"The wage at the end of the day" - Matthew 20:1-16
The 15th Sunday after Trinity
September 20th, 2020
Matthew 20:1-16
“The wage at the end of the day.”
Somewhere in the top drawer of my dresser I have a few
small Roman coins. The denarius was the “silver
penny” of the Roman Empire. It gets two or three mentions in the New
Testament. I have a couple of
those. Mine have ragged edges. The ones which have come down to us
frequently have edges trimmed or clipped or chipped off quite intentionally. The clippings could be melted down and over a
lifetime, money could be stretched a bit.
And, as per our Gospel reading
this morning, a denarius – trimmed or untrimmed – was apparently the daily wage
for a labourer working in the fields. The
story in this morning’s Gospel is a simple controversy. Those hired to start work at 9 or even 7 in the morning
are paid the same as those hired at 3 or 5 in the afternoon because the landowner
has agreed to a daily wage and has not specified starting times. The earlier arrivals grumble. The landowner claims that a daily wage was
agreed on with all, and that a daily wage is a daily wage and, after all, isn’t
it his money? He can give it to whomever
he pleases.
I was involved once in a Union drive at a large clothing
manufacturer in Montreal in the nineties and helped once to organize a strike
on a foreign registered ship in the Port of Montreal which hadn’t seen wages
paid in six months but I have also sat on the management side of the table opposite
representatives of one of Quebec’s more pugnacious trades unions. I can tell you that the landowner’s argument in
the Parable would be, at best, controversial.
The one who pays here believes he can pay in an arbitrary fashion –
according to whim, and that’s not on. It’s not adequate – the word referring to
something which is “made equal” – not equal to the person standing next to you
but equal to the work done. A “day’s
wage” as a single unit of compensation is a one-size-fits-all approach. What
is missing is a scale of compensation which takes account of hours worked. Simply being present in the field
isn’t enough.
Adequacy. Great
word, adequacy. What do we make of it?
You would be unhappy were your life partner to tell
all his or her friends that you are an “adequate” spouse. You might hope to be more than that. To have your professional review at work conclude
that you were an adequate employee would be, at best I suppose, a relief - you could
have been judged a execrable employee - but still you wouldn’t be cracking out
the bottle of Prosecco. An essay handed
back with the words “Adequate” scrawled along the top in red pencil? Would it please you? A book entitled “the pursuit of adequacy”
will not sell as well as one entitled “the pursuit of excellence”. In the post Hegelian understanding of the world
aren’t things supposed to get somewhat better anyway – generation after
generation – simply because stuff happens?
Falls apart and then puts itself together just a bit better? Evolution is one factor and the reason we are
not all sitting in a swamp this morning catching flies with our tongues. The general
upswing of our slowly improving biology is matched by the tweaks we make in our
technology. The hand loom becomes the
mechanical loom becomes the steam driven loom. Our boat moves upstream – of course
it does - slowly.
However, don’t we put a certain stock in those key
moments when something is invented which changes the whole picture, or when our
opponents are defeated and taken away in chains? We
might know the year when that special book was written by that very clever
person and those words were put down on paper for the first time. We are enraptured perhaps by stories of individuals
who prevail – by the Titans of Excellence.
History is peppered with stories of excellent men and women. History tends to curate the stories of a greater
abundance of men, I suppose – many of them on horseback. Who thrust and parry. Who innovate.
Who discover. Who bend the world
to their wills. We might like to be one
of them. If we discover on our sixtieth
birthday that we haven’t become one of them we might hope our children could be
one of them.
The Light at Lunchtime group has spent several weeks
reading through chunks of the Book of Proverbs.
We ended this process on Thursday by reading the final chapter – Proverbs
31 – most of which consists of a section with the editorial heading “A virtuous wife who can find her” or
in another version “An excellent wife, who can find?” which outlined the
daily life of this powerhouse of a woman who runs her household, directs her
servants, maintains the economic unit of the cottage industry, who buys and sells
tracts of land in the family name, who cooks, weaves her own fabric, makes
garments and is, at the end of the chapter, deserving of the unalloyed praise
of her family. Quote
Of the husband in Proverbs 31 it says merely that he
is well known in town and sits at the city gate with the Elders. The heading could just as easily have been. “An inadequate husband who is he married to”.
Virtue – Merit – Excellence. They are self evidently things to be yearned for and things to be accordingly rewarded. No? And so this parable with its one-wage-for-all stance should sit uncomfortably with us. As he so often does, Jesus expects this parable to itch us a little. He wants us to say “Hold on a moment”.
Let’s give a small “shout out” to adequacy, shall we? In government. In family life. In the life of business or institutions. We live in a world where democratic
institutions of government are failing – where the unique relationship between
a voting population, the interests of an economic elite and the conventions and
institutions which facilitate democratic choice but which hold the excesses of populism
in check have become friable. We’re in a
packet of trouble here in the West. You
know it. I know it.
We know families which are riven by strife, between
spouses, between parents and children, between siblings for want of adequate
accountability, adequately instructive conversation, adequate caregiving.
We know organizations and companies which fail or provoke
scandal because of a lack of adequate transparency and governance on the part
of the Board of Directors or adequate honesty on the part of the Officers.
