What can "fair" do for me?

Scripture is full of stories and instructions and parables that I don't like.

What do you mean I have to love my enemies?

What do you mean I have to forgive seven times seventy seven times?

What do you mean I have to forgive others their debts the same way that my debts have been forgiven?

What do you mean I am being sent out like sheep among wolves??

What do you mean I can't prepare my defense in advance?

What do you mean I'm not supposed to worry about anything like flowers in a FIELD,

And this parable from Jesus is one of the stories that people have the hardest time with:

What do you mean if I work all day long I'm going to get paid the same as the person who showed up just under the wire. Does my work not mean anything? Does my anger not get to mean anything? Do my grudges not get to mean anything? Does their laziness not get to mean anything? Does their tardiness not get to mean anything? Do their sins not get to mean anything?

This is one of the wonderful consistencies of scripture - inside of scripture and out of it - people chafe against the things that God instructs. The things God says so rarely feel fair, at least against the backdrop of a culture and an economy that is fundamentally built on the idea of deservedness. More than anything we are taught to ask, Have you earned your worth? Do you deserve what you have? Have you suffered enough to deserve what you have? And for all the occasions that God offers teaching against those lines of thinking, people have a really hard time with it.

There are just so many examples of this tension:

Remember when the rich young ruler asks Jesus what he has to do to truly follow him, who says he has to sell all of his belongings and give the money to the poor, if he really wants to do right by the Kingdom of Heaven. It's a really audacious thing to be told, and yet it is among the clearest instructions that Jesus gives, and he goes away sad because of it.

Jonah, the prophet, who after he makes it out of the whale, crashes out over God's instruction to go to the city of Nineveh and tell them to repent, because he knows that they will and he knows that God will be merciful and he doesn't think they deserve to be saved.

And then people who heard Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan were forced to name that the person who they were the most biased against, culturally, positionally, could be the person who was most following God's call to serve.

I guess what I want to name is that, at the middle of all of this, can be a resistance to grace because it doesn't feel fair. When debts go unpaid, when wrongs go unpunished, when work goes uncompleted, when biases go unconfirmed, when the ledger is ultimately not tallied by you or me, it just feels wrong. Somehow.

And yet, for as much as I read in scripture that I wince at- that feels too generous, too naive, too imprudent, I sort of have to temper that against the world as it is- too withholding, too exacting, too vengeful- and acknowledge that that way of living is not exactly working out all that well for us either. I think we're all feeling pulled taught between the two ends of this spectrum, this fork in the road, and like we're having a real cultural level argument of which way to go to fix what ails us as a humanity. Will it make things better for us to become more generous or more withholding, as a people? Will it make things better for us to become more naive or more exacting, as a people? Will it make things better to become more forgiving or more vengeful, as a people?

As much as I chafe against at times against the forgiveness, the generosity, the naivete, I simply cannot imagine living in this world today without the promise of those things shining across the horizon. Even if it feels impractical, even if it feels foolish, I can hardly stand the thought of a world where the ethic of "withholding" wins in the end. I can't stand the thought of a world where the people who show up late - for reasons we don't really know - end up not actually being forgiven, not actually being saved, not actually having their needs taken care of as we cleave to an idea of fairness that God hasn't asked us to hold onto. And if the cost of that suffering, that withholding, is that I get a little piece of paper that says "at least it was fair to me", then I'm not sure the trade was worth it.

I think the question at the heart of this passage is something like: What does the idea of fairness defend for you? The landowner - standing in for the divine - asks: Are you envious because I was generous? Are you envious because you want more? Are you frustrated because it makes your work feel like it doesn't matter? Are you frustrated because you wasted your time showing up early when you could've just showed up late! Do you feel like you really "wasted" your time doing the right thing?

I feel like the question with a lot of this stuff -- a lot of these scripture passages that are so tough -- isn't first, should we or shouldn't we. Rather its: what are the stakes? What do we risk if we follow this? And what do we risk if we don't? What do we stand to gain if we follow this? What do we stand to gain if we don't?

So I wonder: what do we risk if the Gospel isn't fair?

What do we risk if we believe that God is too generous? What do we have to risk if we decide that God isn't?

Amen.