The Kingdom of God is Like...

The reign of God that Jesus preached was a radical departure from what people of the time expected: instead of a system of future reward for people with the “right” religious and social credentials, the reign of God was about contemporary practice of justice and mercy for all people.

In South Africa today we might equate the toll collectors/publicans with the MECs who think that driving a R1­million Mercedes-Benz is appropriate in a country where so many people are poor and destitute (regardless of whether the MEC accepted the car as a gift and later had to return it as a result of public outcry, or whether the MEC negotiated a special deal for a rare model that was paid for by the department and later reported hijacked from the MEC’s driveway on the day her husband drove the car home from the dealership). Jesus would do well to have dinner with these MECs and engage them in conversations that would help them to understand how their behaviour could be different. Perhaps then the next ‘gift’ or ‘deal’ those MECs would negotiate, would benefit the poor!

We might also see the opposition political parties as the Pharisees when they are too quick to point accusing fingers and talk the ruling party and its members down, even going as far as making scathing personal attacks on particular individuals. While the ruling party may be making many mistakes and committing many injustices, having the opposition crowing about how unlike the corrupt ruling party they are doesn’t help to bring about justice. Jesus could explain to the opposition that justice must be done for justice’s sake (purely because it is the right thing to do), and not for the glorification of those who identified the injustices.

A possible parallel parable for The Good Samaritan in today’s world might be The Just Politician:

A powerful cabinet minister and known atheist (let’s call him Mr X) defies belief by helping a dispossessed stranger (let’s call him Mr J) who made a public show of voting for another party (video footage of which has been watched by millions on YouTube who couldn’t resist spending their boss’s time and bandwidth laughing at the tattooed Manenberg man’s outraged diatribe against Mr X and his ilk). So Mr X rights some serious wrongs by ensuring that Mr J gets the liveable housing and appropriate grant that he’s been waiting on for a decade. In the process Mr X angers his party bosses, forgoes the benefits and bribes offered him by other people wanting the house he gives to Mr J, and tries his level best to avoid the media who want to make a front-page story of his “antics”. When a 3rd Degree reporter finally traps Mr X getting off his bicycle outside his two-roomed Philippi house and demands to know what Mr X is playing at and what his dark ulterior motives are for this unthinkable behaviour, Mr X is abashed and embarrassed that he has generated so much interest and attention for simply doing his job. Mr X’s unassuming comment is “I just wanted to do the right thing for Mr J. And there are so many other people I also want to help! Sometimes it’s a bit overwhelming when I think about the ‘big picture’, but I keep doing what I can do, one day at a time. It would be wonderful if more people would also help, but even if nobody does, I’ll keep on!” Then Mr X politely asks the reporter not to step on the cabbages in his little front-step food garden, because they’re earmarked for tonight’s soup pot: the children in the houses next door are depending on something warm in their bellies before they go to sleep; he tells the reporter that he often hears the little ones praying “Dankie Here vir kos en klere” and he doesn’t mind providing these for them and letting them believe their God is taking care of them: religion is the opium of the masses, and as long as it keeps the kids away from the Tik dens he’s just glad they’re under the influence of the lesser of two evils.

Just Because I'm Losing, Doesn't Mean I'm Lost

Write a page for your portfolio, addressing the following questions, and any other questions you may have:

• In your community / parish / town / country who are the “lost”?
• What can be done for the “lost”?
• What is your association with them?

In my community the “lost” are any sisters who have spent many long, hard years working incredibly hard to do good work for others without also taking the necessary appropriate care of their own personal needs, and now find themselves in a place of burnout where they are experiencing “compassion fatigue” that impels them to withdraw from relationships within and outside of the community. While this withdrawal might seem on the surface to save them energy that they don’t feel they are able to give away anymore, it also isolates them and keeps them from receiving energy and love from others: so they are trapped in a downward spiral. What can be done for these “lost” ones is that members of the community can be sensitive to their predicament and continue to reach out to them and draw them into community activities, even when these attempts seem to be unwelcome. As a novice, I am probably a real challenge to anyone in this predicament… but I can try to be as gentle and as kind as possible, and hold the conscious intention of being a conduit of God’s love and energy for such a person when I am with them. Especially when they are cranky.

