Am I not allowed to be generous?
The Thanksgiving Day lectionary reading happens to be a classic parable. And it’s perfect for what I’ve been thinking about these past few days over some news stories I’ve been reading, and listening to on my drives to and from work on WBEZ.
The owner of a farm along the interstate drove down to the Menard’s parking lot one morning and found some guys in their pickup trucks just waiting for some work. He said he’d paid them a full fair wage if they came over to his fields and worked it for the day.
The farmer ended up at the same Menard’s around lunchtime and found other guys standing around looking for work. He told them to come on down to his farm and work it for the rest of the day.
At about 5 p.m., he pulls up at the same big box supply store and found a couple more guys wanting work. He told them to head down to the farm and work it a couple hours.
After dinner, he goes out and starts paying the workers.
To the ones working eight hours since morning he paid a really good wage for a hard day’s work.
They then noticed the farmer paid out the same to the ones who joined them midday.
And then got angrier when he paid the same amount to the guys that came late in the day.
“Why’d you pay the guys that worked only about an hour the same as us!” the first workers argued with the farm owner.
The farmer replied to them, “Friend, I didn’t do anything wrong. Didn’t you agree with me to get paid what I paid you?”
They nodded albeit still a bit tiffed.
“I chose to give the last of you the same as I gave you. It’s my reward to give. Aren’t I allowed to that? Or are you envious because I’m being generous?”
There are a lot of comments on these same news stories of how angry people are that others got the same rewards for doing less than they did.
“Why should those kids get free lunches when I work so I can make enough money to feed my own damned kids?”
“Why are my taxes being used to give free Thanksgiving dinner boxes away to all those people? Where’s my free turkey dinner? I worked hard so I can celebrate!”
“Why the hell is that guy paying for total strangers’ layaway stuff? I worked hard to buy my Christmas gifts. Why should someone else just get free Christmas gifts if they didn’t have to work for it?”
“Why are we giving away free scholarships because they’re Black… Indigenous… poor… I chose to pay for my own college. Why should they get free money?”
“Why should we cancel student debt? I worked hard every day so I could pay down my own debt and all these folks just get their’s wiped clean?”
”Black Lives Matter?! Why should they get all this focus when All Lives Matter?!”
The problem with the intensity of American individualism is that we believe any grace given to others is an injustice compared to what we, ourselves, worked hard to achieve.
We believe there’s an injustice to pulling ourselves by our own bootstraps but others don’t have to.
We, Americans, get angry over other people’s grace.
One of the great hypocrisies of American Thanksgiving is we are thankful for what we have been able to achieve by our individualism and think of the grace of others as an injustice unworthy of any semblance of thanks.
Be thankful for all graces—not just our own.
That grace ultimately comes from the same place. He should be able to grant it anyway he chooses. It’s his grace to offer.
