What Would Jesus Do?
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
January 3, 2010
Readings
NRS Matthew 20:1 "For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; 4 and he said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went. 5 When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same. 6 And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, 'Why are you standing here idle all day?' 7 They said to him, 'Because no one has hired us.' He said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard.' 8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, 'Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.' 9 When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. 10 Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. 11 And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12 saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.' 13 But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 14 Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?' 16 So the last will be first, and the first will be last."
Harvey Cox, When Jesus Came to Harvard, 11-12, 16, 20, 28
Some of the students had heard that the answer to virtually any moral dilemma could be found simply by asking, "What would Jesus do?" Most had also come to realize that this ]formula doesn't always work. Because he lived twenty centuries ago and in very different circumstances, Jesus never had to face many of the vexing choices they did. They were aware that the centuries separating Jesus from us constitute a real quandary. But during the course they learned that Jesus was a rabbi, and that he did not just hand out answers. Rather, he demonstrated a way of approaching moral decision that they could use themselves. They saw that if we draw on the powers of our imagination, as Jesus made people do with his cryptic sayings and piercing parables, his message does indeed say something important to us today. The question is how we translate his method and his message into our current idiom.
[25] When it comes to a moral dilemma, any moral dilemma, we always face three steps: [Recognizing it as a moral issue; deciding “What should I do?”; and summoning the courage to do it.] A well-cultivated imagination can inform all these steps. It helps us recognize the moral issues wrapped in all kinds of choices. It helps clarify what the right choice is, and it motivates us to take the action that choice calls for.
[28] Once the importance of imagination is brought back into moral reasoning, it is possible to look at the simplistic formula "What would Jesus do?" in a new light. If it means trying to mimic Jesus' behavior in some mechanical way (he did this, so I should do that), this formula clearly does not work very well as a moral guideline. There are just too many decisions it does not encompass. But if it means combining the rabbinical insight that no two cases are exactly the same with the exercise of moral imagination, then the question "What would Jesus do?" does make some sense. It pushes us, as Jesus pushed his listeners, to put ourselves in unfamiliar, even threatening, situations. It requires us to look again and again at not just what Jesus himself did, but at what those who have been touched by his life and message have done over the years.
Sermon
Obery Hendricks, one of my New Testament professors in seminary, offers this reflection on the parable of the Vineyard and the Laborers that we read earlier:
When I was nine years old, my father, a self-employed brick mason, began taking me to work with him during my school vacations, not only in the summer, but in the spring and winter, too. Our workdays always began with a stop at a particular corner in a poor section of town. Although we never arrived later than 6:15 A.M., fifty or more men in dusty work clothes would already be there, greasy brown-bag lunches in hand. My father would call out, as would the drivers of the other trucks easing up to the curb, and an eager worker or two would scramble into our open truck bed to huddle against the morning chill as we sped down the highway. My father usually told the workers the wage he was willing to pay before we drove off, though sometimes he forgot until we'd arrived at the work site, which might be an hour and a half away; yet I don't remember any worker ever asking what he'd be paid at the day's end. Each apparently trusted, or at least hoped, to be treated fairly, but all seemed resigned to take whatever they could get. Apparently they were relieved just to get a day's work.
While reading the parable, I began to see the vacant, haunted eyes of those desperate men of my youth who wanted nothing more than a chance to earn enough for a day's groceries for their families. It became clear to me that this sense of desperation and resignation is what the workers in Jesus' parable must have also experienced. The difference is that my father never exploited or humiliated the few men who from time to time were in his employ. The same cannot be said of the householder, [the landlord,] in Jesus' parable.[i]
Hendricks goes on to list the ways in which the landlord behaves with arrogance: He offers to “pay what is right,” but reserves for himself the decision about what is right; he insults those who haven’t been hired by 5 p.m. by asking why they are standing idle, as though they are too lazy to work, when in fact they are idle because no work was available; and he accuses the workman who challenges him for paying the same to all the workers of being envious because the landlord is (at least in his own mind), generous and good. It seems likely that his “generosity” consists in paying all of them the minimum amount on which a laborer could subsist for one day.
The conventional interpretation of this parable is that the kingdom of heaven is being illustrated by the fact that each of the laborers gets what he needs to survive for the day – each of them earns, as we say in the Prayer of Jesus, his “daily bread.” In this interpretation, the householder or landlord stands in the place of God, who treats everyone equally. That seems like a good way of seeing the story as far as it goes, but would God really be as arrogant and insulting as this landlord? Certainly the people to whom Jesus told this story – or the laborers Obery Hendricks remembers – would be angry with the landlord by the end; they would undoubtedly identify with the laborers, whether first or last hired. So, while it seems to say that the earliest and latest laborers each got their due, the conclusion or “moral” of the story – “So the last will be first, and the first will be last – suggests a more subversive interpretation: the landlord who is “first” in this life will himself be last and the laborers will be ahead of him in getting the good things of life. But we have to be careful about explaining too much – the parables are not like Aesop’s Fables, each ending with a neat moral tacked on at the end; they are intended to keep us thinking, maybe even reeling a little, scratching our heads and wondering “Is that what he really meant?”
We might compare the parables and stories Jesus tells to Zen Buddhist koans – sayings or stories or questions like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The koans in Zen tradition are meant to awaken the student, to open up a new point of view, to force a reassessment of how things really are in the world in order to help bring about satori, or enlightenment, the “unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived.” D.T. Suzuki says that with this satori:
our entire surroundings are viewed from quite an unexpected angle of perception... The world for those who have gained satori is no more the old world as it used to be... it is never the same again... [But] satori can be had only through our once experiencing it.[ii]
You might be able to remember an experience like this – not an ultimate enlightenment, but a moment in your life when everything suddenly seemed different – when a secret was revealed that finally made everything that was mysterious clear, or when you fell in love, or when you realized that your parents didn’t actually know about it every time you did something wrong.
