“Blaming the Victim”

Matthew 20:1-16

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

January 29, 2006

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

 

            We are at the second in a series of examinations of Jesus’ subversive parables.  As you may recall from last week, Jesus used parables as tools to help his hearers look at the world in a new way.  It is through these parables that we can be confounded in our own thinking and challenged to live our lives in a new way.  Jesus, the ultimate subversive, encourages us throughout the scriptures to be better, more conscious, more God-like than most of the people around him.  What a tall order for us.

            Today’s parable seems to be a pretty clear scripture about heaven and our need to make conversions.  It seems to say that all people are equal in the sight of God whether we make our conversion early in life or on our death bed.  The setting is a vineyard whose owner asks people to work on the harvest.  No matter how long they work, they all get the same reward.  They all get into heaven.  They should all be happy about this, but they are not.  They start to grumble amongst themselves.  Think about it.  If you have spent your entire life being a good and holy person who has tithed all of your income for the work of the church and the reign of God, who has sacrificed so that others might have life and have it abundantly, you might feel real good about your life.  Might you harbor at least a little bit of resentment for the person who was apathetic during the vast majority of their life, horded all of their goods, even did acts of evil?  But if they make a death-bed conversion, when they have squandered their life and opposed God and God’s people during that whole time, they get to be as equal in the sight of God as you who did all of the hard work.  If we’re honest, we might grumble a bit that the latter-day converts are at least suspect if not good manipulators.  The parable seems to put down us grumblers.  We do need a lot less grumbling in this world, if you ask me.  So, it’s a morality reminder.  God is the vineyard owner and we are the laborers.

            This is the standard impression of this parable.  It’s not very subversive.  It’s common sense.  It’s Jesus as benevolent sage of wisdom.  We read this parable as our own self-help reminder about the importance of our work.

            But let’s look a bit closer at the parable and try to get into the mind of Jesus and the minds of his hearers.  What might a poor person think when hearing this parable?  What if it really isn’t about heaven after all?  What if it’s about the plight of day laborers?  What if the victims are blamed for being too dang uppity about their rights?  What if Jesus is pointing out this conundrum in which people live day in and day out?  What if the true liberating word is not about access to heaven, but access to land and a living wage?

            It helps to look at the characters in the parable.  We have a vineyard owner, his steward and a whole lot of workers.  These are day-laborers who stand out on the streets waiting for work.

            Studies of the economy of Palestine in the first century point to the fact that there were a whole lot of people without land and a select few people who owned the land.  Even though the Biblical model is for there to not be a great distinction between the rich and poor—for all debts were to be forgiven every fifty years and all land redistributed amongst the tribes of Israel, this was not the case in Jesus’ time.  The land-owners had not taken nor given a sabbatical.  There were a few wealthy landowners and lots of poor people who only had their labor to sell. 

            When I was living in San Francisco, Cesar Chaves Boulevard was the place where the day laborers gathered each and every day.  Most were Hispanic with varying degrees of command of the English language.  I met many of these people in the homeless shelter that was founded by the Baptist church I was serving at the time.  They were up at 3 or 4 in the morning so they could get the choicest spots on the street and hopefully get a job for the day.  Almost all of them were hard working folk who wanted to earn some money to be able to live in expensive San Francisco and send some money back to their families in Central America.  Members of our sister church in Leon, Nicaragua told us that jobs are so scarce and poor-paying that the best hope for their families was to have someone go to the United States and send money back.   

            The New York Times ran a story this past week (January 22^nd—story by Steven Greenhouse) saying that there are day laborers all over the US, as many as 117,000 at 500 hiring sites like Cesar Chaves Blvd.  Most of them do construction, painting, and landscaping work.  Over half of them report to having been swindled by their employers.   Forty-nine percent of those interviewed said that in the previous two months an employer had not paid them for one or more days' work. Forty-four percent said some employers did not give them any breaks during the workday, while 28 percent said employers had insulted them.

One of the study's authors, (Abel Valenzuela Jr. of the University of California, Los Angeles) said: "This is a labor market that thrives on cheap wages and the fact that most of these workers are undocumented. They're in a situation where they're extremely vulnerable, and employers know that and take advantage of them."

One Day Laborer said a contractor had recently failed to pay more than $500 due him after he had spent five days doing electrical and plumbing work. He asked a workers' rights group to help him get paid, but he was unsuccessful because he did not have the contractor's name, telephone number or address.

Nearly three-fourths of the day laborers surveyed said they gathered at day labor sites five or more days a week, with the average laborer finding work three to three-and-a-half days a week. In good months, day laborers earn $1,400, the report found, and in bad months, especially winter months, $500.