In my parish the “lost” are those youth and divorced people who would like to be active members of the church but don’t feel welcome because they aren’t shown understanding and compassion. The youth are intrinsically good and have a lot of potential to grow into people who do wonderful things in the community, but because they are exploring their identity and trying to find their place in the world they are often dismissed as being rowdy, difficult and unreliable. What can be done for the youth is that adults in the parish can recognise that these young people are at a normal stage of human development, adjust their expectations accordingly, and do whatever they can (especially by involving the youth in activities and ministries) to support and encourage the youth as they struggle out of their adolescent cocoons and metamorphose into the responsible adults that God is calling them to be. The divorced have experienced a great deal of suffering as a result of their marriage failing (particularly those whose spouses struggled with addictions or were physically or emotionally abusive towards their partner or the children), and it would help enormously if ‘good Catholics’ could be less judgemental of their brothers and sisters and at least try to be understanding of the dire situation someone would be in before they acknowledged that their marriage was irretrievably broken and go through the trauma of getting a divorce (and an annulment where possible). My association with the youth and the divorced in our parish is fairly low-key, but I do try to encourage them by engaging in casual conversation and by being an affirming presence that says “God knows you’re great, we’re glad you’re here”.

In my town the “lost” are the homeless people who have nowhere to call their own, no way of earning a decent living, and no prospects for a better future. What can be done for them … is a really good question! In theory, the government is supposed to be doing something. In practice there are a lot of people getting help with filling in paperwork for disability grants (many of the homeless have some disability – physical or mental – that prevents them from working), but I’m not sure what the success rate is, or how able someone might be to put such a grant to good use to improve their lot. My personal association is in making coffee and sandwiches for those who come to our convent door, and I try to be cheerful and friendly and honour their dignity by being respectful towards them – even when I have to explain that it’s not appropriate for them to sleep on our doorstep! I wish there was more I could do!

In my country the “lost” are the refugees from other countries, the AIDS infected, the victims of gender violence and discrimination, the children whose schools are ill-equipped to provide a good education and are badly administered which makes matters even worse, and the desperately in-debt super-consumers who gate themselves into high-walled security complexes in a bid to keep the bad guys out… only to find that the bad guys are within: hayi shame! [I could write a thesis…]

The Lord and the Labourers

Does the parable The Lord and the Labourers reveal what the reign of God is like, or does it disclose what the reign of God is not? You can decide!

Reflect on this question and write about one page of your reflections on your understanding of the parable and how it relates to God’s reign.

Until now, I had understood the parable of The Lord and the Labourers to be an exhortation to accept whomever God called to be his disciples, regardless of whether they had always been religious (the first labourers) or whether they had come to faith later on (the late arrivals). I had equated the ‘wage’ with the ‘reward’ of salvation. I’m not sure where I got this interpretation, but it suited me because I had experienced some sense of inadequacy in the knowledge that I was baptised later than most, and had spent a number of years ‘standing idle all day’ – so if God wanted to be generous and include me in his work of salvation, anyone who wanted to point a finger or lodge an objection against me was being very mean spirited indeed. God is allowed to be generous. Especially to me!

However, my recent studies have challenged my thinking.

Some basic values of the Kingdom of God [clearly articulated by Fr Albert Nolan OP in his Biblical Spirituality booklet/lecture notes (April 1982)] are:

• sharing (as opposed to the pursuit of money and wealth creation for purely personal enrichment);
• human dignity (as opposed to the pursuit of status and prestige);
• human solidarity (as opposed to ‘clique’ selfishness) and
• service (as opposed to using power and authority to dominate and oppress others).

From this perspective, if the lord of the vineyard represents God, then I believe he would express these Kingdom values in his actions, and he would have:

• been equally generous with all of the labourers, not just a few;
• respected all of the labourer’s dignity by honouring the appropriate rate of pay for work done, instead of devaluing their hard work by paying everyone the same regardless of what they had accomplished;
• been sensitive to the fact that paying all of the labourers the same money for different volumes of work would rightly cause dissention and disunity by unfairly creating groups of ‘privileged’ workers within the workforce; and
• avoided at all costs making his authority felt by pulling rank on the labourers and reminding them that he was the one in authority and could do whatever he pleased, and he definitely would not have suggested that if the labourers were unhappy about his authoritarian actions it must be because there was some flaw in their character or some lack in their spirituality.

