Talking in parables

 Talking to a friend last week I explained I have a love/hate relationship with Jesus' parables.  Maybe that's because of the "stories with a single point" explanation - in which case I would rather the single point was made big and clear!  Or because it all seems so utterly totally irrelevant to a 21st century city dweller.

That kicked off a little journey which is ongoing with me reading the excellent Paula Gooders book on parables.  She has helped me understand the context a little more - for example, explaining that in Galilee landlords are mostly a "boo/hiss" type of character - not her words - they are mostly absentee landlords which I guess makes things even more complex - God is not an absentee landlord.

Another option I have found - from a different friend, is that Jesus likes to make us "wonder", as in "I wonder if" .  That's had me "I wondering" about the supremely unfair story of the landlord and the workers in Matthew's gospel, which was Friday's passage to read.

If he's not an absentee landlord, maybe he's a small landholder - and why is he going to rustle up workers for his fields?  Hasn't he got staff to do that for him? What sort of parallel is there today to that highly rural story - maybe an insurance company who pays the teaser rate to it's existing customers? (unheard of!) or - for me, Gregory Distribution, who paid me and my team a large pay rise 2 months into probation - a colleague had been there 5 years. Maybe she felt like the day workers who had slaved all day when the late comers got equally rewarded?

I wonder - about the persistence in sitting and waiting in the hot sun, of the un-hired workers.  Maybe that's all they could do - wait. Show up. Waiting for someone to notice them.

The kicker from Jesus is that the landlord is generous.  And the simple answer is God is generous. And maybe that's what has frustrated me, as you can say that in one sentence but perhaps Jesus likes me to wonder and ponder and ask others and tell him I haven't a clue why his frustrating stories are peppered throughout the gospels.