A Subversive Narrative

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "A Subversive Narrative"

Daniella Shanon Rice
5 years ago
Views:

1 The Bishop s Conference on the Common Good 7 th March 2015 A Subversive Narrative Suspicion Why is it that whenever we read of absentee landlords or the owners of great landed estates in New Testament parables we automatically equate these characters with God? By any ordinary standards their behaviour is at the very least morally dubious and often downright brutal and inhuman. Yet we persist in finding a way to twist the stories to find a nice and comforting message. So the union busting vineyard owner in Matthew 20 stands for the God who loves equally those who have served him a long time and those lately come to his embrace. And the marauding venture capitalist of the Parable of the Talents, who actually boasts of being a successful thief, becomes the God who generously appreciates the paltry service we offer him. Now God does love his children extravagantly and without condition. And God is delighted at our faltering attempts to love him in return and I for one am exceedingly glad of it! But is that really what these parables are about? Can these figures who sit at the top of a highly stratified and unjust social structure really be images of God? Do we want a God who is simply a celestial fat-cat? The Hebrew Bible It seems to me that to suggest these characters as models for God flies in the face of the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures. The founding story of Israel is the Exodus when God liberates his people from slavery. The slaves who escape from Egypt link with slaves who have escaped from Canaanite cities and together with other itinerant groups they head to the mountains of Judea where they set up their society. This new society is deliberately not like the ones they escaped. It is non-hierarchical. There are no kings and it is decentralized and self-governing. There is a very nice discussion in Gottwald of the importance of the discovery of lime plaster allowing these people to make water cisterns and so live in the mountains where they were safe from Canaanite chariots. The point is that this is an alternative community which aspires to an egalitarian way of life in which 1

2 each person is valued and protected. They aspire to this because they understand God to be offended by slavery, which is the mortgaging of people s futures and therefore idolatrous. All this is summed up in the Covenant which God makes with the people through Moses. The Hebrew Bible then charts how the people of Israel struggle to live up to their vocation as the people of God. The establishment of the monarchy in response to internal corruption and an external armed threat is a moment of great trauma in this story. The people are warned by the prophet Samuel that they betray God and that they will pay dearly for their kings who will reduce them to slavery. But the people are frightened and when people are frightened they will give up their freedoms. Plus ҫa change! And Samuel is proved right. David s incorporation of Jebusite religion into Israel is about the introduction of hierarchy and the legitimation of inequalities of power and wealth. Solomon may have been deemed wise by the scribes and chroniclers but even they cannot remove the texts which condemn him as a despot who is parasitic on the life and resources of the north. And so it goes on. There is a continuing struggle between the monarchy and the prophets who time and again call the rulers of the people back to the Mosaic Covenant. And this prophetic line leads on into the New Testament. The New Testament Luke is adamant that Jesus the Christ is born of a migrant family forced to leave home to find work. The so-called genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter 1 is nothing of the sort. It points out how the kings and notables of Israel strayed from the Covenant. The women in the list are included because they held these notables to account precisely because they didn t live up to their Covenant obligations. The birth of Jesus from Mary is then described as a new genesis. The point of the story is to announce Jesus as the prophetic renewer of Israel. And we could go on. But I think it s clear that the Scriptures do not present God as in cahoots with potentates and the beautiful people. There is a continuing movement to the edge and that is where God is found amongst the ordinary and the put upon. 2

3 A Subversive Narrative This suggests then that the landowners and wealthy people of the parables are not to be read as models of God. It suggests, too, that we read them this way because we have allowed scriptural interpretation to be dominated by a particular cultural and ideological agenda. This agenda strips the stories of their political and economic meaning and reduces them to pious morality tales. It s an agenda which protects the status quo and guarantees the Church a place at the far end of the High Table. But the narrative of Scripture is a subversive narrative. And if we hand back the stories to those to whom they first belong, the marginal and the poor, then we begin to see that subversive narrative emerge. And when it emerges then we glimpse a new vision of God and begin to understand what it means to be the people of God now. The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard Perhaps an example might demonstrate how this might work. We ll look at the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard in Matthew 20. You know the story a wealthy vineyard owner takes unemployed men from the market-place to gather the harvest and pays them all the same amount at the day s end no matter how long they worked. I guess many of you will have heard of The Pen. This was the system by which Liverpool dockworkers were employed until the mid 20 th century. Each day the dockers went to the docks and stood in animal pens hoping they would be picked for a day s work. The workers had no security of employment and were hired on a daily basis as casual labour. This meant their lives were precarious and they had few opportunities to plan for their families security. A day without work could mean the difference between eating or going hungry, between paying the rent or facing eviction. It was a brutal and dehumanizing process that was only ended with the arrival of the National Dock Labour Scheme and other protections for workers. The dispute of the mid 1990s was about the removal of those protections something we are all familiar with now. In Jesus parable there are a group of men waiting in the market place. A vineyard owner regards them as idle but the Greek word (argos) is better translated as 3

