The Subversive Parables
Session 2
Blaming the Victim

Matthew 20:1-16

This parable appears only in Matthew.

If the traditional understanding of parables as allegory or metaphor is applied to this parable then you get something like this:

Typically the laborers are held up as being those who prefer security over grace, as well as being ungrateful clods. That was certainly the way I have heard this parable explained but William Herzog in his book “Parables as Subversive Speech” encourages us to think deeper. His assertion is that parables tend to portray common scenes in everyday life. This story would have sounded familiar to the original listeners. They knew how the process for hiring day-laborers went. It also encodes some class signals. The owner of the vineyard by virtue of his position as a producer of a marketable product – wine – was a member of the elite. We also know the owner of the vineyard had a manager so this was not a small operation because it had other levels of employees. With those few details we get a picture of a story dealing with a very wealthy man and day-laborers hired to harvest a crop.

Keep in mind those day-laborers had no bargaining power in this arrangement. There were no unions, no minimum wage, no health plans. You showed up at a certain square in the village and the elite would send a servant to select workers for the day. Notice the owner in the parable promises only the first set of workers a denarius. After that the workers are offered a job and will be given “what is right”. The workers offer no protest because they are not in a position to challenge. A denarius is enough of a wage to keep a peasant family in a subsistence standard. Somewhere along the way we have romanticized the value of the denarius as a fair wage. It was not an adequate wage. It was a subsistence wage. Plus it was common in Roman society to hire workers for only one day at a time because this kept the work force dependent on the elite for their survival. There could be no planning, no putting money aside for a rainy day, nothing for the kids’ college fund. It was day-to-day survival, at the mercy of whether the elite would offer work each day.

What is interesting to note is that in some ways day laborers were in a worse situation that slaves. Slaves had value for the owners and so there was some care given to their survival. Day laborers were a part of the class in advanced agrarian society known as the “expendables.” This class of people was constantly being diminished by the effects of poverty, malnutrition and disease. The life expectancy for a person who entered the expendable class was short – five to seven years. At the same time, their ranks were constantly replenished from the classes right above them – the peasants, the artisans, the unclean and the degraded. The expendables in any advanced agrarian society are largely the children of peasant households – children forced out of homes that can no longer afford to feed everyone on a denarius.

So read in a subversive way, this parable describes an exploitive landowner who enjoys a labor market larger than available jobs, so he offers a subsistence wage to the first-hired workers, before abandoning any pretense of negotiation with the rest of the workers sent to the vineyard. Then, at the end of the day the owner intentionally orders the manager to pay the workers in reverse order – to pay the last hired first.

Only now do the workers complain. Why? Because they have been shamed. By paying the last hired the amount promised to those hired early in the day, it has the effect of saying that their full day of working in the scorching sun was valued no more than the worker who worked one hour.

All these laborers have to offer is their work. For the owner in the parable to negate that and for the workers to simply accept this negation without protest means that they would have nothing left. Part of the social system of this time was that this arrangement benefited the elite. Part of their system for keeping the poor in their place was to use degradation and shame to prop up this benefit for the elite.

Now, what makes this parable subversive is that in first century Palestine a vineyard owner would never be part of the actual payout of wages. That was what the managers were for. Owners had employees and servants who did this job. The parable specifically places the owner and the workers in close enough proximity to actually have the conversation where the degraded laborer protests the wage received for a full day’s work. But notice what happens next in the parable. After the owner has shamed the workers by removing the value of their labor, then the owner denies the charge and picks out one of them to make an example. He says to one, “Friend (the word used is not a friendly term but a condescending and subtly reinforcing term indicating the differences in social class). The word used is “hetaire”. A social equal would use “phile” to call someone “friend.” The spokesperson is shamed and blackballed with the weight of the offense placed back on the worker. The powerless gets blamed for the offense. “I choose to give to the last the same as I give to you.” Now, there is no pretense of paying them for work done. It is all charity by the owner which robs the laborers of any sense of honor.

Here is how this parable would have been subversive in its original context. Most of the peasants who heard this parable would have agreed with the landowners remarks. Such is the way that all of us internalize the oppressor’s world.

This parable brings together the extremes of this agrarian society – the elite and the expendable. The meeting is arranged at one of the few moments in the economic cycle in which the elite were dependant on the lowest of workers. The harvest would not happen without these workers. The owner would not make any money without these workers. So to prevent the expendables from having any power in the situation, the owner divides them against themselves, choosing one to make an example of as a way to intimidate the rest. In his final speech, the owner completely smothers the fact that he is dependant on the laborers and that they had a powerful position in this relationship – but only if they stood together. If they are divided, they fall one by one before the withering hostility and judgment of the elite.

So maybe we need to read the introduction to the parable more sarcastically or with irony: The reign of God is like this… more of the same? Rather this parable is holding up the oppressive system of their day to the light of scrutiny and finding it lacking, even if nobody is complaining that should be complaining. Everyone, including the peasants and the expendables, has bought into the system that continues to keep the oppressed in poverty and the rich wealthy at the expense of the laborer. Those were never the values God wanted for them and so this subversive parable challenged their assumptions in a profound way.

Perhaps we can hear with new ears what the word from God is speaking to us and apply this understanding of the parable to give us permission to question our assumptions about the systems under which we live. How do we buy into our own oppression? How do we participate in perpetuating our own intimidation? How do we let the powerful separate us from each other and allow one brave enough to complain to become the scapegoat? The word from God subversively gives us another option in this parable.

Next Wednesday we will look at Matthew 18:23-35, commonly called the parable of the unmerciful servant. Read it this week and try to imagine what subversive meaning might be hidden within the story.

 

Sources:
Herzog, William R. II. “Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed.” (Westminster/John Knox Press: Louisville) 1994.
www.homileticsonline.com Kinko Church, September 2002.

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