"Day laborers continue to endure unsafe working conditions, mainly because they fear that if they speak up, complain, or otherwise challenge these conditions, they will either be fired or not paid for their work," the report said.

So you can see that day laborers are people without a whole lot of power.  They don’t have a union.  They are at the whims, largely, of the employer.  They often do not have a lot of ability to negotiate a wage.  They just need to get some work so they can feed their families. 

            As the parable opens, we learn about the vineyard owner who needs to have his grapes picked or his vines tended.  Vineyard owners are people who control land that ought to belong to others.  We can imagine that many of the day laborers might have at one time been farmers.  Maybe some of them had even farmed land that had fed their families, but like so many rural Minnesota farmers they were one poor weather season away from foreclosure.  Wealthy people bought them out at rock-bottom prices and then hired them to work on their own land.  But the produce from land the laborers are to work on in today’s parable was not going to feed any of them.  It was a vineyard, for the dinner tables of the wealthy people. 

            The vineyard owner goes out early in the day to hire workers.  He settles on a wage with them.  He calls it a day’s wage, but we don’t know how much it really was.   Throughout the day, the vineyard owner hires more workers.  At the end of the day, the workers line up for their pay.  The owner tells his manager to pay the last first, meaning the one who worked the least amount of time.  He paid him a denarius, a day’s wage.  The next workers, having seen this and having worked twice as long as the first workers, figured they would get two denarii.  They got one.  And on down the line, they all got one denarius, even the ones who worked ten times as long.  The landowner certainly had the wealth to pay everyone a decent wage, but paying the one who worked the least first served as an insult to everyone else watching. 

If the vineyard owner was really generous as the parable seems to imply he was, then the longest working people should have gotten paid first, gone on their way and not have to witness the “generosity” of the owner.  That would have maintained the dignity of everyone. But the owner did it backwards and rubbed his power in their faces.  When the longest workers gave the reasonable response that this didn’t seem right, the manager told them not to be so uppity. 

            Maybe Jesus was saying that people who are being ripped off have a right to be a bit uppity.  After all, the owner really only promised the first group the Denarius.  Every other group, he promised them he would pay them, “what is right”.  What is right according to whom, though?  Well, to the landowner, of course. 

            So what are we to make of this parable? 

Is Jesus really calling on us to be graciously submissive to the generosity of a wealthy landowner? 

Is he saying that we need to not argue with the crumbs that fall from the master’s table? 

Is he saying that we ought to be happy with our lot in life and not make such a big stink about things?

            If so, this would contradict most of what we know about Jesus. 

Jesus always sided with the poor. 

Jesus always called into question conspicuous consumption.

Jesus always called into question the propensity of those who would call for simply an individual relationship with God if it stood in the way of our relationships with one another.  In fact, as Mel reminded us a few weeks ago, we are told by the Apostle Paul that if one of our members has sinned against us, we must go and seek to reconcile ourselves to him before we partake of the great feast of God.

            So, the place where God would be would be with the day laborers, seeing the injustice of the landowner and his lackey manager. 

Jesus would say that he sees this and wants a better life for all of us. 

Jesus, by this parable pointed out sin. 

But the greater sin is the sin of the unfair wages, not the sin of the self-righteous grumbling. 

For the former upsets God a whole lot more than the latter. 

Jesus always sided with the poor and the outcast. While heaven was important to him, by looking at the gospel writings, it was not his only concern. Some would argue that it wasn’t even his primary concern.

The parable may very well be about our propensity to blame the victim for their unruly behavior.

And there is the rub.  We tend to look at the victims of poverty these days and say, “If you weren’t so unruly, you could get a job.”

If you weren’t so unkempt you could get along better.

If you weren’t so dang uppity, you would have more friends and influence more people.

If you would just get an education, you would have the whole world.

If you stopped having children, you would be off the public dole.

If you weren’t mentally ill, you would not make our lives so uncomfortable.

All of which are acceptable ways to say, “go away.”  I don’t want to be conflicted, confused or even convicted by your presence.

But Jesus wants better from us. 

Don’t you think? 

Don’t you think Jesus might save a bit of this righteous indignation for the landowner who hides his injustice behind a veneer of generosity?

Don’t you think Jesus would call us on our propensity to blame the victim who has every right to complain about being ripped off?

Don’t you think the reign of heaven has a whole lot more to do with eliminating the source of the grumbling rather than the grumbling itself?

And the only way of eliminating the source of the grumbling is to take the scales off of our eyes and see the world as it is.  That’s the subversive work of Jesu7and all of his would-be followers.  It may cause some grumbling in some and some rejoicing in others.  The key subversive work is to make sure that the right people rejoice and the right people grumble.  It starts by pausing before we blame the victim.  For in the victim’s perspective might be the code that will unlock the clasp on the gateway to heaven.