Not fair (by Danielle Beabout)

When my brother and I were very little, our Mama would always make a point to give me a present on my brother’s birthday, and my brother a present on my birthday. Now, this isn’t a riddle — my brother and I aren’t secretly twins — we both got our own birthday celebrations and presents on our own actual birthdays. In my adult life it’s clear to me Mama was trying to stop any childhood tantrums or sibling rivalry or envy from developing between my brother and I. She didn’t want either of us to ruin the other’s birthday with a childish cry of, “it’s not faaaaaaair!”

This kind of thing seems a bit silly to us, now, with our adult understandings of the complexities of justice. But there’s something honest in that child like complaint, isn’t there? Something that we all still feel from time to time, in situations that range from very small — they got through the green light and I didn’t, that’s not fair! — to very large — we have food we waste while other people go hungry, it’s not fair! I’d hazard a guess that gut punch, not- fair feeling is still an important base line for the rest of where our individual and collective sense of justice comes from.

So, then, what instinctual reaction do we feel in response to this parable we hear from Jesus today?

There is part of us, that can understand why those who had worked all day are a bit grumbly about the wages they received in comparison to the wages those who only worked part of the day received. Especially with the work culture in our country — we’re used to the idea of an hourly wage, so we may be imposing that expectations backwards, which almost gives the grumbling laborers here even more of a point than they may have originally had. But, the resolution for this sits right there in the story: everyone still made a day’s wage. The landowner had honored every agreement made that day and, thus, had done wrong to no one. It was merely those who had worked the full day who had on one hand, somewhat expected more than they had agreed to, who end up resentful at the end. The landowner, surely somehwat taken aback, sends them away, still with their full days wage.

If that from childhood its not fair response in us is an important part of how our sense of fairness for life develops, why do moments like this parable bother us? Why, sometimes, does part of us clench when we see someone receive generosity that we don’t, even when we’re not being harmed? I will point out, too, this is not just a modern-day instinct. We can see it at several other points in our Scriptures, as well — the first, most obvious being way back between Cain and Abel. We see it in the earlier parable, the Prodigal Son, again between two brothers. Why should one get the favor of God, and not the other? Why should the runaway be welcomed home when the other never left? Why should the laborers who haven’t done a full day’s work, get a full day’s pay?

When something likw this makes us uncomfortable, I think it’s important for us to sit with it and be patient with ourselves. We shouldn’t react based on it, but we shouldn’t judge it, either. It is simply a real thing that we are experiencing that we don’t understand — and so we try to make it go away as soon as possible, which never actually works.

It’s in sitting with this question of fairness and the ways that it made me uncomfortable, that I had a bit of a realization. Fairness is a useful base line for us, especially in childhood, because it sets up interactions and expectations in a way that imitates how certain parts of the world work in a reliable and easy to understand way. If, as a child, you’re rolling a ball along the floor with another kid, they roll it back. That is how you play. You know if you push on the ball, it’ll move; that is the reality of how physics works. The additional expectation, then, that the other child will push the ball back to us, is where the relation between something concrete, like physics, and something situationally subjective, like fairness, has the potential to break down. When there are things beyond our immediate context, knowing, and framing, if we judge too quickly, we could be declaring injustice when really our companion — just another child — only got distracted by a sound from the kitchen.

Now, though this is true, this is not to say this intuitive sense of fairness is never useful. Far from it. Rather, in examining and understanding the limitations, I’ve come to think of it like this — fairness truly is like the ground we walk on. When we see something unfair happening that means someone is being taken advantage of or abused, or part of their personhood is being denied, or whole groups of people harmed — it is good and right for us to make a fuss. When cruelty takes someone below the baseline of living, when we see others beginning to sink below the ground of fairness, it serves us well in order to correct that situation by enabling us to see something’s wrong in the first place.

Fairness makes for fine, sturdy ground. What it shouldn’t be, however, is a ceiling — for God has given us the sky. That is where our parable lands us today. When fairness becomes our default for not only the basis for how we ought to treat others, but as the limit of how much good we think others ought to receive, that is where our fairness fails. When we take the idea of deserving things beyond where they ought to be applied — beyond the only mechanical, transactional parts of life — we can harm ourselves and one another.

We can forget that, in reality, not one of us has ever done anything to deserve being born. Nothing in creation simply popped into being because it seemed fair. Everything we have, everything we are, every blade of grass, every moment in the sun, every breath and cry and laugh — it all comes from that which is beyond fairness alone, because it is alive, and therefore has a part of living. It comes from grace. From compassion. From love. From the very nature of who God is.

I lived an example of this, just as I was wondering how to show this truth I’m trying to share. You all have heard before of my attempts at gardening. I would say this year is the best I’ve ever done in regards to maintaining a daily ritual of actually caring for my plants, and helping them flourish… that is, until that awful, awful heat wave that seemed to last almost all of August and into part of September.

I was a bad gardener. I failed to water my plants for several days, in this astounding heat, if not for an entire week or more. The more days in a row I forgot or put it off until later, the worse I felt, so the more I avoided it. But this Saturday, I had to go outside to help my brother with our A/C unit; since I was outside anyways, I decided to face the music and see how bad things had gotten.

To my surprise — once I’d pruned back the dried out branches of the blackberry bush, gotten my strawberry plant almost to its root — I found that there was still green in those plants. Still new, small, itty bitty growth near the roots; still strong stalks where leaves reached high, and new things could still grow.

And I thought, oh, there it is! By the nature of being a living thing in God’s creation, there’s grace here — for me and for my poor plants. It would have been very fair if my lack of responsibility and action had left me once again with nothing green to tend to. If all that there was to life was the dry, uncaring reality of harsh, direct, immediate cause and effect. It would make sense!

But there is more to life. There is space, time, wideness, opportunities to get it wrong and try again. Not only that, sometimes there’s even more life and grace than we were expecting, when we most need it.

After I cleaned up my berry bushes, I decided to check the roots of my now-withered looking potato plant. I didn’t have much hope, but, lo and behold — [hold up potatoes] — like a laborer being given a full days wages in but a few hours!

God blessed me with not just hope for new growth in the plants I pruned; God gave me actual, factual growth and sustenance. God gave me proof that life’s ability to still hold joy, meaning, and hope was not dependent upon whether or not that was fair.

This ultimate reality — that all of life is a manifestation of God’s grace — is what we can easily forget when we’re not the ones on the immediate receiving end of it, and why reflecting in those moments of flinching inward, why them, but not me? It’s not fair! Can be important. Because the truth is — God has enough to be generous to everyone; we see it everyday. We take it for granted. We see God fulfill someone else’s needs and shake our heads, even when our bellies are already full, our homes already safe; we look back and judge the Israelites in the desert for complaining, when really, they were just in need. They were just afraid. They were just hungry. The Creator of the Universe meets their complaining and needs with a miracle — but one that requires trust. This trust is what we forget. We can internalize God being good to someone else as a judgement against us; as a forgetting; as some kind of not-enough ness that we secretly believe God sees in us.

But when we do trust that God’s abundant life, love, and grace, is ever around us — we can celebrate. We can leave with our wages and take comfort in the fact that God, in all of God’s creative living abundance, has ways rooted in love and mercy that are above our ways. That when we are in need, God will be the same to us as God always is.

And maybe the next time we get that too-good-for-them-but-not-for-me gut feeling, we can just relax a bit, and havegrown enough to realize: this time, it’s just not our birthday.