Sermon for Septuagesima
“Go ye also into the vineyard”
The parable of the labourers in the vineyard is powerful and disturbing. That is the point of the parables. They are meant to prod us into thinking. They offer us another way of looking at things. Often as not they are deliberately provocative.
What could be more provocative than the idea that those who have worked less should receive the same pay as those who have worked more? It violates our sense of justice completely. And yet, the point of the whole parable is to open us out to a larger consideration of the justice of God. “Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.” But what is right? Are we the measure? Is right simply, ‘what is right for me?’ Meaning, of course, what I want for me? But on the other hand, is there not a question about equity, about a sense of shared equality? Otherwise doesn’t everything come down to what is simply arbitrary? Now there is a problem!
But is that what we have in this parable? I don’t think so. I think this parable challenges the assumptions that I am measured by what I get and that I am owed what I think I should have; in short, it challenges the entitlement culture of our world and day. What is that? The idea that I am entitled to whatever I think I should have. Why? Because of who I am. Who am I? I am measured by my sense of self-worth but that is measured entirely by what I think I am owed. It is, of course, about arguing in a circle but the assumption is clear. My worth is measured in terms of what I receive. To the contrary, the parable challenges all of the forms of homo economicus, our humanity as defined primarily by economics, whether as consumers or as producers.
The parable suggests another principle which defines our lives. It is simply this. We are called to be labourers – workers. Not in the Marxist sense of homo faber, that I am what I make or produce, but in the much more radical sense that there is something positive and free, something dignified and true in labour. It belongs to the truth of our being as intellectual and moral creatures, creatures who know and love. Work or labour is about our lives as spiritual beings. Standing idle is not good and is not wanted. “Go ye also into the vineyard”. What is that vineyard but the good order of creation? What is our place in the created order? Both before and after the Fall, we are called to labour, to work: first, “to have dominion over” the whole of creation and “to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it”; and, secondly, “to toil” on the ground and to labour for only “in the sweat of your face shall you eat bread.”
