Justice
of the Heart
Rev.
Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September
24, 2017
Scripture:
Jonah 3:10-4:11; Matthew 20:1-6
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of
our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our
redeemer. Amen.
Let me ask you a couple of questions. How many of you like what the
landowner did in our parable from Matthew when he paid the workers
who had worked only a short time as much as he paid the workers who
worked all day? How many of you dislike
what he did? Well, I have to tell you, for most of my life I have
very strongly disliked what this landowner in the parable does. I
mean, it’s just not fair. Surely the workers who worked all day
earned more than the workers who only worked an hour or two, didn’t
they? I’ve always been on their side when they complain to the
landowner who had hired them. Aren’t they right when they say to
the landowner “These men who were hired last worked only one hour,
and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the
work and the heat of the day.” I mean, they’re right, aren’t
they? I wouldn’t work all day for a couple of hours’ pay (or at
least I wouldn’t do that in any work other than ministry, but
that’s a different story). Fair is fair and unfair is unfair,
right? It’s always seemed to me that the all day workers were right
and that the landowner should have given them more. Or maybe he
should have given the short-time workers less, but in any event he
shouldn’t have given them all the same amount.
So now, what about Jonah? For
reasons I don’t understand the lectionary brings us into the middle
of the story of Jonah, and the text assumes a certain amount of
knowledge that not all of
you may have,
so let me give you the
story from the beginning—in short form of course. God has told
Jonah to go to Nineveh and
proclaim the word of the Lord
to them. Now, we really have to understand what Nineveh is if we’re
going to understand this story. Nineveh was the capital city of the
Assyrian Empire. That’s the empire that in 722 BCE had conquered
and destroyed the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel. For the Hebrews
Assyria was very bad news, and Nineveh was its capital city. And that
is precisely where God tells Jonah to go. So Jonah immediately hops
on board a ship headed in the exact opposite direction. To get from
Israel to Nineveh you go east. Jonah headed west, for
a place called Tarshish. Then
there’s a great storm,
and Jonah gets swallowed by a great fish. Then the fish (or whale—the
ancient Hebrews probably didn’t know that whales aren’t fish)
vomits Jonah up on a beach. So Jonah says alright already, I’ll go
to Nineveh and proclaim God’s word to them. He does, and as soon as
he opens his mouth the whole city from the king on down repents in
sackcloth and ashes. So God, who was going to destroy Nineveh for its
sin, changes the divine mind and spares Nineveh.
Jonah is not pleased. In fact, he’s quite miffed. He would have
loved to see Nineveh destroyed, and he thought God was going to
destroy it. God didn’t, so Jonah goes outside the city and sulks.
God causes a great vine to grow up to give Jonah shade, but the next
day God sends a worm that kills the vine. Jonah is so miffed by that
one that he says he’d rather die than live. But God says to Jonah
you have no right to be mad about the vine. You didn’t plant or
grow it. God says you were concerned about that vine that wasn’t
yours. Why shouldn’t I be concerned about the people of Nineveh?
God says, implying pretty strongly that they are God’s people
whether they know it or not?
Jonah
gets mad because God does not destroy Nineveh. So let me ask again.
How many of you think Jonah was right to be mad that Nineveh wasn’t
destroyed? How many of you think Jonah was wrong to be mad that
Nineveh wasn’t destroyed? And:
How many of you thought that the landowner in the Matthew parable and
Jonah were both wrong? I have to tell you that that’s where I’ve
been with these two stories. The landowner was wrong not to pay the
workers based on how long they had worked, and Jonah was wrong to be
upset that the great city of Nineveh was not destroyed. Quite
different stories of course, but I’ve always thought that the lead
characters in both of them were just wrong. So
let’s look at these stories to see if we can figure out why at
least some of us think that both the landowner and Jonah are wrong.
I think it’s relatively easy to
say why we think Jonah is wrong. He wanted God to destroy a whole
city that had in it, as the text says, “more than a hundred and
twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their
left, and many cattle as well.” Nineveh, and the Assyrian Empire of
which it was the capital city, may have had blood on their hands; but
surely most of the people of the city weren’t responsible for that
blood. Assyria was hardly a democracy. But even if
they were in some way morally responsible for Assyria’s sins I
wouldn’t want to see God kill them all. That would be horrible.
They may have been people quite different from us, but they were
people. Human beings. Men, women, and children. For God to kill them
all would be a crime against humanity. I doubt that any of us would
want to see that; and I
suspect. or at least hope,
that we much prefer the God of this story who has
compassion for all of those
people. Jonah was just flat wrong, and the story says that he was
just flat wrong.
