So, the question of fairness versus justice came up recently in our small group and I thought it might be convenient to post my thoughts here, or rather reprint them. Below is a sermon I gave at the New Haven Vineayrd 1/18/04. FYI, this is simply the manuscript off of which I preached this sermon, so there may be ellipses where I filled in more—and surely some typos—but I think nevertheless this is probably enough on the issue... Perhaps jmd will chime in with some comments and I'll get to/have to respond. Anyway, here it is:
Fairness is the “F-Word” of Community
Whenever I think about fairness, my thoughts take me back to growing up in my family with my little sister, Bethany. Some of you may not even know that I have a sister—I do—she’s a senior in high school right now, 7 years younger than me. Despite my sister being so much younger, I still spent much of our childhood tormenting her. I think my crowning accomplishment as the Divinely-appointed pester-er for my sister (that’s what big-brothers are, you know) was when my sister once went running to my mom, shouting, “Mommy, Matt called me a tattle-tale.” The banter was pretty one-sided. I mean, if a 12-year-old loses a battle of wits with his 5-year-old sister, he’s in some trouble. But that didn’t stop us from arguing. Neither did our age difference leave us lacking a common ground for understanding our quibbles. The rules were well-defined, though they had never been explained to either of us, and, frankly, looking back at it, it’s amazing how quickly my sister caught on to the basic currency of our disputes: fairness. Somehow we both understood from an early age that there was a big score sheet in the sky that kept track of how many French fries, how many turns on the computer, how many dollars of allowance, and how many pieces of Halloween candy each of us received. The object of the game was to get an advantage on that tally; your only defense from your adversary taking what you wanted was an appeal to the judge—mom or dad—on the grounds of fairness. Pretty much every swindle that I ever perpetrated against my sister centered around an issue of fairness. We each had our own bag of M&M’s, but I pretended that mine had run out and weaseled a few pity candies from my sister, only to later, after Bethany’s bag was gone, pull out my own bag and relish in her view every last one of my own candies, once thought lost. Not only was fairness the grounds of any appeal for restitution from my parents, not only did it serve as the universal legal principle of childhood, but it seemed that more than an extra piece of candy or any other advantage gained, unfairness was perhaps the greatest offense. Looking back on it, I don’t think either of us cared nearly as much about the item at stake as we did about the fact that unfairness was going to be perpetrated against us.
You don’t have to teach kids about fairness; I’m sure any of you who have young children can vouch for that. It seems to be an instinctual part of human nature, a concern that we each get our fair share. And let’s not pretend that the appeal of fairness ends by the time we become adults; fairness always holds sway over us. Particularly in American culture, fairness is a sort of quasi-religious ideal. Problem is, as each of us hears from an adult at some point in our lives, “Life isn’t fair.” Even worse, I'm going to argue this morning that God isn’t fair either. Don’t believe me? Let’s turn to Matthew 20.
Matt. 20:1 ¶ “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.
Matt. 20:2 “And when he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard.
Matt. 20:3 “And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place;
Matt. 20:4 and to those he said, ‘You too go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ And so they went.
Matt. 20:5 “Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did the same thing.
Matt. 20:6 “And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing; and he said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’
Matt. 20:7 “They said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You too go into the vineyard.’
Matt. 20:8 “And when evening had come, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last group to the first.’
Matt. 20:9 “And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius.
Matt. 20:10 “And when those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; and they also received each one a denarius.
Matt. 20:11 “And when they received it, they grumbled at the landowner,
Matt. 20:12 saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’
Matt. 20:13 “But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius?
Matt. 20:14 ‘Take what is yours and go your way, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you.
Matt. 20:15 ‘Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’
Matt. 20:16 “Thus the last shall be first, and the first last.”