Ordinary, commonplace things – duties, conventions and
rituals - known for quite a long time can simply be discarded these days. It's remarkably how easily its lost or put aside. Bits of the puzzle which make the picture
comprehensible end up behind the cushions on the couch. You are observers of the entire process. You worry that it might happen. You see it suggested or bruited about. You
see it happening. You realize that it’s
happened. You regret it having
happened. You say I told you so. But still some quite simple convention of relationship,
of honesty, of accountability goes by the wayside with very little that we
think we can do about it. Forget your
book on Excellence. Please write us the Big
Book of Adequacy. It's what we’re missing
quite a lot of. It’s what we fail for
want of.
Last week my colleague Fr Bob - a school chaplain from Houston, Texas - put
together a Zoom call for the old gang associated with the Montreal Diocesan
Theological College. There we were – folks
who hadn’t seen much of each other in 30 years – people between the age of say
58 and 80. It included not only students but some of our mentors as well who
are still alive. Many of them had much
less hair on the top of their heads than I have, I might add, although many of
them were a bit trimmer than me. A few of them have had a
difficult rows to hoe and some of them have done quite well for themselves. There are a couple of bishops among our number
– an archdeacon or two. Some are
pensioned off and some are still in the fields.
Some are bitter about what has happened to them and around them. Some of the very astute among them now quite happily need
to write things down and you’d see them putting pen to paper so that they wouldn’t
forget.
Some have changed
their stripes quite dramatically over the years - some are more less who they
were in the early eighties. Silver pennies all – who have been
clipped and trimmed by the vagaries of time and, frankly, who were not all
dealt the same hand of cards – who have not all had the same starting line, did
not marry the same people, were more or less capable of bearing the challenges
which were unevenly sent their way. We might have imagined that our
branches would bear much more fruit with much less effort than we have needed
to bring to bear. We hope we have provided an adequate response to the call of the Gospel in the places we have served and with the tools at our disposal.
Fifteen or sixteen years ago I buried an extraordinary woman. It was actually the Bishop of
Edinburgh who officiated at the service but I was the Rector of the parish, she
was my colleague and I preached. This
lady had been orphaned as a child and subsequently raised by an uncle and aunt
who preferred their own children over her.
She was pulled out of school at 14 and sent to work at a candy shop in
Edinburgh where she languished for two or three years until she decided to enrol
as a student nurse at the Deaconess Hospital in that city. She finished her training and went to South Africa
in the nineteen fifties where she worked for pretty well the entirety of her
working life as nurse/midwife – as I remember, somewhere in the region of
Grahamstown. She delivered several
generations of children and worked innovatively in women’s health and children’s
nutrition and, latterly, in the training and supervision of the next generation
of nurse/midwives. She returned to
Scotland infrequently during her working life.
At sixty-five she retired and
came home. A lifelong Anglican of
catholic sensibilities she was ordained as one of the first Deacons in the
Scottish Church and subsequently a priest.
When I arrived in Penicuik and West Linton she, now in her mid eighties,
was one of the non-stipendiary clergy of the parish. She occupied a huge chunk of ministry in this
two point charge – and when she died she left a huge hole in the ministry of
the church. I could only daydream about
retaining the same professional usefulness at that age. She was laid low suddenly by an abdominal
aneurysm of some sort and when I arrived at the hospital to see her that
afternoon she was conscious but had already asked the doctor whether she would
survive this and had been told in a kindly fashion but unequivocally that she
would almost certainly not.
I believe that when she was told
that she would not survive this illness - she put her head back on the pillow
and said to herself
that she’d had
enough.
There was sadness. I sensed it that
afternoon when we spoke. There was solemnity. The bishop told me that when she
said ‘goodbye’ to him the next day when he came to visit she said it with a
great sense of occasion and finality. You see,
she’d had enough.
What does that mean? Not that she
had no strength to fight it – but that had you asked her if she’d had her
portion, if she’d had occasion to love and be loved, to apply herself to the
world around her, to fill her generation and to meet Christ in the midst of the
world’s people she’d have said ‘yes’. It was sufficient. It was adequate.
She’d had enough.
She
was to be buried at Rosebank Cemetery on Pilrig Street near the 200 soldiers on
their way to the front lines in the First World War who died in the Gretna
Train Disaster, in the same graveyard as her grandfather and great grandfather
and in the company of saints and rascals from two centuries of Scottish
history. I remember the gravediggers – Council employees in yellow coats – who could
be seen hiding behind trees puffing on their cigarettes until we’d gone. It was
just one more burial to them.
Notwithstanding the uniqueness of
the woman and our feelings for her at the time, and even though there are
remarkable stories that can be told about her, what Bishop Brian said in his
prayer at the Commendation as he stood at the foot of her coffin were right out
of the book and referred simply to the one wage which we all receive for our
participation in the Grace which God has granted to us in Christ. I will and would say the same words for each
of you here this morning should the occasion arise
Into your hands, O
merciful Saviour, we commend your servant, (and here I will speak your first
name). Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of
your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming…..
His sheep. The ones he redeemed, the ones he gathered
in. We await the verdict - in the hope
that it is this: "Well done, good
and faithful servant" - here's your dime. This is for an adequate day's
work. I pay you the same as I pay her –
whose life you do not know and whose experience you cannot share. I call them to me when I call them - at whatever stage in their lives and at whatever hour of the day. There is only one place to be – in the midst of life or at its end - at home with
me. One God, one baptism, one Church and
one common destiny in the grace of God.
Amen
