St. George’s Hill sits southwest of London in the suburb of Surrey. The price for a single-family detached house in the gated community in 2025, ranges from 1.5 to over 25 million pounds. St. George’s Hill is home to a world-class golf course, tennis courts, and several British celebrities.

However, in 1649, St. George’s Hill was a very different place. It was home to a group of radical Protestants who called themselves the True Levellers, but were known by everyone else as the Diggers. And they were so called because, as a report to the Council of State said, they had moved onto the common lands of St. George’s Hill and began digging up hedges and filling in ditches in order to grow crops to be shared among themselves and anyone who would join them.

As the report read, the Diggers, invited, “…all to come and help them and promised them meat, drink, and clothes”. The community did not last long. The Diggers, after enduring harassment, beatings, and arsons, were finally forced to leave St. George’s Hill by the wealthy landowners who controlled the government and who wanted the land for profit.

But in the Gospel of Matthew, we hear the story of a different sort of landowner.

20 ¹‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. ² After agreeing with the labourers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. ³ When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market-place; ⁴ and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. ⁵ When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. ⁶ And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” ⁷ They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” ⁸ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” ⁹ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. ¹⁰ Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. ¹¹ And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, ¹² saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” ¹³ But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? ¹⁴ Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. ¹⁵ Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” ¹⁶ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’

Matthew 20:1-16

“…are you envious because I am generous?” is how most modern English versions of the Bible translate that phrase, but the King James Version, as is often the case, is much closer to the Greek in which it was written. There it is translated, “…is thine eye evil because I am good?” 

Modern translations, in fact all translations of any text, are interpretations. One-to-one translations are unreadable in the target language. We know that. But, at times, translations are guilty of interposing a little too much of the interpreters own point of view, sometimes out a desire to make the text more readable, sometimes for ideological reasons, and sometimes just out of plain incompetence. In this case, I wonder if the more modern translators want to save the reader of the heavy lifting of having to deal with, of all things, a metaphor by cutting to the chase and letting us know that an evil eye in Jesus’ time meant jealousy, and that may be the a viable interpretaion.

However, good metaphors have more meaning than any sinlge interpretation can provide, and so my preference would be to leave them as they are and not try to “explain” them in the text. This allows us to discover different, and possibly richer, interpretations

So, in this case we could discover that for the ancients, the eye was the faculty of knowledge. To know something is to see it. To see it is to know it. In other words, our perception – how we see the world – forms our knowledge, and as St. Augustine among the ancients knew, and as modern philosophers are rediscovering, perception is never pure.

We never just see things. We see them as something. Our interpretation is formed by something deeper within us. All seeing is an act of interpretation. And we interpret by what we believe. This is how we make sense of the world, and the sense of the world is not just dropped out of the sky for us. In other words, all knowledge is first formed from belief. In other words, all knowledge is formed by faith seeking understanding.

And faith is formed through the telling of stories. In a 2017 column in the Guardian online newspaper, author and activist George Monbiot writes, “…stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals.”¹

We all possess a narrative instinct, an innate disposition to listen for an account of who we are and where we stand. And so the evil eye, if it does mean jealousy or envy, it means that because the worker’s perception, how they see the world, has become so corrupt, so warped, that they can’t see that how the landowner in the story deals with his workers is the way things are supposed to be. The last shall be first is the true state of human community.

There is a song about the diggers. It was made popular in 1985 by folk punk musician Billy Bragg. The title of the song is “The World Turned Upside Down”.

But whose world turned upside down by the Diggers was the world of the landowners. According the Gospel of Matthew it might be more correct to call the song “The World Turned Right Side Up” because were in reality it was the landowners, whose world was upside down. Their story had become corrupt. 

Salman Rushdie wrote a book for his son called Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It is one of my favourite books.

In this book, young Haroun’s father is a storyteller who has lost the ability to tell stories, and to recover his ability they must travel to the moon, because the moon is the source of all stories. And when they get to the moon, they see all the stories of the world flowing through an ocean as technicolor bands. But as they travel further, they notice that some of these bands are becoming murky, polluted, corrupted. Their own story is now the race against time to get to the source of the stories and fix the problem. 

Because if our stories are corrupt, our societies are corrupt.

And, uur society is corrupt.

George Monbiot describes how this has happened,

Our good nature has been thwarted by several forces, but perhaps the most powerful is the dominant political narrative of our times. We have been induced by politicians, economists, and journalists to accept a vicious ideology of extreme competition and individualism that pits us against each other, encourages us to fear and mistrust each other, and weakens the social bonds that make our lives worth living.²

The story of our competitive, self-maximizing nature has been told so often and with such persuasive power that we have accepted it as an account of who we really are. The early 20th century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber puts it another way in his seminal essay, I and Thou. For Buber, the modern world lives in the world of the “I” and the “it”.

We relate to things in this world, people in this world, as if they are “it”. “It” is a relationship of experience. The world and people in it are data to me, to be analyzed, classified, and theorized about.

“It” is the world in which we leave it to algorithms to decide if we are eligible for life insurance and to decide our sexual preference. And I am not against algorithms, and not even against big data, but in a world of “I-it” relationships, it is extremely dangerous. Because the “I-it” is the world where we are all merely observers. We do not participate.

And this is the world that we live in – it is the story of our time.

But, what if we don’t like that story?

