It doesn’t happen as often as it used to in business but it still happens. There’s a rather senior person where I work who as far as any of us can tell does absolutely nothing. I mean, nothing. He has been seen in his office at 3:30 in the afternoon calmly running one of those little electric shoe-buffing machines over his shoes, or, in a famous incident, sorting a little bag of Skittles candies into piles based on their colors. This is not out of Dilbert. I’m not making this stuff up. I know it never happens in the church, Father Tim, but in business you do find these scandalous situations.
Sometimes stuff like this is just funny. Other times, when I think about it, or other things like it, on my way home at 9 in the evening, it makes me angry. It makes me angry that some people who work no harder than I do whose ideas aren’t nearly as insightful as mine, or increasingly, who are about ten years younger than I am, wind up in the right place at the right time, maybe, and really clean up, and I didn’t.
There are few groups in the gospel we can identify with more easily than these early risers in today’s Gospel, grumbling, because others got a real break they didn’t. Because someone else got more than they deserved, they feel like they got less than they deserved. This is a parish of early risers — I’ve seen all you people on the 5:35 AM, and the relative slackers on the 7:03. What we need to think about today is what being an early riser, a good worker, can turn us into. Today’s Gospel reminds us of the temptation of the early risers: the great irony that even as it makes us successful it can make us angry. It set us so far apart from God’s style of generosity that we can hardly recognize it when we see it.
Forgiveness is hard, we heard that last week, forgiving not 7 times but 70 times 7 times. Today, we see that real generosity is even harder than forgiveness.
Generosity is a fight with human nature, with what we like to call fairness, but which can often turn into an angry resentment — not resentment against injustice, but against the grace God throws around however God wants to. When it happens to us, we praise God for his grace to us and our families. When it happens to someone else, as often as not, we get out the calculator.
Generosity is a real contradiction with our entire culture, a culture that tells us that pay for performance may be the value we hear about most frequently on Monday through Friday. If you’re struggling to run a business, or survive in a corporation, everything around you is telling you that competition for jobs and resources is tougher than ever, that companies need to run lean and mean, that the people who don’t cut it, whether it’s you or the people who work for you ought to get dealt with quickly, because otherwise it isn’t “fair” to everyone else. And even with that philosophy, or maybe especially with it, we get angry at the people who somehow do the best, or who seem to have found an angle, or who get a lucky break that we never got. We see people like these latecomers in today’s reading everywhere, even though in so many respects in our own lives we too have been latecomers, benefitting from God’s grace more than we have any right to expect. But because we work so hard at so many things, we forget that God’s generosity isn’t nearly as impressed with the quantity of our work as with the quality of our love.
The fact is, the only hope for us is to look not at the early risers or at the latecomers. The only hope for us is this third actor in the drama, the landowner.
He holds the secret because he’s clearly a little crazy, arbitrary even, with no good, rational explanation for his generosity. It’s almost as if he takes pleasure in the fact that what he has done makes no economic sense, and confounds the expectations of the people who did what was right. He was not “fair” in the sense that we use the word fair, he was not “generous” in the sense that we use the word generous. But he was both fair and generous, because all those on his land looked the same to him.
That seems to be the way God acts in this world, with an unfairness that makes us confused and angry and sometimes a little betrayed because it defies every rule that we have about how it ought to work. We can be angry about it, and grumble, or we can realize that we need to look at our life more like the way God sees us, more like the way the landowner sees the people working in his vineyard.
Like him, we should be a little crazy and irrational in how we use our money, with how we treat people who arrived late, with how we feel about those who don’t get hired at all. We should take pleasure in the fact that occasionally we do things that make no economic sense; we should stand up and say something when we hear people and political campaigners extend so anger and resentment toward all sorts of people who got here late, who aren’t working as hard as we are or who aren’t getting work at all.
That anger of the hard worker towards the people working all around us will only make us unhappy. The only solution is to worry a little less about who’s getting what and more about how to give it.