Justice of the Heart

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.