The fifteenth episode of the fourth season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (September 30, 2020). It is a retelling of Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard set in the modern pandemic, post-pandemic, great reset situation. You can listen to the episode right now and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:
Show Notes
This podcast is based on Matthew 20:1-16 in the New Testament of the Bible. Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
A parable told in the midst of a crisis
Parables are short and fairly simple stories that, due to their metaphorical nature, are often completely abstracted from their historical context. After all, what is true about a mustard seed is always true regardless of the political situation or world events. But the parable that Jesus told about our number of day laborers working in a farmers field really cannot be taken out of its context.
In order to interpret and apply this parable, you need to understand that the economic situation that these workers find themselves in was intended to be aberration within that society. From ancient times, Israel had been an agricultural society and the ideal had been that every family in the nation should have their own little piece of land. As the Prophet Micah puts it, “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,and no one shall make them afraid.”
This was an ideal that no doubt often fell short of reality. Some have even considered it an unrealistic utopian dream, and yet measures were put in place in order to preserve it. Periodic debt forgiveness, regulations against permanent debt slavery and the Jubilee requirement that all land should returned to its original owners regardless no matter how or why they had lost it were all policies that were clearly intended to maintain an economy based on small landholders. I have written extensively on this matter in my book, Caesar’s Census, God’s Jubilee, if you would like to explore further.
So, the day labourers in Jesus’ parable are clearly not living according to the biblical standard of what life was supposed to be. I believe that Jesus was fully aware of that and felt strongly that the situation needed to be harshly criticized. My retelling of the parable is, in part, an attempt to make that more clear.
Pandemics and essential workers
Having decided that Jesus originally told this parable to address a crisis situation in the economy of Galilee in his days, it seemed to be a natural fit to reset the story in the midst of a modern crisis.
I’ve got to say that, in the early days of the pandemic, I held out some hope that, as bad as it all was, at least we would all be able to learn to be better as a result of it. In particular, there seemed to be a great deal of potential that we would learn a new respect for traditionally low-wage workers as we suddenly discovered how much we needed them. If this parable reflects my frustration at how that potential seems to have been wasted, I would add that it is still not too late and that I still have hope.
Music in this Episode
“AhDah” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Stoneworld Battle by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4420-stoneworld-battle
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Retelling the Bible 
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