Canter Bridge

Jesus’ earthy parables often offended the sense of justice that had accrued over centuries to conventional wisdom and salt-of-the-earth logic. His contemporaries, like ours, managed fairly established assumptions about what a good man was like and how a bad man was likely to behave. Even for those unschooled in the legal minutiae of Israel’s long dance with Torah would have agreed with a high level of consensus about the kinds of behavior that were worthy of respect, the kinds that cried out for retribution, and the unspoken moral code that lay behind all of this.

Against this backdrop, Jesus’ teaching was profoundly unsettling. The agreed and multi-level consensus about right and wrong that any society requires if it is to stumble in a forward direction rather than disintegrate underfoot seemed incapable of commanding Jesus’ consent. His easy way with sinners is one example of this. He actually seemed to prefer their company to the alternatives on offer. He found in those who had been forgiven many and the most shameful of sins a degree of gratitude that he was prepared to admire.

He appears not to have relaxed the codified morality of his correligionists very much. He simply delighted in those who had found forgiveness and questioned the credentials of his generation’s self-appointed stewards of right and wrong.

Jesus must have made for maddening company if, say, one of your main goals was to create a stable, respectable society.

So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

This little aphorism crowned a story Jesus told about workers who had labored for different stages of what for some had been a very long day. The man who hired the day-laborers of Jesus’ parable considered himself free to reward them as he chose, not according to the quite sensible assumptions of the longest serving.

Jesus’ story stands all economical sense on its head. Presumably, he had a single intention in doing so. One can surmise that he had told a story about grace, sketching out a world in which nobody has much claim on anything and where all is privilege.

Jesus called this imagined world ‘the kingdom of heaven’. He was not shy about calling his listeners to ‘enter into’ this kingdom, governed as it is by the inscrutable logic of divine generosity.

Forget all your notions about what you deserve, Jesus seems to have wanted to say. You deserve nothing. Yet you can have almost everything.

His logic could hardly run more strongly against morality’s reasonable current. The first will be last, he warns those who had mastered those currents. To those who had never had a chance even to dip a toe into the river as it runs past, these words of invitation: ‘… and the last shall be first.’