Simon’s Reflection for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost
An American entrepreneur called Dan Price built up a very successful company with his brother. Over the years he became very concerned about how the poorer members of his work-force would make ends meet. He was a more considerate employer than some but there were still big disparities of income in his work-force.
In 2015, he made an extraordinarily bold move. He had been deeply influenced by the struggles of some of his poorer employees and also by a piece of research by a Princeton Team which argued that core emotional well-being rises with income but only to a point; a point they defined as around $75,000 per year.
The average pay of Gravity employees was around $48,000 per year. Dan Price announced that he would increase the wages of his employees to at least $70,000 per year no matter what their work was. He cut his own salary from around $2 million per annum to $70,000 per annum to pay for it. He also ate into company profits to help finance the pay increases.
The move was life-changing for some and deeply controversial for others. He was sued by his brother and a couple of long-standing employees left the firm. I wonder how you would have felt about it if you had been one of his employees. How would you have felt if you had been among the lower-paid? How would you have felt if you had been among the higher paid? While some lauded the move, others thought it unfair. Critics are looking at his firm and hoping it will go under but during the Covid crisis, over 90% of his employees offered to take substantial pay cuts so that he didn’t have to lay people off.
The story illustrates a different way of thinking to the norm. Actually, it is rather like, the attitude of the great Quaker families to their employees in the nineteenth century and perhaps has resonances for us this year when we think about the ways in which some of the poorest paid workers in our society proved to be among the most essential to us during the lockdown.
I think it’s a helpful way into today’s parable, not that Jesus is talking primarily here about economic justice, though Jesus does talk about that, but Jesus’ parable challenges the way we normally think about things with the way that things are in God’s kingdom. Although the parable seems to be about wages, it is really about grace.
What we wrestle with, is the sense that the employer has cheated the workers that he hired first and who work for him through the long day and at the end are paid the same amount that he pays the people he hired at the eleventh hour. This is understandable and the grievance is voiced in the parable and in one sense of fairness, this seems unfair.
Yet, the wage they are paid is not unfair. It is only the comparison that makes them feel cheated. It seems that this employer is giving everyone what they need to put food on the table at the end of the day for their family rather than giving extra benefits to those who have worked the longest. At least those who were hired first had the security of knowing they would be paid. Those hanging around at the market-place had the worry through the day of where the next meal was coming from.
For me, the key sentence in understanding the parable is when the employer says “are you envious because I am generous?” Last week, we thought about how it should help us to be more forgiving if we concentrate on the forgiveness that we receive from God rather than the wrong that an individual has done to us. Here, we are perhaps being asked to be grateful for the good things God has done for us, rather than being envious of the good things God has done for others.
Envy of God’s goodness to others is Jonah’s problem too. If I preached a sermon that converted 120,000 people and brought them to repentance, I think I would be celebrating rather than going into a huge sulk! Jonah of course, doesn’t think the people of Nineveh deserve God’s goodness, though it would be hardly fair for God to destroy them without giving them the chance to repent. Jonah seems to forget the mercy he has received too. God forgave him for refusing to do his bidding. He cares for Jonah despite Jonah’s rejection of his ways.
None of us really earns our way into God’s Kingdom. We receive God’s love and his mercy rather than earning a reward from him for the good works we have done. There is an onus upon us to join in with what God is doing but once we do, we should know that we receive from him far more than we give. Yet, I think we still struggle with grace and living with God’s generosity and we still think of the kingdom as something we have to earn rather than receive.
Thankfully, God is so much more generous than we give Him credit for. Amen.
