Reflections from The Hill – A God Too Nice?

In our family’s annals there is a story that centres on which child was to get the wooden spoon after some misdemeanour that’s now been lost to posterity. Each of the tin-lids was paddled in the end (or on it) because no-one owned up.

Naturally, the event that precipitated my actions has grown exponentially, both with time and the amount of red wine consumed but, dear reader, take the point: when it comes to fair being fair, I’m on the side of equity.

The Gospel today (Matthew 20.1-16) makes another point. Depending on where your head is, this story is either one about how to get your workers really cranky, ready to bring out the Union rep and to organise a strike or it’s an exercise in extraordinary generosity; some might even say stupidity.

As I read this story again and again, I get drawn into outrage again and again, particularly as I watch malingerers and lay-abouts score handsomely for doing not much while I, who has worked until his carpal tunnels are screaming, don’t get any more for putting up with the heat, the flies or whatever. It ain’t fair.

Time and time again I get drawn into this scenario and, even though I know the answer, the question won’t go away: what kind of God have we got here? Over and over again, I get all aerated because it seems that He’s on the side of lazy people, not the productive ones, like me.

This is the world that Jesus challenges. He is using our assumptions – in this case an assumption about equality – to introduce something completely radical and different. We might agree in a moment of weakness that the owner’s move is OK: yeah, He gives us all the same thing, not what we deserve or worked for … but it’s still not fair.

We have a hard time right here because the challenge goes to the very seat of our upbringing. Then comes The question: Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? (v 15)

He’s being merciful, not fair. If we want fair, don’t read this story. If we want mercy, then take a gander at it. There we’ll see love in action: The Big Fella wants everyone to be saved, regardless.

Part of our difficulty with the parable is that it challenges what we see as God’s predictability, His niceness. He’s become so domesticated that we now believe He wouldn’t do anything to upset anyone like me or you.

When something bad happens, which it does, and we start trying to give some sense of Godliness to it, we end up valiantly excusing Him from any culpability and assure people that He feels bad, too, just like we do, and He wouldn’t do anything like that, ever.

It’s been a bit like that this week as we negotiated our way through the 9/11 Memorial Services and the first salvos of the Carbon Tax debate, to name two. If we’re not careful, we can end up using our pulpits to give economic advice to the PM or foreign policy to the leaders of the US of A.

It’s important to be afraid of giving people the impression that God is wringing His hands on the sideline of life, like a maiden aunt with the vapours, and is too nice to do anything different. He ain’t, and we well know that.

It is hard to bear the thought of a God who does things differently from the way we do them, who thinks different thoughts to ours, who says things that are almost outside our vocabulary.

It’s even harder to continue believing in a God who is so bland, so innocuous and so harmless that He’s not worth the effort to even raise an ire about inequality. It’s not a matter of reviving J. B. Phillips’s Your God Is Too Small; it’s a case of delivering us from a God who is too nice.