Photographs

continued

At 6:00 P.M. when they all line up to be paid, these johnny-come-latelies, whose hands are barely soiled, are each given a denarius! The weary full-day toilers are jubilant: With so generous a boss, they're sure to get a big bonus. But when their turn comes, they too each get one denarius. Not only does the landowner make no excuses for treating all alike, regardless of their contribution, he reproaches these exhausted men for supposing they deserved anything more.

For me, as I say, it was a parable that rankled. Was Jesus really saying that God, the "landowner" of the story, will not reward lives of sacrifice in his service? I'd think of the Christians I was meeting around the world in the 1960s and '70s, people whose faith was incalculably costlier than mine. The family in Prague. Christians in Cuba who'd turned down offers of asylum in the U.S., to stay where they were needed. Members of house churches in China, where simply to possess the Bibles John and I were carrying in was to risk arrest.

And of how I would make a few notes about their experiences ... and walk away. Back to my comfortable church, my shelf filled with Bibles. Back where writing Christian stories took no courage.

I'd think of our friend Frank Alarcon, who gave up his job with the post office in El Paso to live across the border with the ragpickers on the Juarez dumps. Would Frank, in the next world, receive no greater compensation than someone like me?

The missionaries and martyrs down through the ages, the twelve-hour-day workers, would they really receive only a denarius like the rest of us?

I remember the morning when this seeming injustice cried out for an answer. John and I had just come back from another visit with Frank Alarcon in the floorless, windowless hovel he's pieced together from scraps of metal and wood in order to share the lives of the people he serves. Frank, it's true, in his lean-to on the dump, is one of the happiest people I know. Still, when he gets to heaven I wanted Frank to have an extra-stately mansion!

Where's your justice, God! I asked. And as I did, that morning, an answer came. I knew, all at once, what the denarius stands for.

That little coin is all there is.

Once more Jesus is trying to convey to his disciples the nature of heaven. How and where and when, he cannot tell them, just that they will be with him. He will give them himself - more is impossible. In him they will possess all things. They will know the Father as he does. For ever and ever they will know the perfect joy of heaven.

Though I've worked only an hour in the cool of the day, this much is offered me! The reward for those who've labored heroically and long can be no more.