Understanding God’s Ways
Eric Hollas, OSB
Sermon delivered to members of Order of Malta
Mundelein, IL
21 September 2014
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 55:8)
These word from the prophet Isaiah pretty well sum up our understanding of God. God’s difficult to fathom, and all of us have had moments when we’ve questioned the wisdom of God’s plan for us. “What in the world is God trying to do to me?” That’s a question we all ask, sooner or later.
But before we conclude that God is arbitrary and unpredictable, let’s consider some experience that is common to us all. Not all of us have been parents, but I assume we’ve all been privileged to watch as kids have screamed to their parents that they are unfair and don’t understand. On the other hand, all of us have colleagues who’ve wondered what in the heck we’re trying to do, because we’ve not made sense to them. All of us have wondered about the wisdom of a friend or a spouse who’s done something that we just have to question. In short, God may be enigmatic and hard to understand, but God’s got no monopoly on this sort of thing.
During our conferences in the past two days we’ve had a chance to meditate on the Beatitudes, and we’ve seen the strange logic that pervades the teaching of Jesus. I call it strange because it’s unfamiliar, but it’s definitely not irrational. Quite the contrary, it’s entirely reasonable; but it’s a view of life that people find difficult to grasp, at least at first. The Beatitudes and the parables of Jesus can seem like nonsense, and that’s what Jesus deliberately does to catch our attention. Like the apostles, we find them hard to figure out and ask what they might mean. But once we ask, Jesus has us hooked. And if we’re lucky, Jesus has us hooked for a lifetime.
Today’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew is a prime example of how Jesus grabs our attention and holds on. He tells the story of an employer who pays everyone the same wage — whether they’ve worked all day or just a part of it. By any human standard, this is grossly unfair. Everyone believes that those who work harder and longer deserve more. But Jesus here seems to condone a practice that offends every shred of justice that we hold dear. And to make matters worse, he manages to turn generosity — something we value — into an act of injustice.
Before we dismiss Jesus as grossly unfair, consider this. Jesus agrees with us. Of course this is grossly unfair, and Jesus knows it. Of course there is a miscarriage of equity here. Of course the first workers should feel outraged. Who wouldn’t be upset about this, save for the workers who came late? And of course Jesus knows that this offends his listeners, and he means it to. But he’s not trying to upend our ethical sensibilities, because he wants us to have a glimpse of a much bigger picture.
As I mulled over this passage, it dawned on me that Jesus is trying to do at least two things here. First, he offends our sense of justice, but then he reminds us that deep down we all know that if this case is unfair, much of life is unfair. If at first we are appalled that Jesus seems to condone such arbitrary treatment by an employer, we also have to admit that we do the moral equivalent to each other all the time. For good and for ill, people don’t get what they deserve, and they haven’t for ages. For better and for worse the wicked have prospered and the good have suffereed, and that’s gone on for thousands of years. For just as long a time the powerful have trampled the weak in countless wars; and for an equally long time the well-fed have walked on by while some have starved and died in the streets. Very gently, then, Jesus sets us all up. If we’re outraged by the vineyard owner who defies the laws of justice, then that’s a good start. Perhaps then we can be more sensitive toward the neighbors whom we see every day.
In this parable Jesus reminds us that life is unfair, and perhaps it will always be so. But there’s another issue in this story that we need to consider, and that is the business of God’s generosity. Jesus at first defines generosity in terms of the landowner’s money. But there’s something far greater at stake here, and it’s God’s openness to all who come forward. And this gets to the heart of why God’s ways don’t always line up neatly with our expectations. Here Jesus aludes to love and generosity and respect. He assumes a whole range of intangibles that are impossible to measure, but these are the qualities that make life both possible and worth living.
I tried to conjure up a good example from human behavior of what Jesus might have meant by all this, and the best I could come up with is the family with more than one child. Should parents love their first-born more than the last-born? Would we be morally outraged to see parents love all their children equally, even the youngest? That, I think, hints at the dilemma to which Jesus points. The fact is, generosity by its very nature is a gift, and it is completely undeserved and a always a surprise.
Or to take another example, what about people who have been faithful and religious for a life-time, versus the ne’er-do-well who approaches the baptismal font after a conversion experience. Should the first be outraged that God loves such people equally? If they are upset, perhaps they need just a few more walks with God to sort things out. Perhaps then they might better understand how the Lord’s ways may seem just a bit different from our own.
When the Lord says that his ways are not our ways, I think that’s something we can all agree on. But just because God’s hard to understand, it doesn’t mean we have to give up. We can still walk the same paths with God that Adam and Eve took in the Book of Genesis. All it requires is a little bit of curiosity on our part. All we need do is take the fist step and continue to follow in step with God. Who knows where God might ultimately lead us? Who knows what we’ll find as we walk the rows of the vineyard of the Lord? But we’ll never know unless we start that walk. But be assured that if we do so, the Lord will walk with us. That’s just one of God’s gifts to us.
[The stained glass windows in this page are to be found in the Church of Saint Severin in Paris.]
