Better than Even Steven

This past weekend we celebrated Catechetical Sunday. This popular Sunday School program and our Parish School are positive signs of life: parents bringing their children here to receive religious instruction from generous and well prepared teachers so they can learn about Jesus and the community that gathers in his name. Last weekend, too, we also celebrated that same community in a traditional way, with our fall festival filled with food, games, information, and the eternal allure of bingo and cake walks. Thanks to all who organized and worked at it.

One of the first lessons we learn as children is to play fair. Don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, don’t trip someone passing you in a footrace, keep your promises and pay back what you borrow.

We believe in fairness, even-steven, giving the other a fair shake. Even that favorite genre of American movies, heist films like all the many and various Oceans 11 or however many movies ironically are grounded in the unquenchable American belief in fairness: there is honor even among thieves: each one does his or her own part, each one gets–ironically, again, since most are set in Las Vegas–a fair shake, a fair roll of the dice in the end, the loot is divided up even-steven. Prescinding from the fact that what they’re doing–robbing a casino–is wrong, we like the fact that Bernie Mac gets as much as mastermind George Clooney. Fair and square, even steven. That’s their code. And ours too.

Yet today, we hear in the gospel one of the most subversive of Jesus’ many parables. Addressing himself to the legalism of the doctors of the law, the scribes and pharisees who predicate all human activity on rigid observance of the law, Jesus tells the story of the owner of a vineyard who violates the even-steven code of commerce. Not because he’s trying to cheat his workers out of their wages, but simply because he’s too generous.

One of the very oldest written laws, dating back long before the book of Exodus was written, comes to us from Hammurabi’s code in ancient Babylon. It’s called the lex talionis, the law of retribution. “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound.” Truth to tell, it’s not a bad place for law to start: it was an attempt to make punishment commensurate with the crime, and not excessive; to control our all too human desire to even up the score and then to top it off some, which inevitably leads to family feuds, vendettas, and wars hot and cold.

Today’s Gospel, as texts earlier in Matthew’s account of the sermon on the mount, propose a higher standard for us: the standard of generosity. Fairness is good, no doubt. But in the logic of God, generosity is better. Much, much better. And much, much harder.

It is hard to be generous, to walk the extra mile, to give and not to count the cost against the one who receives. Yet that is the logic of God, whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts. These ways are far above and beyond our ways, these thoughts far above out thoughts, and that is why Jesus came: to show us the way, to help us to understand, to teach us that bread generously broken and shared is better than a loaf hoarded away in the cupboard. And he taught us that in his way of living and in his dying, in forgiving his murderers as he hung on the cross.

This is what Pope Francis was getting at when he invited the world to celebrate a Jubilee of Mercy a few years ago: This is what he said when he called us to be Godlike in sharing the gifts we have received:

“If God limited himself to only justice, he would cease to be God, and would instead be like human beings who ask merely that the law be respected.

But mere justice is not enough. Experience shows that an appeal to justice alone will result in its destruction. This is why God goes beyond justice with his mercy and forgiveness. Yet this does not mean that justice should be devalued or rendered superfluous. On the contrary: anyone who makes a mistake must pay the price.

However, this is just the beginning of conversion, not its end, because one begins to feel the tenderness and mercy of God. God does not deny justice. God rather envelopes it and surpasses it with an even greater event in which we experience love as the foundation of true justice.”

The ”greater event, the envelope” is the experience of mercy, whose twin sister is generosity. This is a hard lesson, and that’s why we come back here again and again: to be challenged by it, inspired by it, given hope by it. Even steven simply isn’t enough.

Generosity, God-like generosity is the impossible goal we strive for. Yet our hearts tells us, and the life of Jesus shows us, that mercy, not even-steven or balanced scales or retribution, is what will make us happy, what makes us whole.

One simple lesson:

Fair is good.

Generous is better.