25th Sunday of Ordinary Time (21.09.14)
Some Gospel passages provoke readers to an instantaneous reaction. This Sunday’s Gospel (Matt 20:1-16) is one such. The glaring inequality in the workers’ wages, as described by Jesus in his parable, would be enough to launch a strike nowadays! How might Jesus invite his 21st. century listeners to begin to understand his challenging teaching?
It may help to draw a comparison between the reward system, which has influenced us from very early life, and the concept of duty. The smiling face of parents, their moderated soothing words, their gentle and loving touch often come as a reward for our infant cries and tears. It takes time for little ones to learn how to ‘play the game’, how to coax rewards from parents, grandparents and even siblings, but eventually they get there! The eldest has the toughest journey. The youngest, by contrast, watches listens and learns very quickly. It’s a mute point as to the age children learn to play the reward game to their advantage.
Commercial giants, supermarkets and the like, have developed the ‘reward’ game to a fine art. “Have you swiped your ‘Nectar’ / ‘Club’ card asks the cashier or a mechanical voice. Dutifully, we search for the card and swipe it because of a financial discount reward or the promise of one! What’s not to like!
The omnipresent reward system has a downside. It can undermine our sense of duty. Duty is when we recognise and freely commit ourselves to the completion of a task without consideration for our own self-interest. Because duty generally involves the sacrifice of immediate self-interest it conflicts with a reward addiction when our prime consideration is ‘what’s in this for me?’
A taxpayer, for example, may pay HMRC on time because of a promised ‘reward’ namely, of not being subjected to prosecution or a fine? UK Citizenship brings with it a duty to pay legitimate taxation, levied for the good of all, by a democratically elected government. Our first reaction, our duty, to the Revenue notification should be to pay the tax, if it is correct, not to try and avoid it. But is this how most citizens think?
The ancient philosopher Cicero discusses duty in his work “On Duty”. He suggests that our duties originate from four different sources:
1. as a result of being human
2. as a result of one’s particular place in life (one’s family, one’s country, one’s job)
3. as a result of one’s character
4. as a result of one’s own moral expectations for oneself.
Christians believe their duties are founded on their relationship with God.
1. Religious duty – our daily, living acknowledgement
of God as our Father and supreme lawgiver.
2. Filial duty – our daily acknowledgement of our duty to live in a communion of harmony with all others but especially with our Baptised brothers and sisters in the Church with whom we are one family.
3. Civic duty – our daily, living acknowledgement of our responsibilities to and our place within the nation to which we belong.
It’s an old adage that people are generally more alert to their rights than of their obligations. Yet all human rights have reciprocal obligations, for example, I must extend to another the rights that I expect to be accorded to myself. When societies display an imbalance between ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ we see another result of ‘original sin’. We see banners aplenty proclaiming ‘peoples’ rights’ but how many of us have seen one for ‘peoples’ obligations’ – another word for ‘duty’.
‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ is a legitimate objective for labour movements in establishing justice in the workplace. Employers and employees have a moral and legal duty to one another. A day wage is where employer and employee enter, voluntarily, into a contract whereby the employer undertakes to give a fixed amount of money given on a daily basis, and the employee undertakes to give a fixed amount of his or her time. Since a day wage is based on time rather than effort, it does not necessarily provide workers with a good reason to work diligently. The day wage is not a reward.
In the Gospel passage, the wage of one denarius each, agreed between the landowner and the workers, equated with cost of feeding and caring for one family for one day. People then were paid by the day. In Jerusalem today you can still see Palestinian labourers each dawn gathering by the Damascus Gate waiting in hope for the Israeli landowners to drive in and hire them for the day. The uncomfortable irony is that the land on which the Palestinian day-labourers hope to work probably belonged to their ancestors before being confiscated by the State of Israel!
The Gospel extract identifies the landowner’s two key complimentary objectives. He was anxious to bring in his crop before the weather failed and to pay a living wage to each of his workers. The word to underline is ‘living’. Anything less than a denarius would mean hunger in a worker’s household that day. Those who worked through the heat of the day contributed significantly more labour than those hired towards the end of the day. But each worker’s family would have had the same temporal needs irrespective of the hours worked by the breadwinner!
The badmouthing of the landowner by those who worked longer fits the current attitude of some who pay only lip-service to the notion of an equality of dignity and need under the Musketeers’ banner, ‘one for all and all for one’. Some in society demonstrate a different reality through their addiction to the reward system.
People may laugh at the comedian’s line quoting a recent winner of Euro Millions when being asked by an assistant what she should do with the ‘begging letters’, he replied: “Keep sending them out, of course!” Might there be a grain of uncomfortable truth that society attempts to hide from behind that laughter?
The just reward for being dutiful is a clear conscience before God and our brothers and sisters, not a boosted bank balance or self-advancement within a society.