25th Sunday in Ordinary Times
And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius.
This is an outrageous story, befuddling, infuriating. Or so it seemed to me at the time, reading it for the first time, over two-and-a-half decades ago now. There is internal evidence from the story itself that this reaction is shared more broadly, across cultures; perhaps even universally. It violates our intuitions about fairness.
We have conflicting intuitions about fairness itself, of course. The fairness of “all’s fair in love and war” is ruthless in its amoral meritocracy. The fairness of the Rawlsian difference principle—which tolerates inequalities only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged—much less so. What our parable delivers arguably goes further still: not even Rawls dares argue for a strict egalitarianism that demands the equality of outcomes. Then again, what with a denarius being a day’s wages for so-called unskilled labour in a subsistence economy, perhaps we’re not, despite appearances, really dealing with the equality of outcomes here. What we might have instead is that old Marxist slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
It is worth noting that the phrase comes first not from the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where it does appear, but in Étienne Cabet, the French utopian socialist, whose overtly Christian communism is in some ways even more thorough-going than Marx’s, who at least had the good worldly sense that the second half of the slogan—“to each according to his needs”—is an eschatological aspiration, rather than a policy recommendation. It is no real departure from Marxist philosophy that Stalin’s constitution contains the assertion “to each according to his work”, which sounds like it might belong to a manifesto from a rather different wing of the political spectrum…
Jesus of Nazareth being rather more Marxist than Karl of Kentish Town: I found it unsettling, as a teenager from an aspiring middle class family in a rapidly emerging economy. Meritocracy was—and probably still is—the moral philosophy of Chinese Malaysians, which is the this-worldly manifestation of an inherently karmic system. Even among those of us who were sceptical of saṃsāra, we believed in our bones that someone—God or nature, or the free market—was keeping score, and we would get our just deserts, the fruits of our labour and ingenuity. This is also, as far as I can tell, the modern Western world’s metaphysics of morals, our prevailing public and political ideology, not only that success is the direct product of that sacred combination of talent and hard work, but that it also should be. We are all Stalinists now: to each according to their work.
Against all this, Jesus needs no whip amidst the money-changers: a parable has much the same effect, so bold is his assertion that also inspired St John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily so beloved here at Mary Mags: “the Master is generous, and accepts the last even as the first. He gives rest to those who come at the eleventh hour, as well as to those who have toiled from the first”.
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It is so easy to take this all for granted, but it is in a way Christianity’s boldest claim. That it is not by any merits of our own that we are saved, that we are loved; but that love is pure gift, and so is salvation, forgiveness, dignity, and value. We can do nothing to earn these, and we—crucially—can do nothing to lose them. And not because we are inherently loveable as such; that is the secularised version of our doctrine of grace, which somehow makes loveliness—even goodness—a property of individuals. For Christians, these are relational properties, grounded not in facts about us but in a fundamental truth about God: the God who loves unconditionally and absolutely and faithfully, who is love itself, and so the source of all finite attempts to love.
Once upon a time, this parable about agricultural labour and remuneration policy brought me eventually, by way of a curiosity about the kind of theology that could possibly generate such a morality, [brought me eventually] to this God who “accepts the last even as the first”, whose solidarity with beloved humanity knows no bounds, not even that most basic of metaphysical boundaries between creator and creation, the infinite and the finite.
This then, is the love which we received at baptism, which plunges us into the depths of divine love; it is the love we continue to receive in the Eucharist, which fills us with love’s true presence. It is, of course, one baptism for all, and once for all: the Christian insistence that one baptism is enough, no matter how saintly or sinful the life, is yet another example of our radical egalitarianism. And having received the one baptism, we also all of us now receive the same Christ in the eucharistic elements: again, exactly all we need, regardless of our circumstances.
And this same Jesus Christ our Lord calls us to, shall we say, redistribute this same love, asking of us according to our abilities, and compelling us to use them to fulfil the needs of others. Christians are called to abandon that most natural complaint, heard the world over in playgrounds and on playing fields, and across personal and professional context: that it’s not fair. Fairness has nothing to do with it; or rather, we have nothing to do with fairness. To be a religion of grace is to embrace an ethics of grace over one of fairness, according to which gift replaces transaction, forgiveness precedes repentance, generosity exceeds desert.
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We live in interestingly depressing times, depressingly interesting times, in terms of the interactions between the theological and the political. The prevailing public theology, as it is often encountered, especially online, seems, at least viewed from this pulpit, very far away from the gospel as we find it here in St Matthew’s gospel. But maybe that’s always been so. Nearly half of our text this morning describes the recriminations brought against the householder, and his responses to them.
And so this reminder that we are a people of grace committed to an economy of gift comes at a crucial time, and we would do well to pay attention to the gospel’s call in this time and place, and to speak up and act for this gospel’s sake, and the world’s also. Let not the gospel be perverted into a metaphysics and morality of meanness, when it is in truth one whose generosity is unquestionable, which takes those whom the world puts last and puts them first. Let us go and do likewise.