Dear Friends in Christ
We are hearing a succession of Parables or the teaching stories of Jesus, over these current Sundays of the Year. This week - the Parable of the workers in the vineyard - gives us a lesson in God’s sense of justice. His justice often turns our notions of justice on their head! Some peoples idea of justice is focused intensively on the self and so will always ask: Why did that person get more than I did? Why have I not been sufficiently rewarded? And in our relationship with God an awful lot of religious energy goes into perceived injustice. This theme is everywhere in the Bible and the literature of the world: Why do wicked people seem to prosper? And why do good people suffer? Why aren’t sinners properly punished for their crimes? Lots of bad sinners seem to live a rather successful life. Why are the Saints so often ignored and reviled. Why don’t hardworking people get what they deserve? Or if you press it further: why are some people more beautiful, more intelligent, more popular than others? These questions run through everyones mind at some point. Things seem to be unfair, which makes us seem like little children vis-a-vis God: crying out to him when we have this sense of offended justice. And that is the attitude of the workers in the Parable that Jesus tells. Before God, we can never presume we are owed anything. Rather we are in a stance of complete dependency upon God. Every moment of every day we receive, being, life, breath, movement, everything is from God; all of us are beggars before Him. That’s why we have to shift our focus from ourselves to the Great Giver who presides over the whole of the cosmos, who knows everything we do and everything we need. He therefore knows how to properly apportion His gifts in a way that perhaps will never make complete sense to us.
