Outstanding in the field

This is the best parable.  

Correction, they're all good, but this one is particularly great because of when it takes place in our calendar.  Not in the church year calendar, that's one thing.  But it comes up in our calendar right now, which is the most timely moment for it.  Because this is the moment in which we get to think about the harvest.  And a surprising thing, that shouldn't surprise anyone, is that our lives are still partially ruled and guided by the harvest.  Now, it shouldn't be that way because we should be eating full meals in pill form.  But we're not.  Instead of that, we're still eating food that grows from the ground or grows on legs, and that's about it.  Isn't it crazy that we're still only eating plants and animals and not full meals out of lab-grown chemicals?  Nuts.  

So given that we're only eating food that we get from plants and animals, and given that we still have to bring all this stuff in from the fields, the harvest time is still crucial.  Absolutely vital.  And harvest is something that you can't just leave for later.  You can't just leave it until you get a round tuit.  When it's harvest time, it's harvest time now.  There's a sense of urgency that, thanks to our continued analog mouths, still lives in our minds.  That is, we're looking at a sense of urgency that was just as urgent back in the time of Christ as it is today.  If you leave the fruit on the vines for an extra week, they're going to be bad.  And rotten.  And gone.  

So if you know that there's a ticking clock here, and you know that we've been under this same ticking clock for the full 2000 years and more, then you can understand the urgency in the mind of the landowner and his harvest.   He goes out, looks at his harvest, sees that it has come due, and knows that he is running out of time.  So he goes to hire some day-labourers who are standing out in the agora, waiting to be picked up for work.  He goes and picks them up at Prime, the first hour, and says that he'll pay them a denarius.  And that's fair.  If you work a day, you get a denarius.  That's the wage for a worker.  Workers get a denarius, no more, no less.  That is, if they work a full day.  If you work less than a full day, you get some sestersii, which are the farthings to the penny of the denarius, or perhaps the quarters to the dollar of the denarius.  If you work a full day, though ,you get a denarius.  So they go out to work for the full day, but the landowner sees the work that has to be done is still very large, so he goes out to hire more people.  At the third hour of the day (terce), and the sixth hour of the day (sext), he hires more people.  And he promises to pay them whatever is right.  

And that keeps going until compline, until the eleventh hour of the day.  Until the day is almost over.  And the landowner still needs a bit of help to get all that work done, so he hires some 11th hour workers.  And they all work to bring in the harvest.  And they finish the job.  So they come to get paid, and those who worked for only one hour get the full denarius.  Now, if you've been working all day, then your eyes are making Roman dollar signs.  For if someone who works only an hour gets a full denarius, then what are you going to get for working all day? 12 denari? two weeks' worth of wages for a day? Sounds great!  But when the landowner gets to them, they get paid the same denarius as everyone else.  And they rightly point out that the landowner has not been fair.

Which is true. 

The landowner wasn't fair, but it's not that he was unfair to those who had been there all day.  Those were the only ones who he was fair with.  They worked all day, and they got exactly what they contracted for, unlike everyone else.  Everyone else was told that they'd get whatever was right, and as it turns out, that was far more than they could have anticipated based on how much they'd worked.  But those who had been working all day only got what they'd contracted for.  As you know by now, I do love the Alien series of films, and in the first Alien film, Parker and Brett are talking about how they'd like some more money for going down to the surface of LV-426, and Captain Dallas tells them 'you get what you contracted for, just like everyone else.'  They respond by saying 'Everyone else gets more money than us.'  And that's a clear distillation, isn't it? A clear distillation that says that they're being paid fairly, which they are, but that proportionally, everyone else does, in fact get more than they did.  But they still got what they contracted for.

And when we look at this passage, we get to thinking of ourselves as being in that passage, which of course, we do.  But we see ourselves in a very strange place.  We see ourselves in a space where we have borne the heat of the day and the work.  But the funny thing is that we are coming to this way at the end of things.  We are rejoining this battle much nearer the end than the beginning.  I know we think of ourselves as those who make meals, sew masks, knit gloves, knit scarves, pack hygiene kits, all that sort of thing.  And though I don't want to belittle those things or for you to stop doing them, you should understand that those working at the sixth, ninth, and even eleventh hour were working hard too.  But they didn't bear the heat of the day in the same way as those who came first.  The harvest was very wide and broad, and the work had to be done, which is why people had to be added, for sure. But the people who started at the beginning had to do more and more difficult work.