While the method is similar, Jesus was aiming not just to change our perceptions of the world but to help his listeners see that the world itself was changing, that the “reign of God” or the “kingdom of heaven” was already coming to fruition around them. He frequently said, “He that has eyes to see, let him see, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear.” He wanted them to understand that a new world is possible, and to invite them to be part of bringing it about.[iii]
Consider now the parable of the Prodigal Son, which we told our children this morning. This parable sounds different in our ears than it probably did in the ears of those who heard it from Jesus. Families have changed since the time of Jesus, and on first hearing the story most people conclude that of course the father would take back his son – what father wouldn’t? Isn’t that what fathers do? Perhaps we could sharpen it a little. What if the younger son were gay, and his father regarded this as an abomination? Or perhaps the son becomes addicted to drugs and steals from his father until he has drained all his father’s savings and then disappears. Or perhaps the son joins a cult and repudiates his family and says he never wants to hear from them again. There are families even today where the father might rightly treat his son as dead if the son’s misdeeds were heinous enough. The older brother’s reaction, on the other hand, is much more familiar to us. How many family squabbles arise because siblings feel they are treated unfairly? It seems to me that many of us could identify with the older son. There’s another twist here as well. We come to see the father as a god-like figure, ready to forgive no matter what we may have done. On the other hand, it does seem to be true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the older brother’s real complaint is that the wastrel son gets a big feast and the finest robe – things the father never thought to offer the faithful older son, who was always there and never gave occasion for complaint – and therefore also never got the extraordinarily attention and special treatment that came to the wastrel simply for returning. Nevertheless, we are grateful in hearing the story that the father does forgive, and we wish that the older brother, justified as his complaints may be, would just lighten up a bit. We also feel a desire to emulate the father, and to forgive wrongdoing in the same fashion in order to heal a rift of this sort in our families.
Besides these puzzling stories, Jesus also gives instruction directly. The Sermon on the Mount is a concentrated collection of his teachings and one of the most beloved passages in the Gospels. But there’s trouble here as well. We all love the beatitudes with their promises of blessings for the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the gentle (or meek), those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail, those who show mercy, whose hearts are pure, peacemakers, those who are persecuted. We prefer to skip over the balancing “woes” that Luke reports when he tells of the same occasion:
Luke 6:24 "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25 "Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. "Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26 "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
Harvey Cox recalls having memorized the beatitudes in Sunday School for a Children’s Day pageant. He says:
[The Beatitudes] were short and easy to memorize. I chirped them out, and my parents beamed. But somehow in Sunday school I never learned the “woes,” the curses that go along with the blessings. Had I stood on the little stage next to the piano in my clean suit and declaimed “Woe unto you who are rich,” or “Woe unto you when all men speak well of you,” my parents, and the rest of the audience, might not have swelled with such approval. I doubt if they suspect that Jesus had ever said such things.[iv]
Toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers a still more difficult teaching. He says:
Matthew 5:38 "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' 39 But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40 and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; 41 and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42 Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
Now this is a really difficult teaching. Don’t resist evildoers? Turn the other cheek? We all know that if you don’t stand up to a bully, they’ll just bully us again. We tell our children to fight back when someone attacks, and we do the same as a nation. Give to whoever asks? We’d end up broke!
The best example we have in modern times of how this could be applied is the life and work of Gandhi, who took these words seriously (though not himself a Christian) and formulated a way of non-violent resistance for the modern world. Here’s how he put it:
Jesus put in a picturesque and telling manner the great doctrine of non-violent non-cooperation. Your non-cooperation with your opponent is violent when you give blow for blow, and is ineffective in the long run. Your non-cooperation is non-violent when you give your opponent all in place of what he needs. You have disarmed him once and for all by your apparent cooperation, which in effect is complete non-cooperation.[v]
These teachings are certainly not easy, but perhaps at their heart we can see a core message we can apply without completely upending life as we know it. Perhaps we can all be less defensive about perceived assaults on our dignity, be less anxious about tomorrow, and know that we can be more generous with what we have been given to enjoy in this wonderful world we’ve been given. Part of the challenge the question “What Would Jesus Do?” poses is that we have to apply these teachings in the context of our own lives, applying our moral imagination to decisions we must make. As Harvey Cox puts it,
When it comes to a moral dilemma, any moral dilemma, we always face three steps: [Recognizing it as a moral issues; deciding “What should I do?”; and summoning the courage to do it.] A well-cultivated imagination can inform all these steps.[vi]
Our class based on his book When Jesus Came to Harvard aims to take the stories about Jesus, the stories Jesus told, and the teachings that he gave and apply them to our own choices, carrying out in this way the commitment expressed in our Second Parish covenant to gather – and to live – “in the spirit of Jesus.”
These stories and teachings are difficult, but they address for us choices that are difficult as well. Living our lives is not easy, and there are hard times as well as good times. Hard choices need to be made which will not satisfy everyone, where our conscience is on the line when easy choices might satisfy for the moment but disappoint in the long run. What we learn from studying the Gospels is that moral choices can be illuminated by the stories and teachings of Jesus, especially when we are able to work them through with others, with members of our congregation or our friends or our families. We are not alone in our joys and our sorrows, and we can learn to live better and more fulfilling lives as we consider how to construct those lives in the light of the teachings of the rabbi from Galilee.
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