My Battle With Fairness

I confess but do not regret the fact that it has been Mary Gordon’s book, Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels that convinced me to pour over the parables of Jesus in the four Gospels.  She sites this: "Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague, and enigmatic." The quote comes from Ivan Karamazov as he rails against God in Dostoevsky's classic work The Brothers Karamazov.  And I thought: "I feel similar sentiments"  throwing my long laent attention, in reading the parables and stories of Jesus. I am finding them now to be much more and often exceptional in upsetting my religious sensibilities, sometimes vague, and many times mystic in their detail and content. Has it somehow to do with my long past youthful exuberance of identifying the obvious? Is it that for the first time I have taken an aged look of serious understanding?  I don't know and probably will never, so why dwell over spilt milk. But as a long time employeer, I have resently discovered a striking example of this mysticism in the parable of the laborers in Matthew 20. The uncanny and exceptional punch line to this story is that those who come to work at the end of the day—in the last hour—are paid the same wage as those who worked all day long.  These laborers cry out: "These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day" 20:12.  The first are not first, in this story.  Instead, the landowner replies with a radical reversal: The last shall be first, and the first last.

For me, not only is this conclusion to this story exceptional and mysterious, it also seems wholly unfair.  Yet, I have found it is not the only story Jesus uses to demonstrate God's enigmatic sense of fairness.  The parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, has been a familiar story for me since boyhood, but just recently, I have been upset in my sense of what is fair and right.  It seems to me, reading it more closely, somewhat of an extravagant display of grace towards all wayward sons and daughters, even as it illuminates a human cheapness with grace.

In my study I have noticed that Jesus presented the story of the prodigal son as a crowd of tax-collectors, sinners, and religious leaders gathered around him.  I think that everyone who was there probably had a vested interest in what Jesus might say.  Maybe some hoped for grace, while others clamored for judgment.  "A certain man had two sons," Jesus begins. Luke 15:11  The younger of the man's two sons insists on having his share of the inheritance, which the father grants, even though my research indicates: the request violated the Jewish custom that allotted a third of the inheritance to the youngest son upon the death of the father. With wasteful extravagance, the son squanders this inheritance and soon finds himself desperately poor, living among pigs, ravenous for the pods on which they feed.  "But when he came to his senses" the text says, he reasons that even his father's hired men have plenty to eat.  Hoping to be accepted as a mere slave, he makes his way home.  And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him.

Maybe it was the Pharisees in the crowd that gasped at this statement.  How could the father extend such grace towards a son so wasteful and wanton?  Yet, this father is the true prodigal by extending grace in an extravagant way.  His prodigal heart compels him to keep looking for his son—he saw him while he was still a long way off.  And despite being disowned by his son, the father feels compassion for him.  With wasteful abandon, he runs to his son to embrace him and welcome him home.  The father orders a grand party for this son who has been found, "who was dead and has begun to live." 

Fred Craddock, says in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching the older brother in Jesus's story provocatively gives voice to a deep sense of outrage. In many ways, his complaint intones the same complaint of the laborers in the vineyard.  "For so many years, I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours....But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with harlots; you killed the fattened calf for him" Luke 15:29-30.  I hear the implicit mournful cry, "It's not fair!"  I think, so much so, that the older brother is not even willing to go into the celebration.  He will not hear the entreaty of his gracious father both to come in to the celebration and to recognize that "all that is mine is yours."  The grace of this father is radical, given freely and lavishly to both sons.

While neither of these two parables of Jesus neither lack in their detail or content, I still view them both exceptional and enigmatic.  Honestly, they also remain a disruption to my sense of righteousness and my sense of fairness.  Both portraits of the prodigal father and of the landowner present the radical fairness of God.  I’m discovering afresh, God lavishes grace freely on those I often deem the least deserving.  Bill, can it be that you most acutely feel the exceptional and enigmatic aspects of these parables when you see yourself beyond the need of grace?  Unfortunately, with such a perspective, you, like the early morning laborers or the prodigal's older brother, miss out on extravagance and settle for frugality. 
 
Thank you father for your spot light on my soul!  Convict me and strengthen me in grace!