Think about Paul in our epistle reading from Sunday.  Paul who says that he wants to go and be with Christ, but it is good for him to remain here on earth because it is fruitful labor for him to do so. In other words, the longer he stays, the more work he will be able to do.  What work is that?  That's the third hour of the day work.  The work that says that he is there to be an ambassador for Christ, to bring Christ to the world, and to an unbelieving world at that.  And boy was the world unbelieving.  It was an incredibly hostile place to be a Christian.  Sandwiched between the Hebrews on one side, the Romans on the other, every place that the disciples went was a hostile port for them to land in.  This is why 11/12 disciples were killed violently for their evangelism.  Sawn asunder, raked with iron combs on a cross, beheaded, killed with the sword, all these things happened to the disciples who bore the heat of the day.  Most of us, all we had to do was just show up at a church that had been built for us, and not only that, but to show up in a culture that had been built up to know and prefer the Christian church.  The world that most of us were born into, even in this late hour, is a world where prayers to Christ are said publicly, where we are permitted, and sometimes even encouraged to go to church.  It's a world in which every single prime minister, and every single president has been a Christian, at least on paper.  A world where politicians can go out holding Bibles as a way of trying to curry favor with an electorate.  In other words, this is a world where a lot of hard work has been done.  And we are closer to the end of the story than to the beginning. The disciples, the apostles, Paul, Mary Magdalene, all those people and more besides were working a lot longer than we have been.  And part of the humility of us when we approach this text is to understand that the denarius that they earned from their backbreaking (sometimes literally) labor is the same as the denarius that is promised to us, too.  The question isn't so much "how unfair is it that people who come after us get to slide into the same heaven as us," but rather, "how unfair is it that we get to slide into the same paradise as Paul, Peter, James, John, Mary, Martha, and the rest of the people we know from the scriptures?"  It's unfair, but it's unfair in our favor.  

But it goes one layer deeper.  Even the Apostles and Saints didn't work from the beginning.  Even they aren't owed a denarius for their work.  They hadn't worked hard enough to earn the full wage, not even close. All of them had to be told 'follow me' by Christ, all of them had given less than 100%, all of them had to have their sins forgiven, all of them had to be redeemed.  The only one at work from the beginning was Christ.  He was at work from the creation of everything, and in his life on earth, he was the only one who had been consistently good, like actually good.  Not pretending to be good, not good sometimes, but actually at work in God's kingdom from his birth to the cross.  He actually earned paradise, and the great part of the Gospel promise is that we are given what he was owed.  Only he worked hard enough, and yet everyone who comes after, everyone whose faith is fleeting, who can't quite seem to get it all the way together, the people who will say 'Lord I believe, help my unbelief,' all those people get paid the same as Christ.  Same heaven, same paradise.

As frequently happens, we get to talk about the thief on the cross, who says to Jesus 'remember me when you come into your kingdom.' Jesus replies, 'today, you will be with me in paradise.'  That's an eleventh hour worker, and the promise is that he will be with Christ in paradise.  Not in a second, half heaven, for those who haven't worked for very long, but instead the same Heaven that Christ has received, that he earned.  That's the good news of the parable, that God is generous to us, and we receive of his generosity. He'd be well within his rights to give us a half or quarter heaven, but it's not about what we earned, nor those who came before us, nor those who come after us.  We work in the same vineyard, the same mission field as Christ, but we get paid out of generosity what he earned.  

That's good news. 

Abolish the police

 Just kidding.  Don't abolish the police.  Or do.  I don't know, I'm not a political scientist.  I'm a theologian, and there's a good chance that you're reading this blog not because you care what I think about public policy.  If you want to know that, then buy me a schooner on Wednesday evening after the worship service is over.

But if you want to know what I think about such issues and matters from a theological perspective, well, then you should know that the Bible does not, repeat does not endorse the abolition of the police.  At all.

Scripture interprets scripture, I hope we can all understand that.  And if Scripture interprets Scripture, you have have to deal with something fun, which is that although Jesus says that he is there to free the prisoners, which he does, he's not in that passage arguing for the abolition of the institution of the police. He's quoting Isaiah 61, in which Isaiah writes "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord hath appointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound" (Emphasis mine.)

That seems to be quite conclusive, but we also need to understand the circumstances in which Isaiah is writing.  He's writing to a people who need to have freedom from captivity proclaimed to them because they are people who aren't being locked up behind bars by the police, they're being taken into captivity by a foreign power. The book of Isaiah is a prophetic book, one that chronicles what God will do to restore his people.  God works within the framework of the Jubilee year, in which the debts incurred, slavery issued, property seized, and the land itself would all be restored.  Every fiftieth year was the year of jubilee, and the captives would be released, would be released from their slavery, and allowed to return back to their homes.  But the Jubilee was never meant to be only a thing unto itself.  It was never intended that the Jubilee was a thing that God did just because he felt like restoring things every fifty years on principle.  Rather, the idea was that the Jubilee was a way of running thing here on earth, but was also a way of showing, through a scanner darkly, what the eternal kingdom of God was going to be like.  It's a multilevel bit, where you can see the Jubilee, the return of Israel from captivity, and the promise of paradise all bound up in there.  But to be honest, using that passage to make a firm pronouncement that the Bible is against jails on principle is incorrect, and perhaps dishonest.  

For there are massive chunks of the Bible that tell you how it is you should run a country, namely Israel.  And those rules on the management of Israel do, definitely, contain passages about jail, and about punishment.  In fact, the rules that are in the Old Testament are much more draconian than the punishments that people complain about in the United States today.  Have a look at the Bible where it outlines capital punishments for crimes, many of them things that we would never consider as even very serious today.  Crimes like murder and kidnapping, but also cursing your parents, adultery, bestiality, sorcery, being a medium, breaking the sabbath, and idolatry.  There are more besides, but this is a partial list.  And anyone who is very police abolition has to understand that God willfully set up a police force to enforce these things, way back in 1 Chronicles 26, and that same institution was the one that arrested Jesus of Nazareth for his alleged blasphemy, and had him passed over to the Romans for execution.