I remember being in a philosophy class at the University of Winnipeg. I believe we were reading Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. As the professor was lecturing on the text, a student interrupted, voicing their objection to Hobbes’s theory.

As well they should have. Hobbes and his social contract theory is part of the story we’ve been told.

However, the professor said something that to this day I find fascinating in a philosophy class. The professor said, “Well, if you don’t like it, tell a better story”.

He didn’t say, “make a better argument”.

Tell a better story.

George Monbiot again, “A string of facts, however well attested, will not correct or dislodge a powerful story. The only thing that can displace a story is a story.”³

We have been told the story of “I-it” – competition, individualism, atomization, fear, mistrust of the other.

I want to tell a different story. A story about who we are and where we live. 

The landowner says, “…am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”. What is it that belongs to the landowner? The land, surely. The money to pay the wages, yes. But in a sense, the workers themselves. And I know that the idea of owning another person is problematic.

Within our history in North America of slavery and colonization, the idea of belonging to someone else is dangerous.

But who is it in this story that owns the other? The story is told by Jesus about the kingdom of God. And so it would be reasonable to suggest that the landowner in the story is Jesus himself. 

It is the man Jesus, the incarnate God, to whom we belong. The incarnate God who is with us, who is for us. We belong to this God, not merely because he created us, but because he came to dwell with us.

We belong to him not only on account of his power, but because of his compassion, his co-suffering with us. And furthermore, we belong to him because he belongs to us. In Jesus, God has taken on human flesh, our humanity.

He shares our nature, and we share his. He is in us, and we are in him. The theologian Graham Ward reminds his readers, when Paul uses the phrase, in Christ, he means in Christ.

Jesus is a space … a place … a home.

He is a home where a table is set, and dinner is ready.

And when we get to this table, we will see that there are three people already there. Jesus, the one who has invited us, his Father, and the Holy Spirit. In the Eastern Orthodox icongraphy the Trinity is represented by the three persons of the Trinity seated around a table, one in the centre, and two on the sides. There is no one sitting on the side of the table closest to the viewer.

There is a space open, a place. Someone else could sit in that place. There is room.

That place is for you.

You belong there, at that table. You belong at that table, because you belong to Christ. There is a place for you.

And there is infinite space at this table for others, for a whole community. Belonging to Christ means that we also belong to others, to each other. Just as Christ belongs to us, so we belong to others.

Jesus has left us a community, a church, a community of mutual belonging, a community not of “I-it”, but of “I-thou”, a community of encounter, of participation, where both you and I – “I” and “thou” – are transformed by this relationship.

By my count, in the nine short verses of Philippians 1:21-30 uses the word “I”, “me”, or my 16 times. He uses the word “you” 14 times.

For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again.

Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, and are in no way intimidated by your opponents. For them this is evidence of their destruction, but of your salvation. And this is God’s doing. For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well— since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.

Philippians 1:21-30

Paul’s letters are written as an “I” to a “thou”. An “I” that, regardless of what is best for him, will do what is more necessary for the “thou”. An “I” that is not only with the “thou”, but for the “thou”.

An “I” that is not content with mere solidarity, for solidarity is merely support for the suffering, but an
“I” that will suffer alongside, with, and even for the “thou”. The community that is the church tells us the story of our humanity, because it is the community of the “I-thou”, the community of mutual belonging, opened up to us, made possible for us by our mutual belonging in Christ.

That is a better story. It is a more compelling story.

How do we tell this story? Paul pleads with the Philippians, “…only live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ”.

The phrase ‘live your life’ is captured by the one word polytomai in the Greek. The root word of that is polis, the city. And the word means to be a citizen. Be a citizen worthy of the gospel of Christ. It is to live in the world. We belong to Christ, we belong to each other, and we belong to the world.

The Christian life is to be a public life. The King James Version says, “…let your conversation be as becometh to the gospel”. Our individual and common life in Christ is to be a public conversation with the world. Our lives communicate.

Our lives are what the French philosopher Jean-Yves Lacoste calls a lived faith, an opus de, a work of God.

Concerned with bringing prayer back into the realm of academic theology Lacoste writes, “…the unified task of one who prays and writes is a possible task, as is the unified life of the one who does not divide prayer and labor.”⁴. 

We pray and we work and we set the table.

In the 2016 documentary film “The New Economy”⁵ talks about various groups that are trying to move beyond 20th century capitalism and socialism, trying to find new ways of living in the world that aren’t built on the story of individualism.

One of these enterprises is a group in Vancouver called Sole Food Street Farms⁶. They take empty lots and parking lots in Vancouver and convert them to gardening space. Many of their workers who find joy and God in this work are the people of the infamous downtown east side of Vancouver, the poorest postal code in Canada.

At one point in the documentary, the founder of Soul Food is asked, why has this been so successful? His answer, “We just set the table, and people came”.

You have been invited to the table.

You belong at the table.

Who will you invite? Who would you like to be at that table with you in our prayer and in our work and in our invitation?

Invitation is how,

“From morn to set of sun,

Through the church, the song [the story] goes on”⁷.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/09/george-monbiot-how-de-we-get-out-of-this-mess ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Jean-Yves Lacoste, From Theology to Theological Thinking (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 61. ↩︎
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfCmc9GOYik ↩︎
6. https://solefoodfarms.com/ ↩︎
7. Hymn: “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_God,_We_Praise_Thy_Name ↩︎