Twenty Years Against Five

They have known each other since they were nineteen.

Twenty years ago they both started doing the same sort of thing, in roughly the same way, for roughly the same reasons, and for the first fifteen of those years their lives were more or less parallel and they talked about it on porches.

Five years ago something opened up for his friend. Not luck exactly, and not scheming either, and that is the part that makes this hard. His friend said yes to something that was genuinely frightening, at a moment when saying yes was expensive, and it worked, and now there is a thing with his name on it that people have heard of.

And he is still doing what they both always did, in the same room, for the same forty or so people, and it is good work and he knows it is good work.

Here is the thing that started this year and had never happened before in twenty years of friendship. He caught himself doing arithmetic.

Not envy, or at least not the recognizable kind. He was pleased about his friend, in a way that he can put his hand on and check and that has held up under examination. The arithmetic was different. It went: twenty against five. Twenty years of this against five of that. And a number came out, and the number was not flattering to anybody, and he was appalled at himself for having run it.

And then, and this is the actual problem, he ran it again the next week.

Because once the operation exists, it is available. And it produces a slightly different answer depending on what you feed it and what mood you are in, which means it can always be run again, which means it will be.

He has not told anybody. He would not know how to say it without it sounding like the thing it is not.

You will have your own sum. The one that started for no reason and that you keep almost finishing.

The parable people find annoying

There is a parable that almost everybody finds irritating on first reading, and I think the irritation is the point.

Workers are hired at dawn. More at nine, more at noon, more at three. And then some at five in the afternoon, with one hour left in the day. At the end, everybody is paid the same, and the ones who worked twelve hours object, and their objection is completely reasonable and everybody reading it agrees with them.

And then the owner says this.

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?Matthew 20:15

Notice what the objection actually was. Not that they were underpaid. They got exactly the agreed amount. Their complaint is comparative and only comparative: it is not the wage, it is the wage next to the other wage.

And the owner does not adjust anything. He does not top them up, or explain the economics, or tell them their twelve hours will be recognized in some other way. He asks a question about ownership, and the question ends the conversation, because it turns out the day was never a competition; it was a distribution.

So take it plainly: you are inside a distribution rather than a competition, and that is what Matthew 20 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a story about a vineyard and lays it down on a back porch where a man is doing sums about his friend.

Which explains why the arithmetic can always be run again. It is not underdetermined because he keeps making mistakes. It is underdetermined because there is no result. He is asking a question the vineyard does not contain an answer to, and the operation will therefore keep returning slightly different numbers forever, because that is what an unanswerable question does.

And notice the last four words: do you begrudge my generosity. The owner locates the whole trouble in the twelve hour man's response to somebody else's good. Not in his own pay, which was fine, and not in his own work, which was real. He is not being accused of laziness or of failure. He is being shown where he is standing.

You have been standing beside somebody else's good and calling it your own accounting, because the written word puts the difficulty exactly there rather than in the wage, and His Spirit is what makes that land without it feeling like an accusation.

And the twelve hours are not diminished by any of this. Nowhere does the owner say the long day did not happen or did not matter. He says the payment was never a rate. You have twenty real years that were never a wage claim, and Scripture is what establishes both halves of that, and His Spirit is what keeps the second half from swallowing the first.

His friend has taken nothing

Now the guardrail, and this one is close to the bone.

His friend did the frightening thing at the expensive moment, and it cost him something real, and he did it without any assurance that it would work. That is not luck dressed up. Whatever else is true, nothing was taken from a porch in order for that to happen.

And the man doing the arithmetic is not the more faithful of the two. That sentence is not available here. Twenty years in the same room does not outrank five years of a thing with a name on it, and staying is not a higher grade than going, and the whole idea of grading them is what the parable exists to take apart.

If this leaves anybody quietly pleased to be the one who stayed, then something has gone wrong, because staying has just become a position and a position is a wage claim with better manners.

So: you have nothing to win on that porch and nothing that anybody took, because a crown in Scripture is placed on a head and never earned, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.