I remember when I was growing up my sister had these little Christian videos from the days before Veggie Tales; the series was called Mr. Quigley’s Village. And one of the episodes was entitled “That’s Not Fair!” and was a recounting of this story, centering around a communally grown watermelon. Mr. Quigley invited first the porcupine, then the monkey, and finally, the bear to be a part of his project growing this watermelon with the promise that they could each help him eat it when they were done. One by one the characters heard Mr. Quigley’s offer and then responded singing a happy little song “That sounds fair, that sounds fair, I’ll start working over there, ‘cause that, that sounds fair…” Well, when all that work was done and the little bear who had watered the watermelon everyday found out that the porcupine who just planted the seed and thereafter did no work on the watermelon got to eat just as much as she did, her tune changed—literally. Mr. Quigley then explained to them—like the vineyard-grower in Jesus’ parable—that the watermelon was his and he could give it to them however he wanted. I don’t think this story—either Mr. Quigley’s or Jesus’—ever convinced my sister or me that this whole process was fair. And, really, I don’t think it is. Fair is the same hourly wage, pay proportional to the work you’ve done. But the vineyard-grower’s pay scheme is radically different. At the end of the day, no matter how long each man has worked, he receives a day’s wages. The question for the vineyard-owner doesn’t seem to be how much each worker deserves, but rather how much each worker needs. It is on these grounds that the vineyard owner says in verse 4 that he will give to the second shift of workers whatever is right. So the vineyard owner gives each man the same amount: a day’s pay at the end of the day. The vineyard owner is unfair, but entirely just.
Isn’t this how God has dealt with us? Without Him, we are lost, aimless sinners, unable to live holy lives. Paul makes it clear in Romans what we deserve: “the wages of sin is death.” If God were to pay us fairly for our deeds, we would die and be eternally separated from God. But God, in his mercy, sent His Son to die for us, and secure for each of us, regardless of what we deserve, exactly what we need: relationship with God that leads to eternal life. What appears at first glance to be a lack of fairness is in the end a higher sense of justice and a deeper love for the individual. Fairness is everyone gets what they deserve; justice is everyone gets what they need. Fairness is the first stay first and the last stay last. Justice is the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
This is why I tell you this morning not simply that God is unfair, but also that we should give him thanks and praise for dealing so unfairly with us.
But if this is the case, why are we so obsessed with fairness?
I think the primary reason we love fairness so much—and you need to hear this—is that fairness provides a mask behind which we can hide our selfishness. I see this in my own life all the time. There are dishes to be done and I don’t want to do them. If I go to my wife and simply tell her, “Hannah, I don’t want to do the dishes and, frankly, I consider my time more valuable than yours; please wash the dishes,” I’m not likely to get very far. Oh, but if I invoke fairness… “Sweetie, I took out the garbage; could you please do the dishes tonight?” I can mask the fact that really the issue boils down to me not wanting to wash dishes and instead make it appear that I am an impartial arbiter of fairness. It’s like “Well, gee, Hannah, I’d love to do the dishes, but, see, that just wouldn’t be fair…” Really, my concern is for myself, not for what’s “fair” or “right,” though using such language saves me from having to come to terms with my selfishness.
Does this make sense? Does this resonate with you? If it does, what we said at the beginning is starting to make sense: that God Himself does not share our value on fairness. In fact, throughout Scripture, he regularly shows Himself as utterly unfair—or maybe it would be better to say, like in the parable of the vineyard, more than fair—and He encourages His followers to emulate Him in this respect.
