Are my ways unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair? Ezekiel reports God asking these questions about Israel’s notion that what is just, what is fair is that children are punished for the sins of their parents. God does not condemn the child for the parents’ sins, but even forgives the sinner if they change their ways. That is what is just and fair in God’s eyes.
In my time I’ve heard many a protestant complain that Catholics believe you can be a sinner all your life and then just say confession on your death bed and get into heaven. That’s not fair to the people who have lived a righteous life.
Our Gospel points out that tax collectors and prostitutes can show the righteous the way to the kingdom. The subject of sex work comes up relatively frequently in the Gospels. I’ve noticed in the Bible study I attend that folks are uncomfortable talking about sex workers. Not that my fellow students of the Bible claim to be righteous, exactly, but they all think of themselves as “good people.”
But here’s the irony. There is now a glut in the sex worker market. It’s hard to find a job as a stripper. There are countless people on sex cams competing for viewers. As legal jobs you can actually survive on become scarcer and scarcer, people will seek out quasi-legal jobs.
Most folks I know under 30 can’t find full time work. Minimum wage jobs are near completely part-time in order to avoid having to pay benefits. And even then scheduling is such that most of them don’t even know how many hours they’ll get from week to week. That was true long before the pandemic.
Job scarcity and the dismantling of benefits are the unfair ways of the US. Compassion or respect for sex workers, is God’s fairness. How righteous are you if you look down on people struggling to survive - People who want to live? How can you love Jesus if you think the poor deserve their fate?
And the people I know personally in these situations are white. A fair amount of people of color I know working two minimum wage jobs, support themselves and their children cleaning houses in what would have been their spare time.
And there’s nothing more unfair than cops murdering black people when white people in the same situation aren’t even roughed up. I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord.
In a bizarre twist of thinking, individualism in practice actually does make people pay for their parent’s fate – makes them pay for generations. The rugged individual comes out of the myth of the frontier: America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top. If you believe that then disadvantages of time, place, education and money are just excuses.
In 1960, the year before I was born, there were 30 TV westerns running in prime time. The Myth of the frontier was in your face, unavoidable. In the following few years the Civil Rights movement was only seen on the news if at all. I enjoyed watching some of those Westerns and I don’t even think there was evil intent behind most of them apart from the profit motive. Also it’s important to be critical of what we absorbed as children and how that influences us to this day.
And so I ask you, who are your tax collectors and prostitutes? Who would you be shocked to hear lead the way the Kingdom of Heaven? Truly I tell you, the looters and the destroyers of property are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For their anger is righteous. They know one’s life does not consist of possessions, something that Jesus told us. They know more than most that all lives belong to the Lord. That despite the messages we have absorbed – their lives matter.
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