We live in a time when the economy is at the top of everyone’s list of concerns. For some people, anxiety about the economy leads to passionate debates about policy. There is a war of words in politics and the media about who caused the current crisis, and what should be done to fix it. But for many others the concerns are more personal and immediate—will I keep my job? Will I get a job to replace the one I lost? Are my wages keeping pace with my bills? Do I owe more on my house than it’s worth? Will I be able to afford to educate my children? Will I be able to retire?
The bible says consistently that God has a stake in the game of human economies. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus, the one we look to as God incarnate, has a lot to say about the economic conditions of our lives. But Jesus does not approach economics as social science or political theory. Instead, he tells stories about people, about a merchant who found a pearl of great price, about the master of a house who went away, leaving his servants with ten talents of silver, about a slave who begged and won forgiveness of his enormous debts, only to violently demand repayment from a two-bit debtor.
What’s surprising about these stories is the way that Jesus uses them to open up a deeper conversation with us about God. “If you really want to understand who God is,” he seems to be saying, “and what God does, you can’t limit your inquiry to your experiences in moments of solitary prayer, in the contemplation of nature, or in happy occasions with family and friends.” Jesus is in favor of these kinds of experiences, and refers them in his teaching. But he also wants us to look at the way people do business, at their economic relations, and to find out what God is doing there.
And so he says, “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner hiring laborers for his vineyard.”
This story describes a scene that would have been well-known to Jesus’ listeners—men standing around the marketplace hoping to get hired so they can feed their families that day. It was an increasingly common sight in 1st Century Galilee. This was an era of economic upheaval, when agrarian villages were giving way to an urban society based on international trade and integration into the cash economy of the Roman Empire. The infrastructure of this new order was paid for by increasing the burden of taxation on the peasant producers, sending more and more of them into debt. For many that debt became an inescapable downward spiral, ending with their property being added to vast, new, aristocratic estates, where the peasants went to work as slaves and landless day-laborers.
The ancient ideal of Israelite society was to be a nation of free and independent subsistence farmers and herders, living on their ancestral tribal lands. One common way of describing this ideal is found in Micah 4:4: “but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” But in Jesus’ time this dream was vanishing into a mythic past. The new symbol of basic economic security was the denarius, the silver coin with the palm leaves of the kings of Israel on one side, and the head of the Roman Emperor on the other. It was the customary daily wage for an unskilled laborer or a common soldier, and was worth about $20—in short, about enough to keep an average-sized household going for another day.
About fifteen years ago I started my own gardening business in San Francisco. For the most part I worked alone, but as my business got more established there were times when I needed help for a day or two. Later, I would get to know a couple of guys I liked to work with. I had their phone numbers and would arrange a place and a time to meet when I needed their services. But early on there were times when I drove down Cesar Chavez St. and picked up laborers off the corner. They’d spot my truck, the one with the tools strapped to the rack, a block away, and as I slowed to pull over six or eight men would surround me. I’d only be looking for one, or at most two, so there was always that tense moment of decision—whom would I choose? As often as not the choice would be made for me, and I’d end up with the first man to open the door and shove his way into the cab. And then we’d drive away, leaving the others standing on the corner, waiting for the next truck to come by.
That moment of making the hire is the one that Jesus’ parable plays over and over again. If the landowner is going to the vineyard to check on the progress of work, to assess the need for more laborers that day, we never hear about it. What we do hear about is his repeated visits to the marketplace to meet the men who stand there waiting to be hired.
We also learn nothing about where those latecomers have been. Why weren’t they in the marketplace at 6? Or at 9; or at noon? And the ones who still stood there at 5 o’clock—where had they been? Perhaps they had sick family members to care for; or maybe they still clung to a remnant of the family property and had chores to do there before they went out looking for paid work. Maybe they’d already finished a small job that day, but were hoping to earn a little more in the hours of daylight that remained.
In short, the story leaves out everything we would want to know if we were trying to make it a conventional lesson about the virtues of hard work or sound management principles. What matters to the landowner of the parable are not shrewd judgments about how many men to hire, and how much they should be paid. What matters is that there is an abundance of work to be done. The men are unemployed, so he hires them. Their families need to eat, so he pays enough to feed them.
You don’t need to have our ingrained Capitalist social ethic to see this as bad economic policy. I’m sure it would have struck Jesus’ audience the same way. You can’t do business like that. People will game the system. Where’s the incentive to work harder? Where’s the penalty for being lazy? And yet I think it must be obvious that Jesus is aiming for just that kind of reaction. He is deliberately calling our conventional economic wisdom into question.
Maybe we’ve become like the men of the first hour and are grumbling along with them. Maybe, like them, we have come to truly believe that the value of a human being is how much work you can get out of him for a denarius a day. Maybe we’ve also come to think of economic life as a competitive struggle for survival in which your gain can only come at my loss. Maybe like them we have come to believe that the market economy is a moral law unto itself, and so we are owed special rewards for being the first into the cab of the truck, while the losers deserve to starve.
If so, Jesus is asking us to take another look, and to consider economics from the perspective of God. The God of Jesus is a God of generous abundance, who miraculously fed his people in a deserted place with five loaves and two fishes, just as he gave them the heavenly manna in ancient times. But he is also a God of just enough. “Give us today our daily bread,” says the Lord’s Prayer, and the message is not just that we acknowledge our dependence on God to meet our material needs, but that we will be content to have them satisfied for now. After all, we have other important things to pray for, such as being forgiven our debts, as we forgive the debts of others.
Maybe the root causes of the crisis in the global economy are in our spiritual values. And maybe the solutions will come not from the policy measures of central banks and regulators and corporations, but from laborers and landowners who learn to put their economic relationships back into the right perspective. And what is that perspective? Well, it begins; the kingdom of heaven is like this…
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