4 unprofitable. These men are looking for work because of changes in how land is viewed in Israel. Traditionally the land was seen as belonging to God and on loan to his people. It couldn t be sold in perpetuity but was subject to laws preventing the amassing of land in the hands of a few. The rise of the monarchy weakened these strictures and there is plenty of evidence of outrage from the prophets at this transfer of wealth. The picture changes completely by the time of the Roman occupation. The Roman view of land was that it was a commodity and could be bought and sold like any other. So it was. When the people of the land got into debt because of regressive taxation and tithing policies the wealthy foreclosed on the debts and took the land to add to their estates. Those who had worked the land were now reduced to hiring themselves out as day labourers and that was not a career with a long future. It would, then, be a common sight in Jesus s time to see these men in the market-place desperate for hire. The vineyard owner then comes to the market-place to hire workers to gather the harvest. In reality it would be the manager who did the hiring but I think Jesus wants to make the point that the misery inflicted on ordinary people at this time is the responsibility of the elite groups in the nation. The owner is called the lord of the house (oikodespotēs) which is linked to the name Beelzebul, the prince of demons, and gives us a textual clue that we are not to root for this character. The very fact that he owns the vineyard suggests he does not live by the law of God. He has profited from the suffering of his neighbours and is so wealthy he can afford to grow a luxury crop like grapes. The choice of a vineyard for this parable is no accident. The vineyard is symbolic of Israel protected and nurtured by God. The vineyard is God s. However, this man, who represents the ruling groups in Jerusalem, assumes ownership of the actual land and the symbolic vineyard. He has usurped God s position. Then there is the landowner s supposed generosity. A denarius a day was not a generous wage. It was the minimum prescribed by law that could be paid to a worker. It was reckoned as the minimum necessary to keep a man and his family fed for one day. It offered the worker no security and meant he was dependent on the landowner. It offered the landowner a ready pool of labour as and when he wanted it. It was the minimum of minimum wages. So when he calls the workers together and 4

5 pays one denarius to those who have worked for one hour he is not being generous. He is bound to give them that much. When he then pays those who have worked 12 hours in the sun the same amount he is not breaking any law but he is being deliberately unfair and provocative. He demonstrates who is in control, who makes the decisions. The workers naturally respond to this injustice and the landowner s trap is sprung. He has separated the workers from one another so that instead of resisting the structures of injustice they compete against each other. His strategy is one of divide and rule. He then singles out the worker s spokesman and makes it clear there is nothing he can do to change what has just happened. The law is on the side of the wealthy man. He tells the workers he can do what he likes with what belongs to him which is the land he has taken from them and from God. Why be envious because I am generous is the 1 st century equivalent of that brutal and murderous myth, the politics of envy. The spokesman is cast out with what belongs to him which is nothing - or one denarius. The vineyard owner has put on a little bit of theatre designed to reinforce the sense of helplessness of the workers. The spokesman will not work again and he and his family will starve. The workers cannot risk that fate so they keep their heads down. They will not protest. It has been made clear to them that this is the way things are and this is the way they will stay. Demystifying the Paralyzing Untruths of Power And this brings us to the reason that Jesus tells this story. The parable is not an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. It is an earthy story which cuts through myths and lies and lays bare the brute reality of peasant life in 1 st century Palestine. Jesus s point is that the injustice which corrupts the nation and consumes the lives of the poor is the fault of those in authority. Despite what they say they are neither good nor do they prosper by the will of God. Jesus s parable, then, is designed to break the paralysis induced in ordinary people when they are faced with the untruths of powerful elites. This is the way the world is, 5

6 says Jesus, but it is only this way because those who govern you are godless and corrupt. This is not what God wants. There is an alternative, the Kingdom of God. The narrative of Scripture, then, is a subversive narrative. The Practice of Hope This subversive narrative does not allow us to hide from the truth. It exposes what is real and always begins with the victims in order to question our society s assertions that we are good and just. However, it is never simply about pointing out what is wrong. It is not about complaint and whingeing but is a practice of hope. When we let this narrative expose what denies the human and limits mutuality and interdependence then it nurtures within us an alternative consciousness. And this alternative consciousness is one that anticipates that God may do something new, something that simply had not occurred to us, something maybe without precedent. This is about believing in a Transcendent God who is not tied to or limited by human projects. It is about freedom from the cynical philosophy of despair which insists things can t change, that it is naïve or unrealistic to assume we can do anything. This is about believing in the God who is the liberator. It is about the salvation God wants for all his children. Peter Winn 7 th March

I have to be honest. When I hear this parable of the laborers in the vineyard, I identify with the first group, those who worked all day long in the

I have to be honest. When I hear this parable of the laborers in the vineyard, I identify with the first group, those who worked all day long in the vineyard. And I think that is what Jesus means to happen.