“WHAT IS FAIR?”

           

What is our place in God’s world? Synod is looming with some thorny issues and difficult decisions. Social Justice Sunday is upon us. The challenge of ethical choices within a world not known for fairness stalks us relentlessly.

The recent re-telling of the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1-16) brought back to my mind an historical event in Australia just over a century ago. High Court Justice Henry Bournes Higgins (1851-1929) brought down a judgement establishing the basic wage as a fair and reasonable return for work done that enabled a family of five to survive. A son of a Methodist minister, he would have heard his father preach on this parable and I would like to think that it remained in the back of his mind when he considered his judgement.

The story also reminded me of today’s employment difficulties for the young with little work experience, for the older workers past their peak, income discrimination based on gender, and for those with disabilities, whether from birth or acquired, who are unable to compete in the labour market.

Whatever is trumpeted about the market, we cannot say that is fair. Both business and politics are practised in a “hard ball” way with no quarter given to any vulnerability. This parable still embarrasses those of us who, consciously or unconsciously, evaluate human life and dignity according to economic worth.

Jesus, as usual, turns such thinking on its head. God wants us, so Matthew’s gospel tells us, to look at people regarding their needs rather than their worth. It becomes a decision made not just about “bottom line” figures but involving moral and ethical choices which cannot and must not be evaded.

We use the word “grace” for a number of things. I had a great-aunt and now a great-half-niece both named Grace. We say grace before meals. The grace features in the Benediction. Grace is God providing space for us to breathe in a world that attempts to confine us within the straightjackets of our human invention.

Every one of us breathing depends upon the unpredictable grace of those stronger than us. The market has no grace. That alone comes from God as expressed through Jesus Christ. Those around us can only know grace when it is can be demonstrated and thus recognised. Thus the least deserving labourer in the vineyard experienced the evaluation of his need rather than what his labour was worth. We have the opportunity to act like the householder in the parable rather than like the earliest labourers and thus show grace is still possible.