Canter Bridge

Surely we are due some credit!

We have labored long, we have wept, we have worked our way to exhaustion and back, we have sacrificed leisure, friendships, even love for a most high calling. We asked very little and have only rarely complained. No one knows the price we have paid—and willingly—for the cause.

Then comes this damned Jesus-story about day-laborers hired at intervals by a landowner. The best and the brightest, the earliest risers, the young, ambitious and hungry have worked their butts off from earliest light to put bread on the table and pay a little ahead on Junior’s college tuition.

Joined at mid-morning and then again after lunch—after lunch, for God’s sake!—by these friggin’ slackers, they—I mean we—have kept our indignation to ourselves, our heads down, our hands on the splintered handle of our hoes. Our work will be recognized, we reassure ourselves. Things will come clean at day’s end.

Not so:

Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’

Grace is unfair. Entitlement casts no shadow in its light. The calculation of merit shifts with nearly violent speed from self-evident to absurd.

But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

We get no credit, only outlandish generosity.

Perhaps the early riser’s best and enduring salary comes not in the coin that is pressed—per agreeement—into his palm but rather in being addressed by the landowner as ‘friend’. It is a momentary hint at conversation that, alone, sets him apart from the late-arriving lout who stumbles away with less sweat soaking his shirt but the same silver clutched in his fist.

The gospel’s Greek vocabulary produces a fine contrast that is lost in the inevitable treason that is translation. Put rather woodenly in English, the landowner’s question runs like this: Is your eye evil because I am good?

Surely we, the sweat-soaked, blister-handed righteous deserve some credit.

Or not.

Entitlement, before goodness and grace, becomes an embarrassing pimple on the nose, a blemish we had not noticed, a burden that—once abandoned—allows arms to swing freely and joyously as one saunters home with his denarius in pocket.