Matthew 20:1 - 16
If you are a parent of a couple of kids close in age, or if you were a child from a family like that, you probably know how hard it is to insure fairness. A parent has to give his children things they need, and sometimes someone older needs something inappropriate to a younger one, or a girl needs something her brother doesn’t. And in that case, the brother still thinks if his sister gets something, he should as well. That’s why the story Jesus told in the gospel today almost always causes the same reaction in the people who hear it -- you and I are no exception. It isn’t fair, we say. Well, it turns out that this is an instinct, even present in animals. My grandchildren live with a nasty little dog and a quiet, shy cat. If there is food to be had, the dog is right there, hoping for a scrap. Now if you hand a little scrap to the cat, the dog goes into a more aggressive begging mode. If you keep feeding the cat, the dog begins to bark and snarl, at you and the cat. It isn’t fair, he says.
And if we are honest, we look at that landowner and say, it isn’t fair! Equal pay for equal work is fair. Equal pay for unequal work is not. Rewarding hard work is fair; excusing laziness is not fair.
And there is a reason that most people react to this story by saying, “It’s not fair!” It’s because we see ourselves in those laborers who have been out in the sun all day, working their tails off, for a good wage, it’s true, a wage that can feed their families for a while, a wage that can maybe buy them a little leisure, a wage that was worth a day’s labor. But what if we are the workers hired at noon, or late in the afternoon? We would be ecstatic if we received that wage! We had expected little or nothing from our day seeking work, and the landowner has given us a good wage by any standards, a wage we clearly did not earn. It may be the people who only worked an hour or so went out and threw a party, while the workers who spent the whole day sat snarling like my grandchildren’s dog, empty of the joy they should have had, because after all, they had worked productively, they had received their just wage.
And I think most of us see that the landowner represents God in this story by Jesus. I do as well. But what are the implications? The landowner is not considering what is fair and waht is not. He wants those who took him up on the invitation to work in his vineyard to have a living wage, to be able to take care of their families. And I think Jesus tells us this story, and tells many of his stories, to make us realize that there are instincts in our very nature that as Christians, we are called (and given the grace) to overcome. Because if we are children of the Father, we want to look like the Father. And the Father is not concerned about fairness.
Being concerned about fairness has a purpose, but not the one you might think. Fairness is involved when we consider immigration, for example. We want people to wait their turn and not jump the line. That’s only fair. Fairness is involved when we think about taxes -- we all want to pay what we owe, and not one penny more. Fairness is involved when I’ve worked very hard and very effectively in my job, but the boss’s lazy son gets promoted over me. And I’m sure you can think of example after example where the fairness instinct kicks in, several times a day for some of us.
Let’s face it, we can all recognize when something is fair, if we have all the details. It’s an instinct. But what is our Christian response? I think we need to try to be more like the landowner in Jesus’ story. We need to base our actions not on what is fair, but what fulfills the needs of the greatest number of people. Perhaps some of you may have read the report from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce recently which maintained that, based upon the current system for distributing educational funds, wealthier school districts were receiving an excess compared to poorer districts. It turns out that one of the major reasons for this has to do with a sliding scale that requires every district to fund some of its educational costs, with the state picking up the rest -- and the formula says that the funding level can’t be less than the year before, and that the maximum a district has to pick up is 82.5% of their costs. What is fair? We could argue all day. But we overlook the important question -- are the kids being given a quality education?
Fairness is related to justice; justice by itself is heartless. The landowner, and God, are not nearly as concerned with justice as with mercy. And that’s what we Christians should be thinking about when we think something is not fair. God does not care about fairness.
