The God who watches over us is the like the shepherd who watches 100 sheep, said Jesus. When one of them goes astray, the shepherd goes after that one, and upon finding it, he rejoices over that sheep most of all. See Matthew 18:13.
My question is: How do the other 99 sheep feel about this?
This parable doesn’t address that question directly, but other parables do.
For example, the kingdom of God is likened to a vineyard. The men who work in it all day long get paid a full day’s wage. Yet the men who did not begin to work until evening also get paid a full day’s wage. When the former group complains, the vineyard owner asks, “Are you jealous because I’m generous?” After all, the all-day workers did get the wages they were expecting. The vineyard owner asks, “Can’t I run my business the way I choose?” Or to paraphrase, “Can’t I run my kingdom the way I choose?” (Matthew 20:15).
Then there is the parable of the prodigal son. One son lives foolishly, squandering the wealth he is given and rejecting the prospects available to him. But he repents, returning in full humility. This son is welcomed home and invited into his father’s celebration.
Meanwhile, his brother, the other son, is also invited inside. But this other son refuses. He had stayed and obeyed. Rather than joining the celebration now, and being just as much a part of it as his brother, he withholds himself. He remains outside to seethe (Luke 15:28).
These parables seem to offer a message that we might imagine our sterner grandparents saying. Namely: Life is not fair. Insisting upon so-called fairness is insisting upon something that is different from the way of God. In fact, “fairness” is an idol that points to a false god, and that false god we are revering is ourselves. When we claim that our portion is “unfair” compared to another’s, we are presuming that we ourselves ought to judge what the correct portions should be. Do we have the right to make that judgment? Do we even have the capacity to make that judgment?
If we really do believe in eternal life, then the search for fairness ought to be irrelevant. Within the life that spans eternity, the extent of this worldly portion is just the minutest sliver. We see something of this kind of belief in Jesus’ encounter with a Greek woman. She seemed to understand that worldly status is fleeting, while the Lord is supreme. In this seemingly strange episode (which has a historical context outside the point of this post), Jesus refers to the woman as a dog. Her response is essentially to embrace this premise. If the Lord of all creation assigns her the status of a dog within this world, then she has the status of a dog (Mark 7:28). Such complete acceptance and surrender may sound shocking. However, an authentic faith in the authority and mercy of God both permits and entails this acceptance—the acceptance of our allotment, whatever that allotment might be. For the extent to which this woman stood on her faith in this way, she saw her afflicted daughter cured.
Alongside Jesus, we are all unworthy. We are all dogs, no matter how highly we might wish to regard ourselves. If life really was fair, then the Divine would not have died as a human so that humans could come alive within the Divine.
When a stern parent or grandparent says Life isn’t fair, we know they are warning of the potential for loss and unexpected pain, and the way this world is hard.
However, when Jesus says in his parables that Life isn’t fair, he means something altogether different. In the kingdom of God, people get something more and better than what they have coming to them. The unfairness of Jesus does not consist of undue suffering. It is the way to undue joy.
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Photo: Scott Liddell
