Abstract
This article focuses on Jesus’ parable popularly known as “The Laborers in the Vineyard” (Matt. 20:1–16). I propose that a psychoanalytic reading of the parable offers insights that are missing or overlooked in more traditional readings. In support of this proposal, I discuss the interpretation of the parable by Richard Q. Ford (1997) and his emphasis on the critical role of the listener in effecting the reconciliation of disputing parties; and then turn to Freud’s analysis of beggar jokes (Freud 1905/1960) to explore the generosity vs. envy issue to which the landowner alludes in his response to the complaining workers. I also employ Freud’s view that humor (Freud 1927/1963) reflects the superego’s comforting side to suggest that humor may assist in the effort to get the disputing parties to listen to one another and even perhaps to resolve their differences.
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Notes
If the Dean of the Seminary had been aware of my having done so, he may have challenged this “right” on the grounds that grades do not ultimately belong to the professor but to the institution. He would also have suggested that I was contributing to the problem of “grade inflation,” a term that also has economic associations. There was, in fact, a demonstrable connection between its emergence as a perceived “educational problem” in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the fact that the costs of a higher education had increased dramatically during this same time period.
If Stephanie had said that she felt she deserved a higher grade I would have given it to her. In fact, I was on the verge of asking her if she would feel better if I simply raised her grade to an A- or an A when it occurred to me that we were, in a sense, reenacting the parable of the vineyard workers, and I took this approach instead. Interestingly enough, my intention to give her whatever she asked for brings up another parable of Jesus, that of “The Widow and the Unjust Judge” (Luke 18:1–8). In my article “Pastoral Images: The Good Samaritan and the Unjust Judge” (Capps 2009) I suggested that the parable of the widow and the unjust judge “has the virtue of presenting a character whom we would not consider an exemplary model of moral behavior, and therefore it has the potential for engaging us at a deeper metaphorical level.” This is because it cannot be read as a simple moral tale: The judge, after all, “does not claim to be acting out of compassion, or a sense of altruism, or any other exemplary motive. On the contrary, he acted out of a rather selfish need to protect himself from being bothered and a fear that the widow could wear him out.” But this, I suggested, “is what makes the unjust judge so perversely appealing as a pastoral image.” I added that “there’s little chance that those who adopt the unjust judge as an image of the pastor will ever confuse themselves with God, unless, of course, they believe that there is a bit of the unjust judge in God as well” (p. 11). If I had thought of it, I might also have noted that although the judge did not act out of any discernible exemplary motive, he did exhibit a certain capacity for self-care. My decision to write about this parable was prompted by another grading case in which a student came to complain about his grade and proceeded to give me reasons (which he had written down on a sheet of paper) for why he should get at “A.” I interrupted him and told him I’d tell the Registrar to change the grade to an “A” but instead of expressing his satisfaction he proceeded to give me more reasons for why he should get an “A.” A bit irritated at this point, I stood up as if to suggest that our conversation was over. This was my first and only experience of a student leaving my office angry because I had given him an “A.”
Ford’s distinction here between what is held out to a person as lawful and what one perceives to be just is illustrated by a joke I heard when I was a young boy: A wealthy man disembarked from a taxi and handed the driver the exact fare. The driver expecting a tip, frowned as he examined the money. Noticing his frown, the wealthy man said, “It’s correct, isn’t it?” to which the driver replied, “Yes sir, it’s correct, but it ain’t right.”
In point of fact, he went out to the marketplace five times—early morning, nine o’clock, noon, three o’clock and five o’clock. This, of course, does not negatively affect Ford’s argument.
John D. Crossan discusses the honor-and-shame ideology in Mediterranean societies in The Historical Jesus (Crossan 1991, pp. 9–15). He quotes John G. Peristiany (1965), who emphasizes that “honor-and-shame are the constant preoccupation of individuals in small scale, exclusive societies where face to face personal, as opposed to anonymous relations are of paramount importance and where the social personality of the actor is as significant as his office” (quoted on p. 10). Thus, within the exclusive group, honor-and-shame relationships are well-defined, non-overlapping, and non-competitive. Outside the group, however, honor-shame rankings are insecure and unstable for “where nothing is accepted on credit, the individual is constantly forced to prove and assert himself,” and “he is constantly ‘on show’” and “forever courting the public opinion of his ‘equals’ so that they may pronounce him worthy” (quoted on p. 10). This security within the family and insecurity outside the family is true for all levels of society. A member of the lower classes is not, for example, exempt from this requirement to prove himself worthy (see also Capps 2010, pp. 98–103).
In Deadly Sins and Saving Virtues (Capps 2000) I suggest that the deadly sin of envy comes into its own in the “school-age” stage of the life cycle (roughly 5–12 years of age) because this is the stage when children become aware of the advantages (cognitive, physical, material, etc.) that some children have over other children (pp. 39–44). I note that envy is not always a bad thing, that there are times when it has positive effects, for example, it may be “a resource for protesting the injustices of life” and it may also arouse “the desire to acquire goods and qualities by meritorious effort” (p. 41). On the other hand, it may provoke the desire for or overt actions of revenge and it may also immobilize or render one impotent. I suggest that emulation is a better way of dealing with envy than revenge, though I also acknowledge that emulation does not eliminate natural injustices.
