When I moved into my neighborhood over 16 years ago, along with several others who felt a call to
exploring Christian community in a more interdependent way, the neighborhood was quite different
than it is today. We chose the neighborhood for what it was back then: a fairly even mix of people
struggling to exist with below-poverty level means and others who were living above the poverty
line, but not by a lot. Sometimes the distinguishing mark for those two demographic groups were
whether they owned or rented, although there were plenty who owned a small lot and held on for
dear life as the economic storms threatened their stability. The neighborhood was also an almost
equal number of folks who were Black, Latino, and Anglo or white. We liked the idea of moving into
a place where this sort of racial diversity felt worth protecting and celebrating — although the reality
was that these differences were largely homogenized into relational silos of distrust. And there were
the kids! The number of kids roaming the neighborhood, playing soccer in the street, having
birthdays every weekend — or whatever the excuse might have been for their families to pull out the
plastic tables, cook on their front yard, play music all night long, and have the kids dressed up in
their finest with no perceptible bedtime. All of this was desirable for us when we looked for a place
to begin Anthony’s Plot Community. But the market effects of the past 6 years have changed all that,
unfortunately. Its a little weirder these days. For example, in one corner of our neighborhood is
almost this “throw back” to what it looked like when we first arrived: an apartment complex, almost
entirely made up of first generation immigrant families who struggle to earn a living wage but are
buoyed by the affordable monthly rent of that unit. We have had to defend this little bastion of our
old neighborhood from the perceptions of the newer neighbors who arrived with the winds of change.
We hear comments about the blight or the crimes (never true) or the development opportunities.
But, even in this present climate, something wonderful happens usually once each year. In
December, we hold our neighborhood Las Posadas event — the traditional Mexican celebration of
Maria y Jose seeking shelter for the birth of the coming Christ child. This is a celebration in which
we go door to door asking people, through song, to welcome this migrant family into your home.
The family is always refused until we return to Anthony’s Plot where hundreds of people welcome
the holy family and then, logically, have a big fiesta. At this fiesta, our neighbors — those very
neighbors of the apartment complex, who are under-documented and under-paid by their employers
— make the most amazing homemade Mexican foods, and from tents they serve every single person
who comes to them without any cost. Now, we have tried to give them money for the ingredients
they need for this abundant feast, and even tried to get them to take money for their labor, but they
often take none of it. This feast is a gift. And those newer neighbors often find their way to the fiesta
and, ultimately, to the lines for the food. And then the comments come: Y’all hire the best caterers
for this event. Can you give me their contact information for an event I am having? How can I buy
some more tonight? Can I give you money? And it is always my pleasure to say, No, you can’t buy
any. These are your neighbors sharing with you. Because we are where we are as a society when we
put a price tag on that which has no price. You cannot use the same formula for buying your house or
catering your party when it comes to building community as God desires it. Community can be
invested in, and should be; community can provide resources, produce good things, and give you a
return. It is economic. But its just…different.
Our Gospel lesson for this morning is doing some heavy lifting, carrying a few different
themes forward from Jesus’ previous teachings (about marriage and divorce) and interactions
(welcoming the children, engaging the “rich young ruler”), before Jesus and the disciples turn their
attention toward Jerusalem and his collision with the powers and principalities. One thing which has
become a focus in the lessons up to this passage is that the social-economic realities of the people has
made them vulnerable and in many ways isolated — unable to build thriving community within acultural climate which does not value all children, does not care about whether a family has stability,
does not know its neighbor or commit to their thriving. Jesus seems committed to calling people to a
reimagining of this social-economic existence, but there are few who are actually ready to invest
themselves in stabilizing families and households, strengthening neighbors, and — in the words of
Dorothy Day — abandoning the “filthy, rotten system” which continues to produce more harms than
“goods.” But, as he often does, Jesus provides an assurance of God’s “deliverance-in-process” by
promising the people around him that “many who are first will be last, and the last shall be first.”
This message, like the beatitudes, buoys the spirits of a devastated people who recognize in the rich
young ruler’s refusal to redistribute resources something all-too-familiar to them.
Then Jesus tells them a parable: “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went
out early in the day to hire workers for his vineyard.” This also would sound all too familiar to the
people around Jesus. Although the Israelite prophets had described peace and prosperity as each
household sitting under their own vine, at the time of Jesus’ ministry the Roman and local elites were
pushing these same families off their inherited lands and enlarging their own lot and influence —
using the families impacted for cheap labor in the forms both of slavery and day labor. The workers
in this parable are understood to be those harmed by this form of development: displaced and
insecure.