Love trumps Fairness
It was in the area of my personal relationships that God really started rocking my world with this fairness-unfairness stuff. A bunch of us—11 of us—were sharing a house on Lake Place in New Haven, the house came to be called affectionately, the Porter House on the basis of a dubious claim that Cole Porter had at one time lived there. God did amazing stuff in the lives of every member of that community that year. The community offered support and a safe environment for us as we all made our way through our first year out of school. However, it was not all easy. As it turned out, living which 10 of your closest friends did not end up always being as fun as it originally had sounded. The main problem, frankly, was the whole living together thing. We had three separate apartments, one for the 3 girls, two for the guys, but shared a common kitchen, had a central cooking schedule, shared rent, utilities, grocery bills, etc. We wanted a deep sense of community and working together on so many of these basic things was a great way to help create that community. The real problem was that it worked all too well. Our lives were entangled; we were dependent on one another. And, as if we were one big newly married couple, we all found that there were annoying little things about each other that we had never known before. Little things quickly became huge issues. More and more, God made it clear to us that fight for love, community, and fellowship was going to be won or lost on the battlefields of cooking shifts, chore assignments, grocery trips, home improvements, and the like. I think we were all caught a little off guard by how small the challenges seemed, and appalled by how difficult they were to master.
It wasn’t more than a couple days into the Porter House experience that the demon, Fairness, first reared its ugly head. So-and-so had worked on painting all day, so it was only fair that somebody else cook dinner. The problem was the “somebody else” had been picking up the dish-washing slack and felt indignant to be called upon again. I don’t have to recreate this situation for you. If you’ve seen the Real World, you can probably picture it. It was back to elementary school; the game was on and the only rule was fairness.
It was just as this was starting to heat up, just as I was starting to build resentment for some of my housemates whom I thought weren’t doing their fair share that God brought me to a passage in I Corinthians 6.
I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? But instead, one brother goes to law against another — and this in front of unbelievers! The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers.
-I Corinthians 6:5-8
Why not just be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? Man, that hurts. What is more un-American than just being wronged? When I read these words 3 years ago, they jumped off the page and stung my heart. Why not just be wronged? What did I really have to lose that God wouldn’t replace? God has promised us what we need, but I was living my life in the house as if there were a chance I would give too much and end up short. Why not rather be cheated? Now, I’m not talking about just letting people off the hook, enabling unhealthy behavior; being a doormat. It wasn’t about the other people in the house. At the moment I read this passage, God made it clear that the issue was me and my heart, whether I was willing to forfeit my “rights” in order to better love my friends in the house. Frankly, there wasn’t anybody in the house that wasn’t trying to do their part. The problem was that we were all wasting so much time keeping track of tallies on the fairness chart that we didn’t have any energy left to actually go about the business of loving each other as Christ had taught us. I was so worried about getting ripped off, getting the short end of the stick, that my hands were tied in terms of trying to really love my friends. Christ’s love is self-sacrificial, right? Well then, to put it crudely: when you love, on the surface, it will look like you’re getting ripped off. God was pleading with me in this passage to lay down my weapons in the Fairness wars that were raging and to just focus on giving, willing simply to be wronged, if that’s what it came to.
My motto in the house became “Fairness is the F-word of community,” which I’m sure has some of my old housemates here rolling their eyes. But over that year, I came to believe that. Fairness stands in direct conflict with love. For whereas fairness has me concerned about what I deserve, love has me looking for ways to forfeit what I deserve for the sake of others. This is self-sacrificial love. This is meekness. I knew that love meant laying down my life for my friends, but somehow that seemed easier than washing dishes I didn’t dirty or doing chores that weren’t mine. How often do we profess to be capable of following Jesus to the cross when we can’t follow him to the laundry room? Over that year at Porter House, God continually pushed me to make my convictions about him real in my small day-to-day relationships.
What about this community? How can we forfeit our “rights,” what we “deserve” for the betterment of another in this church? How could this community be bettered if more of us were willing to just be cheated if it came to that? Could we do that? Are we capable of making those small choices? Are we willing to just be wronged for the sake of the gospel and the sake of our brothers and sisters in Christ? Try that this week the next time you flinch at doing more than your fair share for your spouse, your roommate, your co-worker, your friend. The next time you are considering what the fair share of the work would be, ask yourself, “If it means I can better love this person, why not just be wronged?”