In the King James Version, the landowner asks the worker he identifies as “Friend”: “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” Belief in the evil eye was widespread in the Mediterranean region in Jesus’ day Crossan (1991) cites David Gilmore’s (1982) statement that it is “one of the oldest continuous religious constructs in the Mediterranean area” p. 7). Freud sheds light on the landowner’s question in “The ‘Uncanny’” (Freud 1919/2003) in his identification of the dread of the evil eye as attributed envy: “Anyone who possess something precious, but fragile, is afraid of the envy of others, to the extent that he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place.” He adds that one is likely to believe that the envy will reach a particular intensity and that this intensity will be converted into effective action, so that “What is feared is thus a covert intention to harm, and on the strength of certain indications it is assumed that this intention can command the necessary force” (pp. 146–147).
In his chapter on the motives of jokes Freud (1905/1960) notes that Heine was Jewish but converted to Christianity at the age of twenty-seven. He changed his first name from Harry to Heinrich when he was baptized (p. 173). Freud suggests that there is bit of self-parody in Heine’s creation of a comic character named Hirsch, a Hamburg lottery-agent, extractor of corns, professional appraiser, and valet of Baron Cristoforo Gumpelino who changed his name to Hyacinth. Heine explains that there was an advantage to changing it from Hirsch to Hyacinth for because he already had an “H” on his signet ring he did not have to have a new one cut (p. 172). It is also worth noting that Heine’s witticism about a Catholic priest and a protestant minister is virtually begging for a third—a Jewish rabbi—to transform it into a full-fledged joke (see Tapper and Press 2000).
In The Jokes of Sigmund Freud Elliott Oring (1984) discusses the relevance of Schadchen jokes to Freud’s personal conflicts relating to his prolonged engagement (four years) and marriage to Martha Bernays and of Schnorrer jokes to his personal conflicts relating to his reliance on wealthy benefactors during the years that he was a medical student.
In Jewish Wit the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik (1962), a member of Freud’s early circle, presents the third and fourth of these jokes in a section on “the sacred duty of charity.” Then, noting that “the cynical attitude in these Jewish jokes is not always shown only by the beggar,” that this attitude “sometimes emerges surprisingly in the person who is irritatingly importuned by the Schnorrer,” he relates the following joke: “One Schnorrer complains to a rich man that he has not eaten for three days. The millionaire says: ‘Sometimes one has to force oneself’” (p. 76).
Freud focuses on beggar jokes that reflect conflicts within the Jewish community. The following beggar joke has more to do with the fact that Jews are generally a minority group within a given society or culture: Two beggars are sitting on a park bench in Mexico City. One is holding a crucifix and the other a Star of David. Both are holding hats to collect contributions. People walk by and lift their noses at the beggar with the Star of David, and then drop money in the hat held by the beggar with the crucifix. Soon the hat of the beggar with the crucifix is filled, and the hat of the beggar with the Star of David is still empty. A priest watches and then approaches the two beggars. He turns to the beggar with the Star of David and says, “Young man, don’t you realize that this is a Catholic country? You’ll never get any contributions in this country holding a Star of David.” The beggar with the Star of David turns to the beggar with the cross and says, “Moishe, can you imagine, this guy is trying to tell us how to run our business?”
This consideration of possible scenarios raises the issue of the offensiveness of jokes. Readers may be interested in the experiment I conducted in a class of seminary students reported in my book A Time to Laugh: The Religion of Humor (Capps 2005, pp. 72–76) in which I tested Ted Cohen’s view in his book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Cohen 1999, p. 82) that you can find a joke objectionable without having to assert that the joke isn’t funny.
Interestingly enough, Freud (1927/1963) says in his essay on humor that the person who “adopts a humorous attitude towards others” acquires “his superiority by assuming the role of the grown-up, identifying himself to some extent with the father, while he reduces the other people to the position of children” (p. 206).
If this is what it is—an act of grace-we may view the parable—or, more precisely, the listening developed in this article—as clearing the way for an exploration of the implications of the more liberated understanding of generosity made possible by the landowner’s discovery of the more comforting side of his superego. Arthur W. Frank’s (2004) The Renewal of Generosity may be a useful starting point. By focusing on stories of patients and health care workers, Frank presents a vision of how “a renewal of generosity among the ill and those who care for them [may] resonate through the human community” (p. 1). In the concluding chapter, he asks how each of us may act to restore generosity, and although “responses to this question risk becoming lost in elaborations of institutional complications and menacing possibilities” (the latter of which are usually expressed in financial terms), it is essential that the practice of generosity is “guided by the principle that few of us can be more generous to others than we are to ourselves. To be generous, first feel grateful” (p. 142, emphasis in original). In his chapter on theological guidelines for pastoral diagnosis in The Minister as Diagnostician Paul W. Pruyser (1976) proposes the variable of grace or gratefulness, and notes that all the cognates or derivatives of the Latin gratia—i.e., grace, graciousness, gratitude, gratefulness—“have something to do with kindness, generousness, gifts, the beauty of giving and receiving” (p. 69; see also my chapter on “the graceful self” in Capps 2008, pp. 171–191).
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Capps, D. The Laborers in the Vineyard: Putting Humor to Work. Pastoral Psychol 61, 555–571 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-011-0422-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-011-0422-z