The parable that we read from Jesus today might be difficult for us to wrap our minds around. Here we have some people who were hired as day laborers. Some of them started at about six in the morning – so early! – and worked a twelve-hour shift in hot and unpleasant conditions. It certainly sounds like they earned their wage! But then other workers are added throughout the day, with the last group working only an hour before hanging it up for the day. They are paid the same wage for their labor as those who worked for twelve hours. By our standards of labor practices, this seems deeply unfair. What happened to “equal pay for equal work”? How could Jesus promote such a thing?

And then we hear God’s voice echoing from Isaiah: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” Perhaps we’ve been thinking about labor all wrong. According to some biblical scholars, Matthew had the final judgment in mind and intended to address resentment among communities involved in the Jesus-movements. Some of them had followed Jesus a long way down a difficult path, while others had just joined, and all of them would be given equal grace at the end of time. While certainly valid, theologian Richard Horsley, in his book Jesus in Context: Power, People, and Performance, warns us not to separate the spiritual and religious elements of the gospels from the economic and political contexts with which they were inextricably linked. Jesus, and the first communities who followed him, were quite literally concerned with whether the people of Galilee would have enough to eat under the political and economic oppression of the Roman Empire.

Let’s begin by mapping the landscape of overlapping religious, political, and economic powers in Roman Palestine. According to Horsley, the day laborers who appear in Matthew’s parable were likely people who managed a subsistence living on their ancestral lands, but who were unable to make ends meet because of the taxation from the Roman Empire and the Temple-State. It is important to the early “Jesus movement” that these people still owned their own land, because that kept them from complete dependence on the elite, and therefore more free to participate in counter-movements like the one Jesus inaugurated. Horsley places Jesus within this network of relationships. Far from a solitary man who presented isolated sayings to anyone who listened, Jesus was entwined in a Jewish community that regularly practiced resistance to Roman imperial rule. 

Interpreters of the gospels have tended to read a modern understanding of state and church as separate spheres into Jesus’s social context, which simply does not accurately represent the religious or political scene of first-century Palestine (though, I would argue, it does not really represent our social fabric either). Roman systems of power engaged Jewish religious leaders to maintain Roman imperialism alongside Roman political rulers. The resulting gap between the religious elite (who were primarily high priests) and the common people, who mostly lived in village communities, was immense. There are many nuances to the reasons that the religious elite maintained this system, but the fact remains that while the religious elite were wealthy, Jewish people in the villages were quite literally starving, in no small part because of the resources demanded of them by the Temple.

Jesus’s parable from this passage in Matthew underlines a critique of this economic injustice. It would have been the system of taxation that made day labor necessary for the characters in the parable. And importantly, just because you don’t get the chance to work a full day does not mean that you don’t need to eat. It is this economic emphasis on meeting people’s needs and the acknowledgement of everyone’s intrinsic worth as human beings that is spoken of in the Gospel. The Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew wants to save people from direct reliance on imperial powers. It is any economic system that allows people to go hungry and rely on wage-labor that is oppressive and must be resisted.

For further reading: Richard Horsley, Jesus in Context: Power, People, & Performance; Richard Horsley, Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine.

Let’s imagine what the inbreaking of the kingdom of God would look like if we fore-fronted solidarity and the good of people and environment in our economics. What would happen if we tried to pay more attention to God’s thoughts? 

Analysts say that the world does not have a food shortage problem, but a food distribution problem. What would it look like to make sure that everyone had enough to eat? If we took seriously the labor standard of CST that one person’s wage should support them and their family, how would our economy and our world be different? What might we have to relinquish in order for it to be so? Finally, how would our relationships and interactions be different if we consciously decentered capitalist logics from our thought? What might it be like if we didn’t ask about someone’s labor production as a way to know them? 

Mary Harris Jones, often known better by her nickname of Mother Jones, was a prominent figure in union organizing between 1877 and 1930 across the U.S. Though her views on women’s natural domesticity and anti-suffragism would give us pause today, they reflect how informed she was by her Catholicism, which is often deemphasized in biographical accounts. Knowing the history of CST and Pope Leo XIII’s support for unions, however, we can see that she was acting in alignment with her Catholic faith in the public square and on the picket line. As she is said to have quipped, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!” 

She worked especially in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and often with miners. She also showed special concern for the conditions of child workers, writing in her autobiography that “the little mill child is crucified between the two thieves of its childhood; capital and ignorance.” Now listed among the U.S. Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor, it is interesting to wonder what Mother Jones would think of the economic policies of the people who inscribed her name there.

You can find Mother Jones’s autobiography on the Project Gutenberg website.

Ariadna Phillips founded the South Bronx Mutual Aid (SBXMA) at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic as a means for neighbors to support each other in times of economic hardship, especially when government services are insufficient or overwhelmed. As Phillips put it, “mutual aid is cooperation between neighbors for the sake of the common good, a form of caring for one another. It is different from charity. Mutual Aid is a form of building and advocating for community wellbeing.” 

This organization provides a kind of alternative economy, one that is not bound by capitalist logics, but by an ethos of care. It is not unlike the kind of caring economics that CST and Matthew’s gospel call for. Neighbors can volunteer for a number of things that fit their skill set, such as stocking community fridges, providing legal support, fundraising, and emergency relief. They also emphasize maintaining the dignity of people who obtain aid by offering direct delivery for food relief, obviating the need to stand in long lines at food pantries. 

Read more or sign up to volunteer with SBXMA at sbxma.com.

Image description: Street art painting on a wall. A man in tattered clothing sits cross-legged with a cup in front of him, and holds a sign that reads “Keep your coins, I want change.”