At no point does Jesus of Nazareth make mention of the idea that any of these rules and structures should go away. When the thief on the cross says that he is being punished justly for his crimes, Jesus doesn't fight him on it.  When Christ is being taken away for his execution, when he talks about how John the Baptist has been arrested, when he talks about the eventual arrest of the disciples, he doesn't ever say that the institution of the police, of jails, even of execution is unjust and against God.  

Now, you may very well say that this is an argument from silence, and you'd be right so far.  Just because Jesus doesn't say that something is expressly forbidden, that doesn't mean that it is endorsed.  Well, says Paul, hold my hyssop.  Paul comes in and tells you about the police, bringing up the fact that they are on earth to do the work of God, no jokes.  Now, someone will give me the business and say that these things aren't the police force as we understand it today, and they're right.  These institutions from the time of Christ were significantly worse by every metric.  Look at the treatment of Jesus while he is arrested - he is beaten, mocked, flogged, spat upon, made to carry his cross and nailed to it.  And crucifixion is one of the more unpleasant ways to check out, you know, and is so by design.  You're supposed to suffer while you are being crucified, that is the entire point.  But the Romans were always there to add insult to injury, and I mean that in the most literal possible way.  Mockery, insults, beatings, torture, and eventual death.  And Christ declines to speak out against it as an institution.

But I'm not going to go full 'blue lives matter' either.  Because everyone who is calling for the abolition of the police wants what I want anyway.  It's the same as the pro-life and pro-choice positions - effectively they want the same thing, which is that there should be fewer abortions, but the two sides want to bring that conclusion about in different ways.  What someone from the abolish the police camp has in common with me is that we both want the police to be unused.  How to get to that point? Well, if you want to abolish the police, you get there by abolishing or defunding the police, and putting that money into community building, education, resources and the like.  That's supposed to stop the problem of draconian policing, which it would, but it wouldn't stop the crimes.  Oh sure, some crimes would be prevented, crimes born out of a lack of opportunity, or economic depression, or mental health, those could be prevented, but the crimes that could not be prevented like that are crimes that are committed because the perpetrator wants to commit them.  That is, you're still going to have the frat boy rapist, and the movie mogul molester; those won't be prevented by increasing funding because they weren't caused by a lack of funding to begin with.  These are some of the most privileged people in the world, and they aren't stopped from committing their crimes by having more than enough.

Because the human heart is a disaster, really.  The human heart wants to serve itself, to go for what it feels are its best interests, even if it costs other people.  And this is an issue that is endemic to the human condition, that is, we all have that fatal flaw built into us that isn't caused by a lack of opportunity, a lack of resources or anything of the like and is instead caused by sinful nature.  And we're sinners, so we tend to fall into it.

So, though I may be in favor of increasing funding to mental health resources and community initiatives, I'm switched on enough to know that this isn't going to delete all crime everywhere.  We are still going to be people who are immoral, criminal and unpleasant, no matter how much money is dumped into community resources.  So what is the question then?  Well, it's perfectly straightforward.

The best route forward is to know that this is a spiritual problem before it's a policy problem.  And if you're going to offload everything onto the police, don't be surprised if you need more police forever.  But if you go back to the source, you may not need the police quite so much at all.  You've got to deal with people as spiritual entities. They're people who are almost guaranteed to have sinful thoughts and words before they have sinful deeds.  And to offer them the Gospel of Jesus Christ means that instead of ignoring their sinful thoughts and words, pretending that they don't exist or anything like that, they can deal with their sins before they turn into anything that affects anyone else directly.  James 1:14-15 tells you as much: 'Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.  Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death.' The problems that you see in the world all started with thoughts first, and frequently were words too.  But definitely thoughts, lots and lots of thoughts.  People sitting and coveting, or lusting, or seething, that kind of thing.  If we're going to make serious inroads against the problems of our world, we should start by saying that we are sinful beings who have problems that we want to work on.  We are people who want to do better, who want to be better, and who will only be able to do so if we're honest with our desires and words.  If we're lying to ourselves about that, though, then things will never improve, and we will always be responding to crimes which, I can guarantee you, will continue to happen.  But if you can confess before almighty God that you have thoughts that drive you in the wrong direction, that you have words that are contributing to your thoughts, driving you to actions.

So let's empty the jails, something that we all want.  But let's do it through prevention, not just of economic anxiety, but also of spiritual malaise.  We can defund the police, refund the police, and fund all kinds of social programs, but let's not stop there.  Let's work on healing the individual spiritually, so that when faced with the opportunity to do evil, they may say that they do not want to, rather than that they're afraid to.  If we're spiritual creatures who understand that we sin in thought, word and deed, let's work on confessing our thoughts and words, asking God's help with them, to forgive them, understanding them as things we don't want to do, so that the deeds get a bit more nipped in the bud.