Christ’s observations on the economy

It is estimated that perhaps a third of all restaurants and coffee-shops will go out of business, made unprofitable by necessary ‘social distancing’ regulations, and a natural reluctance of shoppers to risk infection. Others fear that the number of those claiming unemployment benefit may reach as many as three million, a figure that hasn’t been seen for over thirty years.

Particularly hard hit will be new graduates who, saddled with student debt, will find few outlets for their energy and skills.

Unemployment is a painful experience, shattering an individual’s self-esteem. Work brings dignity and pride, as well as remuneration; unemployment produces dejection and a sense of worthlessness.

Someone remarked that the most tragic words in all Shakespeare are ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’.

While Jesus did not endorse any political agenda, students have found two economic hints in his ‘Parable of the workers in the vineyard’ (Matthew’s Gospel ch 20).

The story relates to an employer who hires labourers at different times of the day to work in his vineyard. Although he had hired some early in the morning, he boosted his workforce at other times in the day, pointedly asking waiting workers, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’.(Matthew 20;6). At the end of the day, when wages were being handed out, all men received the same amount, whether they had worked twelve hours or only one.

Those who expressed surprise were met with the rhetorical question, ‘Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?’(vs 15).

There are deeper spiritual lessons in the story, but some students suggest that the parable expresses the right of every man to a day’s work. In the drama in the Garden of Eden, the disobedient Adam is told that he must earn his living by the sweat of his brow. ‘Cursed is the ground because of you,’(Genesis 3; 17) can be translated as ‘cursed is the ground for your benefit,’ since in the demands of labour a man is a co-worker with the God who is himself a worker. Jesus said, ‘My father is always at work...and I, too, am working’(John 5;19). After David Livingstone buried his wife in Africa, he wrote in his diary, ‘I turn to my work for such comfort as can be obtained there. The sweat of one’s brow is no longer a curse but a tonic.’

Further, each man is entitled to a living wage. Had the one-hour man only received a fraction of what the others received, how would he have met his family obligations? The revelation that in ‘Lockdown Leicester’ some textile workers receive less that £4 an hour is a stain on any society. It is a situation Jesus would not have tolerated.