It’s a different matter with the
landowner. He paid people
who’d only worked a short time the same amount as he paid to people
who’d worked all day. We,
or many of us at least, say the landowner was wrong; but the parable
says he was right. If Jesus says he was right, why
do we say he was wrong? I
think we say he’s wrong because what he did violates our sense of
justice. We think of the workers in this parable as hourly workers.
Of course the story says the first workers hired agreed to work for
one denarius not for an hourly rate, a denarius being the average
day’s pay for a laborer. But I think we nonetheless think of these
workers as working for an hourly wage. That’s how we mostly
compensate this kind of labor in our day, pay by the hour. Some of
these workers worked far more hours than other workers did, so our
sense of how things are done and our sense of justice say they
shouldn’t all be paid the same amount. Paying them all the same
amount isn’t fair, we say. It isn’t just.
So I ask once again: How then is it
that this parable says the landowner was right? He gives his own
self-justification. He denies
being unfair to the workers who worked all day. He says I paid you
what you agreed to work for. Then he says: “Don’t I have the
right to do what I want with my money? Or are you envious because I
am generous?” He says, in effect, that he is using a different
standard than fairness. He isn’t being fair, he’s being generous.
Well, OK I guess. It’s hard to object to people being generous, but
let me suggest another way of looking at what the landowner has done
that might make this story be about more than the generosity of an
ancient landowner. What if we understand the source of the conflict
here between the landowner and the all-day laborers not as a clash
between justice and generosity but as a conflict between two
different kinds of justice? What if the conflict here is between
justice of the head and justice of the heart? Let me try to explain
what I mean by that. Justice of the head is the justice of the
all-day laborers. This justice is a mechanical operation. Look at how
long different laborers worked. Get out your abacus and calculate
what percentage of a day each worker worked, then apply that
percentage to the average day’s wage, that is, to the denarius, and
pay each worker according to that percentage. This is justice of the
head, a rational calculation based on what each worker has done.
So what’s justice of the heart? It
is justice that looks not at what each laborer has done but at what
each laborer needs. This
parable is set against the realities of first century Galilee. In
that world a denarius, the average day’s wage, was just barely
enough to live on. If you earned it one day you ate that day. If you
didn’t earn it you probably didn’t eat. We’re not talking a lot
of money here, and the men who were hired later in the day and their
families almost certainly would have done hungry if they didn’t
earn a full denarius. Surely the landowner understood that economic
reality. So he gave everyone a full denarius. He says he was being
generous. I say he was using the justice of the heart, justice that
looks not only at what a person has earned but at what she needs in
order to live.
There are a couple of ways to look at what seeing justice as a matter
of the heart rather than the head might mean for us in our world.
When we consider the poor among us, the homeless, the unemployed, we
tend to apply a justice of the head. What have they earned? If they
haven’t worked, well, that’s probably their own fault; and in any
event they haven’t earned anything so they shouldn’t have any
thing. Jesus’ parable of the landowner and the workers say no to
that kind of analysis. It says look not to what people have earned
but to what they need. Everyone has the right to live, and we should
make sure everyone has enough to live on. That’s one way of looking
at justice of the heart.
Here’s another one. Think of this parable as a parable of God’s
grace for us. Does God give us only as much grace as we’ve earned?
If we’ve led a sinful life and amend our ways only near the end of
our lives does God give us just a little tiny bit of grace, not
enough grace to save us? Thanks be to God, no. God gives us a full
measure of grace, a full measure of love, a full measure of
forgiveness. In fact, God gives us that full measure of what only God
can give even if we never amend our ways and turn to God at all. For
let’s face it, none of us ever mends our ways completely. None of
us ever gets this living business completely right. When we don’t,
God is like the landowner in Jesus’ parable. God gives grace. Full
grace. God gives forgiveness, full forgiveness. If God gave us only
the grace we’ve earned we’d all be in deep trouble. But God
doesn’t give us only the grace we’ve earned. God gives us the
grace we need. All the grace we need whether we’ve earned it or
not, and mostly we haven’t.
Jesus’ parables were usually in some way about God even if God
wasn’t expressly a character in them, and I think we are to
understand the landowner here as standing in for God. I think we can
understand the payment the landowner gives the workers as standing in
for the grace God gives to us. When we understand this parable that
way it becomes immensely good news for each one of us. God doesn’t
reward us according to what we have earned, God rewards us according
to what we need. God’s justice isn’t justice of the head, it is
justice of the heart. With God we get all we need whether we’ve
earned it or not.
So thanks be to God. God isn’t a accountant adding up our faults
against our merits. God is the great landowner who knows what need
and, at least when it comes to grace, makes sure we get it. So yes.
Thanks be to God. And all the people say: Amen.
