That's Not Fair!!!!

Kid's know all about "That's Not Fair!!!" Adults do too, because we were kids once.  At a very early age children just naturally know when they are being short changed of what ever it is they want. Just imagine the child who got one scoop of ice cream while the other kids got two... or got stuck with strawberry because all of the chocolate chip ice cream was gone. "That's not fair!"

Jesus often uses children as examples of how we are to live as disciples working for the Kingdom of God. "It is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs." It's a great analogy because children are completely dependent on their parents or other adults. Their simple and absolute faith is to be admired and is an excellent example of how we are to dwell in Christ. Children are not the best example of faith, however, when we start thinking about their natural, in bred, "That's not fair" radar.

While Jesus often compares the Kingdom of God to children, he uses many other parables and analogies to make the picture for us even richer and clearer.  Faith in the kingdom is not simply like being a child.  In Matthew 20 Jesus throws a wrench in our sweet, comfortable picture of life in the kingdom by telling us a story that flat out offends our American sensibilities. The kingdom is also like workers working in a vineyard, for various amounts of time, but all getting the same amount of pay when the day was over. They all earned the fair wage for working a full day, even those who only worked an hour.  I don't even need to type our gut reaction to that, do I? Just look at the picture of the kid.

In so many ways the story is just not fair.  Stop right now and read it. Here's a link to the text in Bible Gateway. Read it in a couple versions. I bet you can read it ten times and still look a whole lot like the kid in the picture.

So is Jesus just wrong here?  Is there some stretch of an interpretation we can make of this text that will satisfy our fairness radar? Some have made the point that those seeking work would have been hanging around without work because of their great shame and their suffering and not because of laziness.  Does that now make it fair? Maybe it should open our eyes to another reality.

God so loved the world that he sent his only son. He loves us all. Everyone of us: the righteous and the unrighteous; the insiders and the outsiders; the deserving and the undeserving. We simply are not equipped to know what our neighbor, our friend, our colleague, or our enemy has been through. We are in no position to judge. What we learn in Christ is that when he does judge, he chooses to be "generous."  

I like the way Thomas a Kempis puts it in The Imitation of Christ. "In judging others a person works to no purpose, often makes mistakes, and easily does the wrong thing, but in judging and analyzing ourselves, we always work to our own advantage." The workers who worked all day fall into this trap as does the child with only one scoop of strawberry ice cream. They do not know the truth underneath. Instead they simply are blinded by their passionate cry: That's not fair!

God wants our heart and gave us Jesus to show us the way. Our calling is to love and that is hard to do. You don't just wake up one day and decide to turn off the fairness radar. It takes a life lived in Christ daily to get to the point where you can sincerely desire others to receive what you have.

Thomas a Kempis puts it this way: "If you lean more on your own reason or diligence than on the strength of your life with Jesus Christ, you will have only a slim chance of becoming an enlightened person - and if you do, it will happen slowly, indeed. God wants us to conform our lives perfectly to his will and to reach beyond our passions and prejudices through an intense love for him."

The first step to even desiring to turn off the fairness radar is to love God. How do we love God? Pray about it.