The Way Things Work

Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash

By Andrea Lingle

Jesus’s parables should confound us. If the last words of a parable don’t make your heart rate go up just a little, you probably have stopped really seeing it. Take, for example, the parable that goes like, and I am paraphrasing here, this:

One fine Saturday late in October, at 7:00 AM, a tired mother poured herself a cup of cold, leftover coffee, looked around at the leavings of a busy life, and, seeing her early-riser eating breakfast, asked her child to, please, do some chores around the house. If those chores got done, the mother would reward the child with a milkshake.

Two hours later, another of the mother’s children forsook the comfort of bed, only to find himself confronted with a maternal request. Please, do some chores. Thirty minutes later yet another child appeared and was similarly conscripted.

Lastly, after 11:30 AM, a tousle-headed teen broke plane of slumber, had a leisurely brunch, showered, and stretched before the mother found her. Because a home’s demands are unceasing, there were still to-do boxes left unchecked, and, so, this child was also set to cleaning.

At the end of the day, each child piled, in various stages of exhaustion, into the minivan to receive his or her reward: a milkshake. Of identical size.

This is confounding. De-motivating. Unfair.

When Jesus was asked about the parable, he replied with a most unhelpful answer: the first will be last and the last will be first. Uhmmm…thanks? It is utterly disappointing to realize that the Kingdom of God is not a meritocracy. Your hard work does not earn you a place of honor or a large reward. Proverbs has plenty to say about sluggards and hard work, but the parables of Jesus refuse to align with our natural sense of what is fair and right.

Erik Erikson’s fourth stage of development is Industry vs inferiority. Basically, elementary aged children learn that to succeed you have to work for things. Which is pretty straightforward for children in elementary school and, probably, the last time in the child’s life that it will be. We become convinced that life should be a function machine. If you put in hard work, you will get out a successful life. If you follow the rules, you will be granted an upwardly mobile, disease-free, smooth-sail of a life.

Jesus seems to be saying that there is something more or less to life than that.

There seems to be an invitation to participate with something. The Divine Parent is asking us to work, but the compensatory mechanism seems to be off. Or infinite. Sacred disappointment comes when we realize that the work of our hands cannot make us more loved than we were when we were star-dust motes floating in the first moon beam. Divine Love cannot be metered out proportionally because it is infinite. We work as participation in Divine Love not to earn love or comfort but because to love as God loves is a creative act. When God loves it is generative. When we also love, we work, not to be rewarded, but because we are part of the thing. Paul Tillich writes in his sermon, “Forgetting and Being Forgotten,” “For the truth of our own being is rooted in the ground of being, from which it comes and to which it returns.” (Tillich, The Eternal Now, 35) We sprout from a creative ground, therefore, when we act as a part of that ground we are also creative.

Sacred Disappointment is not about lining up for what we have earned. Jesus’s parables show us that participating in Divine Love is a result of, not incentivized by, being loved.