Payday!

Matthew 20:8 - When evening came, the owner said to his steward, "Call the laborers and give them their wages, from the last to the first."

Of course, what stands out here is the final instruction, "from the last to the first." If I'd have been one of those earlier workers, I'd have been miffed. It seems so arbitrary and a little unfair. Why not start with the first? They've been there longest, they deserve to leave quicker than the others. Or even first come, first paid. Because we are talking about the kin-dom of heave, not the planet earth. And God's ways are not our ways.

We often think the way we do things is the best or only way. One way to cure that is by letting/requiring all students spend time - at least a semester - in a foreign country. When I lived in Japan, I had to adjust to a society based not on individuals, but on families. It was very different; I loved it. Some of my fellow American ex-patriots hated it. They often talked about how backwards the Japanese people were. I always wondered why they stayed if they hated it so much. It must have been a little like hell, and I don't mean the summers.

Jesus here is telling us that heaven will be a like a foreign country to us unless we start paying attention and getting with the program. In this case, the last coming first and the first coming last. Our societies, at least here in America, are built on greed and human ideas of power. The greedy become powerful and the powerful become greedy. It a never-ending spiral. It has always been this way. Governments have always supported systems that keep most of the population down in order to enrich the rich and powerful. Even when we consciously try to do better, it often (always?) gets derailed by greed and selfishness.

But Jesus reminds us that those who are first in this life, like the rich, young man, will be last in line for heaven. If they get in at all, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and the thieves will get in before them. Or, in contemporary terms, the slaves, the oppressed, the tortured, the murdered, the disabled, black people, homeless people, and poor people will all get in before our current president. The latter will, no doubt, promptly declare God a 'loser,' and hurry to hell to begin (continue?) making deals with the devil. If we don't begin to think like Jesus, we'll see heaven as hell and hell as heaven.
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