Popular wisdom, Christ’s teachings do not mix

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund

Walking down the street, my daughter asks me loudly for the third time that day to name her father’s, her, and my genitalia as one of neighbors passes us on the sidewalk. A few days later in The Met’s Greek and Roman art collection, she surveys all the marble sculptures. I give her the history of one of the statues, and without pausing, she corrects me, “Actually, Mom, that’s a booty,” pointing to the work’s back end.

One of the guards giggled.

As funny and embarrassing as these moments can be, I know I have harder ones ahead. Not long from now, the questions she asks will shift from matters of the body to those of soul and mind. Contradictions of ideals and reality aren’t lost on children.

I remember some of my earliest struggles with the competition in my young mind between some of the folktale virtues and the meanings of Christ’s parables I learned at church. I was being raised in a culture that espoused the civic religion of self-sufficiency and do-gooder practicality popularized by public thinkers and almanac writers of the United States in its infancy, and I believed Jesus would have supported all their moral directives.

But Christ’s stories didn’t always jive with big, illustrated paperback versions of tales like “The Little Red Hen,” “The Lion and the Mouse,” “The Farmer and the Stork,” or “The Fox and the Stork.”

As much as I knew the expected thing to do was agree with both, I usually preferred the old, illustrated fables better because they communicated the kind of justice that espoused simple living uncomplicated by exceptions. If you don’t put in the work, you won’t reap a reward. Moreover, if you do the work, you will receive appropriate reimbursement. “The Lion and the Mouse” teaches that people who do good things for others to expect people to repay them with kindness. The others remind us that we are who we hang out with, and if you trick someone, expect nothing more in return.

Christ’s teachings often directly conflict with these lessons. In Matthew 20, Jesus tells a parable of day laborers who worked for an hourly wage. The owner of the vineyard looks for workers and hires them at different times, and at the end of the work day pays them all the same amount. One of those hired early in the day complains of unfair treatment, but the owner replies that he kept his word and can choose to compensate as he wishes. After all, it’s his money.

This, and the parable of The Prodigal Son, bothered me greatly. That kind of lavish, unmerited favor toward undeserving people seems weak and unjust. According to stories like “The Little Red Hen,” those who came to work late in the day should take home less than the ones who toiled all day in the sun. Or, those who worked harder should have at least been given extra.

Grace, as demonstrated by Christ, doesn’t work like that. The thief dying on the cross professing faith in his dying breaths will spend eternity in heaven, just as will Peter, on whom Christ built the church. Although Christ’s story deals with heavenly matters and the story of the hen and her lazy housemates is supposed to motivate workers, I don’t believe Christians want to look past their conceptions about how the treasured ideals of their culture work in order to learn about justice constructed outside a human framework. It’s too risky in its generosity and scandalous in its hope.

When I found the same version of “The Little Red Hen” that I grew up within the laundromat stack of magazines and books a few months ago, I almost censored my daughter’s options as we waited for our clothes to finish drying. I want to spare her from falling into that trap of believing that it’s all right to be smug about her accomplishments or expecting that hard work is necessarily rewarded in material provisions, because that’s what that the story teaches.

But I read her “the chicken story,” which she doesn’t fully understand yet anyway. Eventually, she’ll have to work out how to balance the individualism, pride, humility, and community, both in her spiritual existence and her civic participation.

I hope I have good answers if she comes to me with questions. So far, she trusts me with biological knowledge, but we’ll see how far it goes beyond that.

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund is a former news reporter for the Maryville Daily Forum, now living and writing in New York City.