The Thomas Avenue Home Depot car park in Phoenix AZ around 5am. Men squat in ones or twos or small groups seeking whatever shade the sparse Acacia trees of Phoenix’s ubiquitous car park desert plantings can provide against the merciless sun – which even at this hour of the day grows hot. A pickup truck drives slowly by – stopping at a group of men. After a brief exchange of words – the men climb onto the back and the pickup drives off. Maybe the driver of the pickup is in construction. Maybe he’s a farm foreman. Either way – he’s on the lookout for day laborers who abound at any number of pickup points in the carparks that dot not only the Phoenix landscape but towns and cities across the Southwest.

At whatever time of day, you can find scatterings of such men –seeking the only work easily available to them as below minimum wage undocumented day laborers. Numbers throughout the day fluctuate, yet, even towards the end of the working day some still patiently wait for the ever-decreasing possibility of finding a day’s hire. What of those who are not hired as the sun sets?

Manual work – now there’s an expression! It means to work with one’s hands. Unskilled day laborers who have nothing but their labor to trade have always been and remain vulnerable to the dehumanizing conditions we impose on those who have no power, no voice, no country, no other marketable skills.

Even for skilled workers who like the members of the United Autoworkers Union – or the Writers Guild of America – workers whose manual labor takes the form of an application of necessary knowledge and skill are forced to strike for an equitable share of the huge profits generated from their labor. It’s odd how even today capital refuses to recognize that the most valuable commodity in the creation of profit are the workers whose labor produces it.

And so it was ever thus as we plainly see from Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20 – in which he addresses the economic plight for a class of Jewish tenant farmers and small landowners who had become the losers in the 1st-century global economy. In the 1st-century – Galilee was a cosmopolitan mishmash where Syro-Phoenicians, Greeks, Roman incomers, and Jews mixed freely. It was the most fertile and productive agricultural region in the Middle East. Therefore, Galilee was also at the heart of the socio-economic upheavals that accompanied an agrarian revolution in which Jewish tenant farmers and small landowners were being displaced by the influx of Roman new money.

The Roman new money wanted to amalgamate land holdings to create larger farms to form more economic units to maximize profit for the landowners through scaling-up agricultural production to feed the Empire’s rapidly increasing population. As a story this one is not an unfamiliar one from the pages of history – where page after page evidences the eviction of tenant farmers and small landholders reducing them to the status of day laborers. Jesus would have encountered men standing idle in the marketplace – an ancient Home Depot carpark – awaiting hire to work the land they had once farmed.

This story opens with Jesus describing it to his listeners as a parable of the kingdom of heaven. In other words, he’s telling them that this is a story about God. Jesus’ stories about God take the form of parables – that is- stories that draw on the familiarity of the hearers’ everyday experience to expose them to an unexpected and somewhat disturbing conclusion – a kind of sting in the tail ending.

Read from our 21^st-century perspective this parable about a landowner presents him as a man with a strong social conscience. He acts to do what he can to stem the tsunami of injustice afflicting his society. He not only pays his laborers above the daily minimum wage but is concerned for the plight of those who as the day progresses have still not been hired. He goes out at intervals through the day and hires them in batches – promising them the same daily rate as those he had engaged in the early morning. So far, so good.

But the surprise comes when at the end of the day, he pays everyone the same amount regardless of the hours worked. I mean, who does that? How can this be fair we cry?

Both Jesus’ 1^st and 21^st-century hearers are confronted – if not affronted by this man’s behavior. How can it be fair to pay those taken on late in the day – working only and hour or so – the same amount as those who have been toiling since 7am. How can this be fair ?– we all ask. But remember, this is a story about God. The employer – standing in for God counters – why accuse me of being unfair when I am actually being generous. Those who have worked since sunrise receive exactly the wage I’d promised. In effect, my generosity is my own business and not your concern.

Wow, can God really be like this? Where’s then – the incentive to work hard and do the right thing if God is so indiscriminate in the distribution of his generosity? Assailing our cherished distinctions between the deserving and undeserving – those entitled and those with no claim whatsoever.

Jesus’ parables – his stories about God – are at their heart stories about justice. If aliens from outer space were to observe how we Christians talk about God, they might conclude that the thrust of God’s concern as evidenced in Jesus’ teaching is about personal sexual morality. They would be correct because that’s what most Christians and non-Christians believe.

Closer reading of the gospels reveals that Jesus never speaks about personal sexual morality in social life. The closest he comes is in his parable about the woman taken in adultery and we know upon whose heads his judgment is heaped here. The other example is his teaching on the indissolubility of marriage – but this is a teaching honored mostly in the breach. 99.8% of Jesus teaching directly addresses the societal and religious issues of his day reframed through the lens the kingdom’s justice revolution.

What is justice? Jesus shows us that justice is love in action. Justice has little to do with fairness and everything to do with generosity. Thus the right to earn our daily bread and the dignity of human labor is an aspect of justice viewed through the lens of the kingdom revolution – where Justice requires the dignity of human labor honored by the equitable distribution of both risk and profit.

On a baptism Sunday, we hear Jesus opening words The kingdom of God is like. He sets the expectations of the kingdom within this parable about an employer’s seemingly – to us – unfair remuneration of his laborers. Through it we learn that God is not interested in fairness at all. God is only interested in generosity. Like all stories of the kingdom revolution our conventional expectations of the way things should work – are upended.

We live in a world in which so much is governed by the principle – first come first served. In the workplace it’s enshrined in notions of reward for seniority – protections for length of service– and corresponding vulnerability of the last in to being the first out the door when downturn strikes.

The task of the Christian community is to reflect less the values and arrangements of the world and more the expectations of the kingdom’s justice revolution. In the kingdom there is no such thing as seniority nor greater reward based on length of service. In the Christian community there should be no discrimination according to status. Among us, there is only the status of the baptized. Baptism is the common denominator that elevates us all to the same level of significance in God’s eyes. Whatever distinctions we enjoy in the world – whatever lack of privilege and disrespect we suffer in the world – all inequality is leveled through baptism.

When Lucca is baptized in a moment – he will be admitted to a community of equals – taking his place with the rest of us who sit in the front row in the House of God. For my generosity is my own business and not your concern – says the Lord.