Since the lord of the vineyard’s behaviour did not model kingdom values, I don’t think he can reasonably be said to represent God. I think the more acceptable interpretation is that he represents the land-owning elite of agrarian Palestine! The labourers were right to protest unjust treatment!

The parable raises a number of important issues:

• the landowner tells the labourers “I will give you what is just” – so what constitutes a just wage?
• in defence of his actions the landowner says to the complainants “My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?” – how ethical is it for an employer to hold a worker to an agreement that was made without the worker having access to information about the employer’s intended remuneration policy?
• the way the landowner handles the remuneration issue shifts the focus away from the work and onto the wage, which implies that the primary purpose of work is for the worker to earn a wage – but where is the understanding of work as vocation or ministry? And where is the employer’s responsibility to use his authority as an employer to serve his workforce by creating opportunities that challenge and assist the workers to become more skilled and proficient in their work?
• the worker-as-wage-earner paradigm also contributes to the realisation of a worldly ‘commodity economy’ instead of a ‘gift economy’ that corresponds with the values of the Kingdom of God.

Through A Glass Darkly

So, what do I think about the parables of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels?

While I have always enjoyed stories, my approach to working with scriptural texts has been primarily one of fact finding and reporting. On reflection I think that this is because my personal experience of religion has been strongly weighted towards ‘finding, believing and speaking the Truth’, and shying away from ‘making up stories’ or ‘telling stories’ (which was likened by my mother to being the furthest thing from telling the Truth, and punishable by eternal damnation… and even if I had the chutzpah/idiocy to try to argue against that reasoning when I was nine years old, I definitely didn’t have the facility to explain the subtle nuances that distinguish stories from lies or tattle tales).

Undertaking a study of the Parables has:

• clarified for me the value of using story as a means of telling the Truth;
• revealed myth, parable and allegory as three distinctly different types of story, each with its own intention and dynamics;
• explained parables as subversive stories that aim to expose injustices against vulnerable people by presenting a vision of life in the kingdom of God which challenges the hearer to metanoia and a new way of engaging with the world;
• given me clear factual information that helps me to better understand:
• the variety of parables (similitude, extended comparison, narrative parable),
• the format or ways in which parables are constructed (question, refusal, discourse),
• the themes of many of Jesus’ parables (farmer & fisherman, master/servant, king, householder),
• helped me to identify some of the risks involved in the interpretation of parables:
• where the evangelists may have reframed an original parable in order to address a specific situation, and over time the story has been developed and transmitted to the point where the original meaning is no longer clear or relevant;
• where some parables have been treated as allegories, which has affected the original message of the parables;
• where some action parables might have been reconstructed by the evangelists and aimed at a situation or need within a particular faith community, rather than at conveying historical content.
• made me aware that some of the parables (particularly in Luke’s Gospel) were presented in a context of conflict in order to help the reader understand the situation that the parable is addressing indirectly.

My study has also created a link in my mind between the valid use of story and the growth of interpersonal relationships. Conflict exists to some degree in all relationships, and the way in which this conflict is confronted and handled can be constructive or destructive to the relationship. The way that the parables of Jesus have been presented in Luke’s gospel as a response to situations of conflict, offers insight into a model for using story as a means of indirect confrontation in order to illuminate a point of view and in so doing open a meaningful dialogue in which all concerned parties are able to participate. Dialogue aims at reaching a new understanding that acknowledges and encompasses each person’s point of view, and in order to do this it must sincerely and continuously seek a response. This corresponds with the way that the parables are left deliberately open-ended in order to call forth a response from the hearer.

While it can be said that storytellers existed prior to theologians in the Christian tradition, I think that the storytellers were themselves theologians in that they were attempting through their stories to reveal the truth about the nature and character of God – which is the aim of theology. In addition, the storytellers were modelling dialogue as a priority of a God who is all about relationship.