Jesus’ parable continues as other day laborers are hired at different parts of the day, and each
time the laborers take whatever is available to them. At the end of the day, the pay is handed out
starting with the latecomers who received the amount agreed to by those first hired — making those
hired first optimistic that there would be a better rate for their services. Yet, they are paid the same
and become angry at the landlord. At this point a few messages seem to emerge: God is generous and
chooses to provide same for all regardless of whether you come to the “vineyard” later, and, as
before, “the last will be first.” Both of these messages were understood to be aimed at the religious
establishment and were about Jesus’ mission to sinners, outcasts, and Gentiles. This is the good
news, it seems. At least, that’s how it appears presented and how most interpretations of this passage
conclude.
But there are some serious problems with leaving this passage at that. It is “too familiar,” but
in the wrong ways: It is too intertwined in the formulas that get used to keep harmful systems in
place. Its too satisfied with a “gotcha” to the first-comers for having market expectations, when in
fact the whole parable setting is basically that the kingdom of God is linked to the day labor, market
economy of the day. Its too much like the “rotten system” to be all that we get of the good news.
But we are supposed to pick up on that as the hearers of this parable, the clues being in the passage.
To reexamine this parable, we go back to the beginning and this time ask: “What in the world
is a denarius doing in the Kingdom of God?!” Some of our translations have tried to do us a favor
and replace the word “denarius” with “usual daily wage,” but it is denarius which is repeated four
times in this short lesson. Translating it as “usual daily wage” is a mistake for a couple of reasons.
For one, what is usual wage? You want to talk about the wages of our neighbors here in Winston-
Salem, North Carolina and you absolutely must think about the service and hospitality industry
which upholds so much of our own day to day activities and attracts visitors to spend their tourism
dollars. Those laborers, depending on their skill level (like the lesser skills of those day laborers
hired last in the parable), often *agree* to $7.25 an hour, our state’s minimum wage. Or maybe we
should think of our recently immigrated neighbors who *agree* to the conditions described in our
passage as “bearing the burden of the day and scorching heat” for some under-the-table amount
which comes to something less than $7.25 an hour. What is “usual daily wage”? The other problem
with using that phrase instead of the actual word denarius is that we are supposed to hear the worddenarius here. We know from Gospel readings that this coin was basic currency for those living
under the Roman imperial economy. It held the emperor’s image on it and was idolatry for certain
Jewish communities. Perhaps that was the reason why Jesus never seemed to carry this coin himself,
having to ask someone to produce one so that he could answer the question about whether it was
lawful to pay taxes to the Roman government or not. Or perhaps it was less about idolatry and more
about harm to Creation which made Jesus avoid carrying the coin, considering that it represented the
way religious-political movements had managed to create un-payable debts for working families so
that they had to become share croppers working for a pittance. That shakedown is the backdrop to
our parable, and the denarius is the symbol of it all. So, you are telling me that Jesus, who wouldn’t
be caught with a denarius, is letting his good news be this: The Kingdom of God is like day laborers
making a denarius for grueling labor in the fields, and in the end everyone gets a denarius? That’s
like a bad Oprah show! Why is heaven participating in this? Why are we paying minimum wage to
everyone and calling it good news?
As shocking as it is to see a denarius in the passage, it is equally disconcerting to hear the
landlord calling the later workers “lazy” (which is the word we translate as “idle”) on multiple
occasions for not being able to thrive within the extractive and oppressive economic system inflicted
upon them. These are those who have been historically marginalized, had to migrate to survive, had
their thriving village community razed by Roman renewal projects, forced into dependency situations
against their prayers and wishes — and the parable dares to call them “lazy?” It sounds so similar to
the Syro-Phonecian woman who came to Jesus and was compared to a “dog.” Is laziness supposed to
be part of a personal lesson to workers here? If so, once again it does not seem like good news.
With these startling inconsistencies adding up, the parable boldly suggests in verse 13, “I am
doing no wrong to you, for you agreed to this.” Perhaps we have all agreed to this mess… Perhaps
we have all co-created a community-less world in which the best we can do is pay everyone
minimum wage even if they don’t have employment. Or maybe we can push back on this part of the
parable: There is something wrong here; the whole thing is wrong. The whole way we treat people
today, driven by a market mentality, is wrong. The way we determine whether we will help someone
if they can prove their economic savviness is wrong. The way community wellbeing can be a market
question of investment and disinvestment is wrong. The way religious communities are
simultaneously flippant with resources and yet become financial experts when it comes to others’
needs and worth, is wrong. This whole parabolic economic scene is wrong. The landlord isn’t right
about that. But that’s on purpose because the landlord management is mirroring us. This sometimes
happens in parables involving the idea of God as landlord where there is mimicry of our own present
social-economic realities and the harm it creates for covenantal community — most obviously seen
with the presence of slave-holding within a parable. God does not approve of these systems, and
Jesus is NOT presenting even modified versions of them as good news. That is the case in our
passage, too.
