible as it has been read and
interpreted for them by elites. They have gone back and read it again with
fresh eyes, for wisdom that speaks to them about life as they live it.
The
second thing that has happened is that a wave of scholars, in universities and
seminaries around the world, have also been rereading the Bible, in the light
of social science, of cultural anthropology and archeology and political science,
to better understand the social forces that were at work in the time of Jesus,
and how his teaching and his movement addressed them. And
what has emerged from both of these developments is a new reading of the social
context of Jesus’ ministry. We
understand better now that it was a time of great economic and cultural upheaval,
of rising inequality and social and cultural dislocation. Along with this upheaval came increasing, and
increasingly violent, social and political conflict.
Fishing
on the Sea of Galilee was becoming an industrial operation, mass-producing a
salty fish-sauce for an export market.
The grandiose building projects of Herod and his sons, especially the
massive expansion of the Jerusalem temple, were taxing the traditional village
landowners deeper and deeper into debt, while local markets for their produce
were being flooded with cheap imported grain.
Forced to sell out, the proud, independent farmers of Galilee were
reduced to sharecropping, or hiring themselves out as day laborers on sprawling
estates made up of land that used to be theirs, or, in the worst case, selling
themselves and their children into slavery.
Landless men, turned bandit revolutionaries, lurked in the hills,
levying their own taxes and carrying out terrorist attacks on government
officials and collaborators. This, in
turn, provoked ruthless retaliation from the Roman Army that did not
discriminate between combatants and civilians.
So
when Jesus talks about robbers waylaying a traveler on the Jericho road, or a corrupt
estate manager fudging the record of the sharecroppers’ debts, or a rich man
who tears down his barns to build bigger ones for hoarding his wealth, he isn’t
just coming up with colorful illustrations of religious principles. He’s showing his audience their own
lives. And he’s asking them to imagine
how God might act in such times. Jesus
says, "The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the
morning to hire laborers for his vineyard,” and his audience pictures a scene they
know well, one that, depending on their social class, might make them feel a twinge
of guilt or a swell of shame and anger.
But
as the story unfolds they hear that this landowner is like none they’ve ever
heard of. What he cares about is that
every idle laborer should find work, and that all of them get paid enough to
keep going for another day. Maybe it
would have reminded them of other stories, like the one about their ancestors’
journey through the desert to freedom and how God fed them on bread from
heaven, just enough for everyone, just enough for one day. Maybe they would have noted the contrast with
their own experience of landlords, and no doubt there would have been some
people who heard a concealed revolutionary critique. But what Jesus is really asking them to do is
to examine themselves.
“Am
I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” says the owner of
the vineyard, “Or are you envious because I am generous?” It’s a reminder of who the real owner of the
land is, that everything that comes from it is God’s gift, and that it is God’s
will that all should have work, and all should be fed. But it’s also a reminder of how social
upheaval and economic insecurity pit people against each other, and turn
everyone against the least fortunate and most vulnerable, begrudging them even
the barest minimum needed to survive. When
Jesus closes the parable with one of his favorite aphorisms, “So the last will
be first, and the first will be last" he is not so much threatening the
rich, or calling for revolution—he is warning us that the kingdom of Heaven is
built on the generosity and forgiveness of God, whose sense of justice is not
the same as our self-righteous work ethic, and doesn’t take its cues from our
cut-throat social pecking-order.
Last
night there was a fundraising event over at the Petaluma Sheraton Hotel to kick
off a campaign to create a Day Labor Center.
Because you don’t have to build a time machine and travel to ancient
Palestine to find landless men standing around, waiting for someone to hire
them for the day. You can just walk
about three blocks northwest of here to the corner of Washington and
Howard. So when we read Jesus’ parable
of the laborers in the vineyard we don’t have to treat it as only a literary metaphor
for some theological principles. It
shines a light on our own real-world experience and some real people in our
town.
Some
say it would be wrong to do anything for those men because it wouldn’t be fair
to other workers. But immigrant day laborers
don’t cost other workers jobs, they create them. They support all kinds of enterprises at the
base of the economic pyramid, independent tradespeople like painters,
carpenters, and landscapers, and small farmers, manufacturers, and
food-processors, that depend on irregular extra labor. I was one of those, when I had my little
one-man gardening business in San Francisco from 1997 to 2003. I usually worked on my own, but once in a
while I needed another hand to do the bigger jobs where I made the better money. Until the San Francisco Day Labor Center
opened, at the north end of the Mission District, this was a matter of pulling
over next to six lanes of fast moving traffic on Cesar Chavez Street and hiring
whomever jumped into the truck first.
I
could go on for a while about the net benefits to the economy of immigrant
workers, but if we’re followers of Jesus, the economic questions aren’t the ones
that really matter. The important
questions for us today are the ones the Bible asks, questions like, “who really
owns the land, anyway?” and “Whom did our ancestors depend on when they were migrants?” and “When times get
hard, what will save us—beating out our neighbor for a bigger slice of the shrinking
pie? Or taking a stand together, on the
generosity and the justice of God?”
