Do you remember the Palm Sunday five years ago when twin suicide bombings took place in Egypt? One was at St. George’s Church in the Nile delta, and the other was at Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria, the seat of the Coptic papacy. It’s one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Most scholars believe that the Ethiopian eunuch Philip baptized in Acts is the founder of that community. At least 45 people were reported killed and 126 injured.
And then there are the Christians in Iraq and Syria and Turkey. They date from even before the Egyptian Coptics. They still speak Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. The first community of all was in Antioch, now Antakya, Turkey. That was where Paul was headed when he was struck blind and fell off of his horse and went on to convert Western Europe. Recent earthquakes have all but wiped out the city. In the 1980s there were over 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, about 8.5% of the population. By 2013 they were down to about 450,000 – a third of the previous number - and at last count there were only about 250,000. In Syria, the Christian population has also declined by about two thirds just since 2011, with fewer than 700,000 left. Pastors have been kidnapped and murdered, churches have been burned.
It’s not fair. Christian communities are hard-working, law-abiding, hospitable. And they were there first! They’ve stood up to hundreds of years of pressure, been faithful to God and to their neighbors. Why does God let this happen? What about the promise in Psalm 121:4: "He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." Sure looks doesn't look like he was paying attention, does it?
Maybe we should be asking, instead, “Is it fair that people in the United States can worship anytime they like, and be reasonably sure that they won’t be dragged out and murdered, or have the church burned over their heads, or be thrown into jail, while in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Vietnam and Nigeria and dozens of other countries around the world this kind of act is almost an everyday occurrence?”
Maybe this is not just a tragedy. Maybe this is a wake-up call.
In this country only “disturbed” people kill one another because of their faith, or their race, or their politics, or their position in life. Not even ISIS has targeted Christian churches here. It is Western civilization as a whole, rather than Christianity in particular, that seems to be under attack. And so these terrible events in other parts of the world might seem random or pointless. After all, more Muslims have been killed by terrorists than Christians. But perhaps it will make us think about whether or not we would be willing to gather to worship God if there were danger, if we knew that people hostile to the Gospel might break in on us and burn our Bibles and break our windows and perhaps even take our lives.
How many of us come to church, worship God, and live decent, orderly lives because it’s the prudent thing to do? How many of us obey God out of an expectation that if we do, everything will go well? How many of us - how many of our friends and neighbors - respond when senseless tragedy strikes, “It isn’t fair!” because we’ve played by the rules, and done all the right things.
I used to wonder why it was that, the first time I lent my car to a needy friend when I was out of town, a flying stone took the windshield out, and the second time a tourist from Los Angeles broadsided it making an illegal left-hand turn. You’d think that God would protect the generous! It wasn’t fair!
But why do we expect things to be fair?
All over the world things are happening that aren’t fair. It isn’t fair that the Rohingya Muslims are being chased out of Burma, across the border to Bangladesh, which is already one of the poorest countries in the world. It’s nothing new to them; they’re described as “the world’s least wanted people.” They have always been denied citizenship, and they don’t have the right to free movement or higher education.
Ethnic cleansing is nothing new, of course. It’s only been a few years since the Serbians were slaughtering Albanians and before that it was the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka and the East Timorese in Indonesia and last century the Armenians in Turkey… It makes the Egyptian treatment of the Hebrew slaves seem almost humane by comparison.
That’s what I thought about, and wondered about, as I read the passage from Exodus this week. There are refugees, and then there are refugees. Moses had talked them all into leaving Egypt, making a brave stand for freedom in the face of impossible, unbelievable odds, and there they are, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, starving to death. “It’s not fair,” they whine, “we thought all the hard times were behind us.”
The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said, “If only we had died by the hand of YHWH in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” [Ex 16:2-3]
What the Israelites endured was not quite the same kind of unfairness as the forced conversion and slaughter and enslavement of thousands of Yazidi or the genocide in Darfur or the civil war in Rwanda. The Israelites might not have had as much time as they wanted to pack, but they did leave voluntarily. And they had had months to think about the long trip across the desert to Canaan, and just because they didn’t know the exact day they were going to leave, it didn’t absolve them for making some kind of preparations.
Some of the time when we cry out, “It’s unfair!” it’s just because we haven’t thought about the consequences of our decisions. But some of the time it just doesn’t make sense.
Sometimes terrible things happen to good people. And sometimes really wicked people get off with a slap on the wrist. And there is something deep within us that wants things to even out. A lot of the Psalms say just that. Most of the time our yearning for “getting even” is a reflection of God’s image of justice in us, even if what we mean by justice is often pretty skewed.
But surely we can at least expect God to be fair in his dealings with us, can’t we? After all, he’s the one who is ultimately, totally and completely just. And so today’s parable rather throws us for a loop, doesn’t it. It seems to say that it doesn’t matter what we do, that God doesn’t care if we’re faithful all our lives or last minute hitchhikers on the grace express.