Before we go much further on that point, I want us to recall together right now what Jesus
actually considers good news. Richard Horsely, in his book, Jesus and Empire, examines Jesus’
relationship to the people who are living in the economic conditions of this parable. Horsely
describes how the people Jesus encountered had internalized the negative effects of the economic
conditions in which they lived and under which rule they struggled, turning their spiritual emotional
condition into one of blame for their failures — aided and abetted by a religious institution which
piled on concepts like “sins” and errors of your family. I once met with a community about the topic
of homeownership and we listened to everyone in the room tell their experiences with
homeownership, displacement, obstruction, etc. At one point this sister began to tear up talking abouther father and how the family-body implicitly blamed him for not being able to create a stable home
life for them, and how he internalized that as a personal failure for himself. This is the condition of
the people Jesus is ministering to — a people who need to be “forgiven” publicly, not because they
did anything wrong but because they need to be freed from a self valuation which comes from this
market mentality. Their worth is not their success in this system. We were all made for something
else, and that is what Jesus came to reconnect us to. Horsely writes that Jesus’ kingdom mission
sought “to heal the effects of empire and to summon people to rebuild their community life…to
reestablish mutually supportive social-economic relations in the village communities that constituted
the basic form of people’s lives.” Jesus calls the people to return to the “principles of mutual sharing
and cooperation central to covenantal teaching.” “Tapping the people’s reservoir of cultural
tradition, Jesus pressed a renewal of Mosaic covenant to foster and guide a cooperative covenantal
community.”
Such readily accessible memories would have included our Old Testament reading for today
in which the people are angry that their God who led them out of the market predecessor to the
Gospel lesson and into a wilderness journey had not properly set them up for thriving. They were
hangry. In this moment, God did not mimic Egypt with their model of enslavement, or Rome with its
sharecroppers, or our own modernized brand of economics. Instead, God showed them another way
of trust, interdependency, abundance, cooperation, and care. It was a covenantal economy
symbolized by manna, not denarius. This is better than getting paid for overtime. It is something
different. This is thriving within the kingdom of God, and it is what Jesus really wants for all people.
Now, back to the parable: In verses 13 and 14, the landlord speaks with the grumbling worker
who agreed to operate under the market conditions. After saying “I did nothing wrong” by that
measure, the landlord then says sternly, “Take what is yours and go.” This phrasing has similarities to
“give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” and the rejection of Judas who sought to return his silver for
betraying Jesus and is told “What is that to us? That is yours.” It is the phrase of a serious disconnect
between the economy of the world and its harmful effects, and God’s order. And then the landlord
says something that gets translated as “I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you” —
however, I find the following translation to be closer to the Greek, “I desire other to/compared to
this.” The word for “this” seems innocent enough, but can refer to “the pay these others who worked
in my field will get.” That would mostly get you the translation we read. But it is also possible for
“this” to NOT refer to a single noun at all. Instead it can refer to a whole phrase or action or abstract
idea that was just expressed. There are usually clues for this interpretation (our parable includes
them), and it would basically then be referring to “this whole situation” or “what I just said.” That
would get you a different translation, such as the divine caretaker of the vineyard saying “I desire
other than all this being portrayed in this story.” A Gospel rejection of the market economy of the
day and a deep, holy desire for something completely other here: I want to invest in something
different than all of this.
We have become so conditioned by the present economic-social operations —what I think of
as our market mentality — that we think of this parable as the ultimate good news, when it is really a
snapshot of us having the wrong argument. The good news isn’t an increase in minimum wage. The
good news isn’t being glad that those who held power over the vulnerable will learn what it is like to
labor from too dark to see to too dark to see and then not be properly compensated for it. And the
good news is not a church who is passing the plate or handing out a buck to organizations or people
in need while not selling the farm or the vineyard to find out what it takes to invest in a fruitful,
producing community. The good news is “desiring something other than that.” A covenantal moral
economy, as Horsely calls it, where we love our enemies, share our bread, invest in people, trust theneeds articulate by the people, restore the village, heal the spirits minds and bodies of those crushed
by the present conditions, move toward mutual care communities.
Thankfully we, like the community originally listening to Jesus’s parables, have readily
accessible examples and opportunities for exploring mutual-sharing covenantal community as God
desires it. We will hear more of these opportunities for our congregation to invest in covenantal
community that restore and heal where the effects of what denarius has harmed. And we will get a
chance to explore the truth that community takes investment, but of a different sort than we are
accustomed to. And who knows, maybe we will find ourselves lucky enough to emerge from passing
offering plates to breaking bread and making friends and having fiestas in places that have a different
value to us — far beyond what the market can determine.
