Matthew Speaks

Barbara Brown Taylor’s The Seeds of Heaven offers a series of explorations/sermons from Matthew’s Gospel. There are fifteen in all, picking out a mix of things that Jesus did and said, the origin of the volume being a series of sermons that were prepared for radio broadcast in the summer of 1990.

Taylor introduces a number of very interesting ideas as she reflects on the various passages from Matthew, and I found it a gently inspiration, but provocative, read.

To comment on just one, her reflection on the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, recorded in Matthew 20. The story is of a man who hired folk to work his vineyard on one particular day. Some started early in the morning. As the day progressed, he felt he needed more help, and hired others, and then again, later on, still others. At the end of the day, everyone was paid the same, which was as agreed, but significant disquiet amongst those who had worked the longest, as they felt his generosity was unfair.

I am usefully challenged by Taylor’s insightful comment: “The most curious thing about this parable for me is where we locate ourselves in line. The story sounds quite different from the end of the line, after all, than it does from the front of the line, but isn’t it interesting that 99 percent of us hear it from the front row seats?” Quite so!

She adds: “God is not fair. For reasons we may never know, God seems to love us indiscriminately, and seems also to enjoy reversing the systems we set up to explain why God should love some of us more than others of us. By starting at the end of our lines, with the last and the least, God lets us know that his ways are not our ways, and that if we want to see things his way we might question our own notions of what is fair, and why we get so upset when our lines do not work.”