My granddaughter, Ava – the most beautiful in the world – is 20
months old. She is speaking more but has
yet to learn the four-letter word that strikes terror into a young parent's
heart. That word is
"fair." The problem is that in
a two-year-old's egotistical world, fairness is: "If it's not mine, it's
not fair." Ava may not
know the word, but she knows the theory.
If you take something from her, she indignantly pulls the pacifier from
her mouth and flings it to the ground, crumples onto the carpet and lays out
spread-eagled as if she has been crucified!
Oh, the unfairness of it all!
As the toddler reaches preschool, we try to inject a sense
of sharing with others into our child's concept of fairness. I'll call this the "one for you, one for
me" school of fairness. Then our
children grow older and start playing games.
With games, there are rules.
Being fair becomes “follow the rules.”
If you work hard and play fair, you’re a winner, whether the score is in
your favor or not.
We take this “play hard, follow the rules” sense of fairness
into our adult lives. If you work hard,
if you follow the rules, if you keep your nose to the grindstone, you will get
rewarded. And the rewards tend to be
proportionate to the effort. "An
honest day's wage for an honest day's work," "You worked hard, you
earned it." And if you slack off
and break the rules, you will get nothing, at best, punished at worst.
We're quite proud of this civilized, “quid pro quo” approach
to fairness. We believe it is just –
everyone gets their just desserts. Even
if it doesn’t work out that neatly all the time in real life, ultimately karma
prevails.
It is a fairly small leap to carry this concept from the material
realm – the world in which we live – to the spiritual realm – the kingdom of
heaven of which we are. If I work hard,
if I say the right prayers, if I obey the commandments, go to Mass every
Sunday, then I earn my heavenly reward.
In fact, we may even commingle the material and spiritual worlds
together, assuming that our path to spiritual success is marked by our well-earned
success and growing wealth here on earth.
We forget the Lord’s words to Isaiah – “As high as the
heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your thoughts and my
thoughts above your thoughts.” (Is 55:9) Then we hear Jesus in this morning's Gospel. (Mt 20:1-6)
Our valued sense of fairness isn’t at all important to
Jesus. He tells us bluntly, this is not
what “the kingdom of heaven is like.” Jesus
does not want us to settle for human fairness in divvying up our finite
goods. He calls us to divine mercy and
unlimited, infinite, super-generous divine love. And each one of is promised precisely the
same share of God’s love – infinite love for everyone! No matter what we’ve done or failed to
do. We cannot earn more, for it is
already infinite. We cannot earn less,
for it is unconditional; we can never lose it; for it is eternal. We need only accept God’s generosity.
In a sense, the kingdom of God’s concept of fairness is more
like nursery school than like our grown-up, adult world. We teach our three and four-year olds to share
with others since they obviously haven't done anything to warrant all of the
toys that they have. The toys have
simply been given to them. Similarly, God's
love is given to us. It is pure gift,
pure grace. By definition, it cannot be
earned or deserved, it can only be accepted.
We earn nothing, yet we have everything. Having everything, we need nothing. Needing nothing, we can share this
superabundance of love with others. We
look at others not as competitors for the finite goods of this world, not as
opponents whom we must overcome through hard work or bombs and bullets, but as other
children of God – our brothers and sisters who are loved by God and cared for
by God, precisely as we ourselves are loved and cared for by God.
We look on others not as an inconvenience, a drag on society,
a scourge that needs purged, but as a gift from God, as one for whom the hope
of eternal life shines as brightly as we pray that it shines in ourselves, as
one whose right to life comes not from human laws or institutions, is not
determined their good or evil works, but is from God's very hand.
And He calls each of us to care for these lives, to support
these lives, and to cherish these lives as our very own.
For Christians, fairness is stewardship.
For Christians, fairness is preference for the poor.
For Christians, fairness is unconditional love.
