No, It's Not Fair, But Bear With It In Christ

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Course 2023

Have you or anyone you know ever said that some fine or traffic ticket or concert ticket price or something else “isn’t fair”? I suspect that a show of hands would involve almost everyone who is here today. That cry, “it’s not fair!” is one of the most common judgements passed in our culture. But if your response to the complaint is, “tell me the reasons this isn’t fair,” you might not get as emotive an answer. The fine might have involved not paying a license fee on time. The traffic ticket was for a moving offense, and those always involve increases in auto insurance rates. The concert ticket price on the day of the concert is huge because it’s sold-out at Ticketmaster ® and you’ve got to pay scalper fees. In maybe 90% of the cases, “it’s not fair” really means “I feel bad, really bad, because I don’t want to take responsibility for a mistake I made.”

In the case of the Israelite exiles to whom our prophet Ezekiel was ministering, they complained against God because they thought their exile, and other plights, were due to sins their parents or grandparents committed before the exile. Ezekiel, like our psalmist today, tells them that God does not work that way. You commit the crime; you pay the time, or the fine, the penalty. You have to take responsibility for your own error, and use your mind to determine what sin you committed that caused you to deserve a penalty even up to and including spiritual death. Confess, repent, and be reconciled to God. Get your head wrapped around God’s Law of love of God and neighbor, and stop messing up, empowered by His grace.

In our Gospel, Jesus is speaking to the Jewish leaders, scribes, Pharisees, priests, Levites. He has been observing their behavior for two or three decades before accepting the Father’s call to a ministry that will get Him rejected and killed. He makes His points with stories, some hypothetical, and others drawn from contemporary events. Parables. He asks them a pointed question: which of these brothers actually did the Father’s will? It wasn’t the guy who talked the talk and then went off to the gaming table, was it? No, the one who did the Father’s will is–surprise–the one who talked rebellion but actually did what the Father requested. That’s why Jesus reminded them of John the Baptist and his ministry. He was pretty stark in his preaching, “repent and follow the Law of God.” And the sinners did that, and will get into heaven, while the hypocrites just talk and don’t actually do anything other than make themselves comfortable and rich. Maybe that hits a little too close to home in this congregation, but it’s Jesus teaching this parable, not I.

St. Paul tells us the real way to heavenly glory. You stop letting your passions, your emotions, rule your life. Forget the old song that asks “how can it be wrong when it feels so right?” That’s unmitigated baloney. Your mind must rule your emotions, not vice-versa. The real question is “how can it be right when God says it’s wrong?”

No, Paul uses a contemporary hymn to tell us the way to glory: put on the mind of Jesus Christ. He was equal to God. We say it every Sunday–consubstantial with the Father. But Jesus considered resting in that state to be a kind of rip-off when it came to glory. He emptied Himself of all that divine glory and took the form of a doulos, a low-rank slave. He was born not in glory but in servitude, in a Bethlehem stable. Then as man He humbled Himself even more, allowing Himself to be arrested, accused, tried and convicted of treason–talk about not fair. He was guiltless but took His humility all the way to the most disgraceful of deaths, execution on a rude cross. But by acquiescing in that humiliating injustice Christ brought justification to the human race, and in His Resurrection from death opened the gates and paved the highway to the kingdom so that it is accessible to everyone through faith and sacramental life.

That’s the servant attitude that God is challenging us to adopt, to live out every day, as witnesses to the love and divine determination to save us. In a real sense, we suck up the incidents that are not fair and offer them with Christ’s sacrifice so that we may attract other human beings to become servants, too.