Start with those laborers in the vineyard

Start with those laborers in the vineyard

Posted on March 15th, 2011 by Frank Wilson

My last column concluded with the notion of discovering islands of meaning in the sea of information we find ourselves adrift in these days. I have since been pondering this, and have come to realize that I didn’t really think the matter through.

There is, to begin with, a problem with the metaphor. We discover real islands in real seas because they are unmistakably there on the horizon. But islands of meaning in the sea of information are not as immediately and irrefutably evident as an island in the Pacific. The fact is, different people can derive different meanings from exactly the same information.

Actually, it’s even more complicated that that. “Words differently arranged have a different meaning,” Blaise Pascal wrote, “and meanings differently arranged have different effects.”

A good many meanings are hand-me-down affairs, passed on from generation to generation, and often unquestioned simply because of their longevity. This is something I often notice at Mass when Scripture is read. I wonder if people really pay attention to what a given passage says as opposed to what they have been taught it means.

Take, for instance, the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 20:1-16. It’s about a householder who goes out in the morning to hire laborers to harvest the grapes in his vineyard. The deal is that they will each be paid a penny for their labor. But the householder goes out four more times, and each time he hires more laborers. And the deal is always the same, the upshot being that everybody gets the same pay at the end of the day. Of course, those who worked all day are a little peeved. But the householder tells them a deal’s a deal and he can do with his money as he pleases. And this, Jesus says, is what the kingdom of heaven is like.

This seems to me to be as perplexing as any Zen koan and I suspect that, like a koan, it is not meant to be translated into a moral platitude suitable for needlepoint. It is, rather, designed to shock us into a realization that God’s ways really are different from ours.

There seems always to have been a tendency to take religious insights and reduce them to formulas in order to arrive at some foolproof, step-by-step program of salvation. It’s that old craving for certainty. But, as Erich Fromm observed, “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.” Belief is ersatz certainty. As Alan Watts put it, it is “clinging to a rock; faith is learning how to swim.”

Jesus reduced the entire corpus of the law to loving God with your whole heart and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. That apparently is too simple to be grasped, hence the myriad rules and regulations.

But think of it: The notion underlying all of it — underlying as well that parable of the workers in the vineyard — is the concept of grace, that God was not obliged to create us, and that his doing so is a pure gift done out of love.

We hear a good deal about love. In particular we hear about how important it is to learn how to love. But it may be just as important, especially in this case, to learn how to be loved.

We also hear a lot about creation, usually in reference to something that happened a few billion years ago that got the whole universal shebang going. But focusing on that is to miss the point. Something sure took place a long, long time ago, but the point is that it’s still going on. I am being created by God right now even as I type these words. Not because I deserve to be, but because God chooses to do so — out of love, of all things. And what is true for me is true for everyone else and everything else.

Not everyone thinks this is so. Richard Dawkins famously doesn’t. But I reviewed Dawkins’s The God Delusion and he doesn’t consider any of this. He has a dim schoolboy’s notion of deity and labors mightily to refute it, more mightily than necessary, since the notion he has is utterly banal.

Unfortunately, many who claim to be religious never seem to think very deeply about what that claim entails. Oddly, they may have to abandon what they think it all means, or what they have been told it means, and go back and look at what has actually been said on the subject and figure it all out for themselves.

They could do worse than start with those laborers in the vineyard.