Justice trumps Fairness
So this all made good sense to me. If loving others meant in some ways, lowering myself, then fairness and equality were no longer things to seek in my friendships. But God wasn’t done with this fairness stuff. What about people beyond my circle of friends? Slowly, God began to show me that the same principles that governed self-sacrificial love in personal relationships were the principles on His heart regarding justice for the poor and disadvantaged.
God has long taught His people to go beyond fairness in public life as a community of faith. Perhaps the most strikingly example of this is in the Levitical teaching on Jubilee. The Jubilee is prescribed in Leviticus 25, if you’d like to read all about it later, but for now I’ll just lay out the basic system for us. The basic idea is that every 50 years, everybody gets their stuff back. Is that nice and easy? Talk about a quick fix for systemic poverty, right? Previously in the Law, God has prescribed an equal distribution of the land for each family in Israel, and in one fell swoop here He guarantees that this equitable division will remain. It even sounds, dare we say, fair…
But, then put yourself in the position of a wealthy man the year before Jubilee. You worked hard, you conducted your business shrewdly, and to pay their debts, your competitors literally had to sell the family farm. And now in twelve months all that property reverts to its original owner because God says so? That doesn’t sound fair. In fact, that sounds like the definition of unfair. It’s not like you dealt dishonestly with anyone, why should you be penalized?
God explains Himself in Lev 25:23: “The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and sojourners with Me.” Simple enough. The land is actually God’s and the Israelites are all—rich and poor—tenants on God’s land. The land is God’s resource to distribute as He sees fit and, as we saw in the parable of the vineyard, God’s justice is “to each as he has need,” rather than “to each as he has merit.” Wholly unfair, but radically just.
The simple fact of life which the Bible does not shy away from is that justice for the poor will often feel like injustice for the rich. And you get no apologies for it. The first will be last, the last will be first. That’s not a condemnation of the rich, but it’s letting them know—letting us rich folks know—that the raising up of the poor will mean a relative loss in position for the rich. That’s not fair; but it’s just. This is the radical heart change that God’s justice requires and brings about for us: Whereas fairness has me concerned about what I deserve, justice has me concerned about what those less fortunate need. Sound familiar? Justice is merely a special case of love. Love is putting all others ahead of myself; justice is specifically putting the powerless, the poor, the outcast ahead of myself because my resources are God’s and His mantra is “to each as he has need,” rather than to each as he has merit.
This starts to really blow your mind, right? No wonder no politician can figure out how to feed the hungry without taxing those of us who have enough or how to improve city schools without taking tax dollars from suburban schools. No wonder justice in issues of race or gender always sound unfair to white men like me. Globally speaking, all of us in this room are rich and powerful. Yet we’re all looking to have our cake and eat it, too. We’re looking for that volunteer opportunity at a convenient time so we don’t have to drop something else in our lives. We’re looking for that church ministry opportunity that will be fulfilling yet magically require no sacrifice of time or energy. We’re looking for that non-profit organization or political candidate that will solve our community’s social ills without costing us a penny. There is no such thing! And if there were such a thing, it would be a shame because we’d be able to pursue social well-fare without pursuing God’s justice, because God’s justice necessarily means that those in positions of power must learn to willingly abdicate their positions for the sake of the powerless. Sound ridiculous? Of course, but so does God dying on a cross for the sins of the world! We win by losing, lead by serving, live by dying, and love by sacrificing. That’s as true in our public lives as it is in our private, interpersonal relationships. If only we would learn to love the taste of this strange food of Christ.
So, I don’t think we’re going to have a ministry time today. I don’t know exactly where God’s going with this in your heart, but my question to you this morning is: Where is God calling you to take the short end of the stick? Where do you need to do some losing in your life? How can we together radically transform the world through our downward mobility? Is it in a relationship that’s gotten petty because of your concern for the tallies on the fairness score card? Is it in an issue of justice that the Lord’s put on your heart? Are willing to just be cheated for the sake of others? If the worship team would come up, I’d just like to spend some time in prayer and then we’ll sing a final song and close.