“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.”
These are profound ideas. No doubt, the idea of dominion and subduing the earth troubles us; no doubt, too, the idea of sweat and toil seems hardly positive. And yet, these ideas go to the purpose of God’s creation and our place in it. They speak to the whole matter of human character – to who we are in the sight of God and in terms of God’s will and purpose for our humanity.
These ‘gesima’ Sundays are transitional between Epiphany and Lent; they look back and they look ahead. The focus is on ethical life. Ethics is about doing what is right but that really depends upon what is good; in other words, upon the virtues of the soul. Virtues are the activities – the active principles – that define our character. The ‘gesima’ Sundays examine the four classical or cardinal virtues as transformed ultimately by the theological virtues, principally charity, the greatest of them. What are the four cardinal virtues? In order, temperance, courage, prudence and justice; of those four, justice is the greatest, the one which is implicit in all of them: in the self-mastery of our appetites, in other words, temperance; in courage or fortitude, which is about the spirit or attitude by which we face all the challenges of our lives; in prudence, which is about our practical wisdom or reason which directs our actions. In short, all of them involve some sense of right order which is ultimately the meaning of justice.
This is the ancient wisdom of the Greek philosophical culture. Wonderful in itself there is yet a problem. From the Christian perspective it is simply this. We cannot perfect ourselves. “The good that I would, I do not,” as Paul puts it, “the evil that I would not do, that I do,” he says, identifying the deep disorder and distress of our souls. In terms of the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians, Paul reminds us that we seek more than “a corruptible crown”, more than the temporal and passing rewards of our labour; we seek “an incorruptible crown”. We are more than our labours and more than the reward of our labours, it seems. And we need something more than the cardinal virtures in order to achieve our goal; the end and purpose of our lives is found in God.
That is why St. Augustine calls the cardinal virtues “splendid vices”. There is something good, even splendid, in them but in thinking that we can perfect ourselves we destroy ourselves, the very goodness of the virtues becomes vice. The deeper lessons of the Gospel come more fully into the picture. The cardinal virtues need to be reordered to a higher end – our end in and with God. That can only happen by God’s grace, especially, the three theological virtues or graces, to make the point more clearly. As we will hear on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday before Lent, “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three but the greatest of these is charity”. Yet already charity or love is at work in the discourse of this Sunday, in these readings about temperance and justice.
“I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection,” Paul says in the epistle, speaking about temperance or self-mastery, as it were, but notice that this “striving for mastery” is for the sake of “an incorruptible crown” and notice, too, that it relates to others, “lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a cast-away.” The logic is brilliant and clear. Temperance or self-mastery is not just about ourselves but about our relation to others; to put it more strongly, it has to do with the good of others. Our good can never be pursued without relation to the good of others.
What about the gospel? It recalls us to the justice of creation. The vineyard is an image of the good order of creation. It recalls us to its justice, the rightness of that order as created by God, and to our place in that order as ultimately defined by God, the Creator. Our place is as labourers working to the glory of God and finding in our labour the lessons of love that perfect our fallen humanity. It is about labouring for God, not for our own sense of worth, nor for what we think we are owed. There is a delight and a joy to be found in work itself; it is not just about the drudgery and the necessity of labour. Here work is seen as the counter to the evils of standing idle.
Standing idle is a denial of who we are in the image of God. Our labour is about dominion but that doesn’t mean beating up on nature or ourselves and one another. This is our contemporary problem and in many ways, including the problems of unemployment and just wages. We fail to see our labour as for God and for one another. We fail to see our labours as labours of love, doing everything for the Lord – Dominus – in which lies the true meaning of dominion.
These readings challenge the ethics of our day: the ethics of duty, the ethics of utility, and the ethics of virtue. All three undergo a kind of sea-change in the light of this epistle and gospel. Deontology or duty ethics reminds us that we have duties to be sure, that there are things which we simply have to do because it is the right thing, but without being able to say for what end, this is incomplete. An utilitarian approach, the greatest good for the greatest number, also has some truth in it but is unable to say what the greatest good ultimately is. Virtue ethics calls us to questions about character, about the actions that in some sense define us, but apart from the Christian idea of love perfecting the virtues we would be left with an incomplete view of our humanity and human character; we are condemned by our actions, even by our labour, unless it is transformed by God’s grace.
We are opened out to the idea of a greater good, the goodness of God who seeks the perfection of our wayward humanity. Our labour needs to be seen as our vocation; labouring in the vineyard of God’s creation to his glory and to the good of his church and people. The Collect recalls us to the themes of Creation and Fall and to our labour, that “we who are justly punished for our offences, may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness”– but to what end? Doing everything “for the glory of thy Name.”
“My soul cleaveth to the dust,” as the Psalmist puts it, an image of death and decay, but our prayer is to God, “O quicken me, according to thy word”, the word of truth and grace. That word bids us “go ye also into the vineyard.”
Fr. David Curry,
Septuagesima, HC 2014