And of course we know that, don’t we. After all, what else is the parable of the Prodigal Son about? But still, it’s uncomfortable. After all, this is a landowner, not a father. We can understand a father throwing away justice for love. But workers in the vineyard? Shouldn’t there be some benefit for having put in a full day’s work?
The landowner is, of course, a metaphor for God. And we can understand a landowner going out to get workers to bring in the crop. But what on earth does God need workers for? I mean, he could get all the grapes in with just one snap of his fingers. What’s he doing down in the marketplace rubbing shoulders with the unwashed?
Tom Long, in his commentary on Matthew, points out that the landowner is never focused on the crop or on his profit. His whole attention is on the laborers. He hires whoever is there, whenever he goes down to the marketplace. The landowner is motivated by their need, not his.
The last excursion down to the marketplace is particularly touching. When the landowner found them there at the end of the day, he asked them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” [Mt 20:6-7] Now, a normal employer would have said, kindly, “Well, we’re through hiring for the day, perhaps tomorrow,” or perhaps even given them alms. But this man recognizes their need for work, their sense of lostness, uselessness, perhaps even desperation.
Because the focus is on the relationship between the landlord and his workers, not on the workers and their tasks, it’s a good idea for us to look at the relationship the other workers have with the landlord, as well. Do you notice that only the first group bargains for their day’s wage? The next groups just get a vague assurance that he’ll pay them “whatever is right.” And the last crew doesn’t even ask. They’re just so grateful to have work that they follow him without question.
And at the end of the day, each worker gets what he or she needs. Less than the daily wage for a day laborer in the fields wouldn’t have been enough to sustain life. And if the last-minute crew hadn’t been there, the all-day crowd wouldn’t have complained. It wasn’t that they deserved more; it was only the contrast. They felt left out, as if they’d been deprived of something. They, too, wanted to get “something for nothing.” Only then would it have been “fair.”
What none of them realized was that, the entire time they had been working, secure in their knowledge that they’d have food on the table that night, the others had been anxious, adrift, worrying about their families, not knowing what to do or where to go. Both have received grace: the first crew the day’s peace; the last crew the day’s wage. But the first crew do not recognize grace when they see it. They - and too many of us - operate on a similar sort of contract with God, with deals and negotiations: counting up our good deeds and devotions, and measuring our blessings with a yardstick. We know what we deserve and we expect what’s ours.
But the latecomers knew they deserved little or nothing, and so were able to respond in gratitude.
Do you know what I think “fair” would be?
Fair would be if God had left the Israelites languishing in Egypt. After all, they went there under their own steam, of their own free will, and never bothered to go back to Canaan once the famine that drove them there was over. No, they got used to the cushy life there in Goshen, and settled in, probably even intermarrying with any Egyptian who would have them (the Egyptians looked down on herdsmen, so intermarriage may not have been as common as it was later in Canaan). It wasn’t until they were persecuted that they remembered the God of their fathers, and the promises. They made their bed, let them lie in it. . .
And it would have been fair of God to let them go hungry in the desert. They wouldn’t have starved, the people could have slaughtered some of their herd animals. But no, God not only provided water, which they really did need, he gave them manna and quail as well. God gave them everything else they could possibly need, as well: he gave them the law, and he gave them the land, and they took it all for granted, and complained that they didn’t have a king like all the other countries. So he even gave them that.
And God had every right, and every reason, to wash his hands of the whole lot of them after the umpteenth time they went astray and forgot his Word. It would have been fair. No one would have blamed him.
But instead, having seen that we were helpless without him, God came to us as a man, Jesus Christ, to live and die for us and bring us back into relationship with him.
No, God isn’t fair. God is lavish. There is a Jewish folk song, “Dayenu,” which means “It is enough.” It goes, “it would have been enough if you had only set us free...” and goes on for verse after verse detailing God’s lavish provision for his people. Half - one quarter - of what God has already done for us would have been enough ... but every day continues to be filled with gifts.
It is not fair for followers of the Prince of Peace to be targets for hatred and violence and death. But in that we only follow Jesus himself, who warned us what was to come. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” [Jn 15:18] It was an even more vile and blasphemous deed to greet the Prince of Peace himself with murder. But think – is it not far more terrible to go to your death without knowing God?
Everything we have received is a gift, including our lives, whether short or long. God gives us everything we need for life, and a reason to live as well. And when death comes, whether expected or unexpected, we receive the greatest gift of all - the eternal joyful presence of Jesus himself.
How terrible it is that the Gospel has enemies. How terrible it is, for the Christians in Egypt and Syria and Iraq and Nigeria. How terrible it is, that those enemies do not know what they are doing, do not know what they have lost. How wonderful it is, that we “who believe in [Jesus] will live, even though we die,” [Jn 11:25] because God is not fair.
