“You Have Made Them Equal to Us”

Today’s post is from Bondings 2.0’s Editor, Francis DeBernardo.

Today’s liturgical readings for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be found here.

“. . . you have made them equal to us.”

This is one of the complaints from the early group of vineyard workers in today’s gospel parable. These workers grumble that the vineyard owner is treating all the workers equally. They see workers who arrived later considered the same as those who began earlier and, by human standards, should receive additional wages. The early birds are shocked at what they think is blatantly unfair.

These early workers are not selfish. They are totally human. While very few people would decry the idea of equality in theory, in practice, most human beings like to qualify equality. We categorize people and place them in hierarchies constructed to decide who gets special treatment. As George Orwell put it in Animal Farm, some people “are more equal than others.”

During the marriage equality debates in the U.S., a frequent argument against legally recognizing same-gender couples’ unions was that doing so would harm heterosexual marriages. On the surface that argument is  silly: how could one couple’s union harm that of another couple? The unspoken logic underlying this argument, though, was the fear that heterosexual couples would lose hierarchical privilege in society. If same-gender couples were equal to heterosexual couples, then the latter group loses their special standing–or at least would have to share that special standing. Equality threatens privilege.

Most human beings extol equality in society, but our preference is  for the kind of equality that will not threaten the invisible privileges that we ourselves enjoy because of certain social categories to which we belong. This kind of thinking underpins much of the personal and social prejudice against LGBTQ+ people–as well as prejudice against women, people of color, and many other categories that subjugate people in the social hierarchies we create, consciously or unconsciously.

God’s ways, however, are different from our human ways. Much to our shock and horror, God insists on everyone being treated truly as equals. Today’s first reading from Isaiah reminds us:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says God. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.”

Unfortunately, my default in prayer is not to try to learn God’s ways, but to try to convince God to follow my ways. Unsurprisingly, my ways mostly include preserving any particular privileges that I have because of my place in society and the various hierarchies.

Kenneth Burke, a 20th century literary critic and philosopher, said that one of the defining characteristics of human beings, one of the key things that sets us apart from the rest of the natural world is that we are “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy.” In almost any situation that humans find themselves, one of our first instincts as humans is to create a hierarchy. And 99.9% of the time, we put ourselves in a position of privilege within that hierarchy.

We members of the LGBTQ+ and ally community also are prone to create hierarchies. (After all, we are human.) Despite knowing oppression because of lower status in society (and the church), we are not immune. Our hierarchies place some, as individuals and/or as a group, on the top rung and others lower. Sexism and racism, for example, are two hierarchical problems which still thrive in the LGBTQ+ community. Troublingly, anti-transgender bias exists, too.

Kenneth Burke had it right: our propensity to create hierarchies is part of our DNA. Theologically, we might call it an “original sin”—an impulse we all share. Concretely, our struggles to overcome this impulse look different from one another because we face different privileges and oppressions.   And our overcoming the desire for hierarchy may only last a short before we fall into its trap again. We will always have to relearn this lesson to think more like God does.

One of my favorite authors, Graham Greene, put it perfectly in his novel Brighton Rock:

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”

The early workers in today’s parable, much like me and many people, are shocked and appalled at how generous God is with mercy, strangely dispensing it to people we don’t believe deserve it. Of course, we ourselves don’t truly deserve it, but in general, we conveniently often overlook that fact. Our salvation comes in our attempts to think more like God does: abolishing hierarchies and living with radical equality.

—Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry, September 24, 2023