The Two Daughters is based upon Matthew 21.28-32
This is a very easy parable to retell in modern terms, because it uses a situation that repeats in every generation. The writer Paula Gooder jokingly calls it: ‘the parable of the wet towels’. We could even have it as: ‘the parable of the dirty socks’.
What’s being asked?
In our society, we’re most likely to remember similar episodes as wet towels, or taking out the rubbish. Maybe it was tidying our sock strewn room. But what is the father really asking his sons to do? He’s asking them both to help in the family business.
The sons are being asked to pull their weight in an adult job – but they react like teenagers. ‘I don’t want to! I want to laze around all day. Let’s just tell Dad I’ll go; he’ll never check.’
The modern equivalent?
What would a modern equivalent of the vineyard be? In the culture of Jesus’ day, the family home was also the headquarters of the family business. Even in a modern rural area of the UK, it would be perfectly possible to ‘translate’ this parable almost unaltered. The teenagers might be living on a farm, asked to help in the fields, or help with the sheep.
In modern urban areas, both parents frequently do jobs that teenagers can’t help with, not even if the parents do work from home. However, a shop is one type of urban business that often does have an attached family flat and does have jobs that youngsters can do. Whether it’s a mini-supermarket, a take-away food business or a cafe, teenagers can work there. Additionally, there’s a combination of parents needing extra help and children needing extra pocket money. In family shops, children often do help out from their teens.
Sons or Daughters?
In the parable, this is a father with two sons. What each son is being asked is hard work, probably in the hot sun. But it’s also training him for the day when he will inherit his share of the family farm from his father. It’s training him for his adult life. The vineyard, in the Bible, is often a metaphor for Israel. One of the underlying images in this parable is of God asking people to do His work in Israel.
Jesus might have used daughters – women star in other parables. But in Jesus’ time, the work daughters were asked to do would be within the house. The female images of Israel tend to be of the bride eagerly awaiting the bridegroom; Jesus probably picked sons because the ‘work’ imagery associated with sons was more appropriate to his point.
If we’re retelling this parable to people outside the church, we can’t expect them to recognise ‘vineyard’ or ‘bridegroom’ as coded imagery. Furthermore, sex-based splits between jobs in the Western world are now mostly social, rather than legal. Nowadays, a father with two daughters could ask them to work in the vineyard, just as a mother might ask her two sons to help in the house.
Unhelpful changes
One thing I would suggest (in a retelling) is that we shouldn’t give the parent a son and a daughter. Whichever way round you go, the dangerous implication is that either men or women are less likely to respond to Jesus’ words, more likely to pay lip service. Keeping the two children the same sex puts the emphasis on the choice, rather than the gender.
Another suggestion is to be wary of making this parable into one in which a father orders his two daughters into the vineyard. Jesus did live in a very patriarchal society, but that’s not what this parable is about.
Mother or Father?
One of my standard jokes is that Jesus talked so much about God as Father because fathers, by and large, want their children to be adults. Mothers, on the other hand, have a tendency to always see their children as five (even when those children are fifty-five).
Jokes aside, there are occasions when the Bible uses female imagery for God. So swapping the ‘father’ of the original parable for a ‘mother’ is perfectly possible. The question – in a time and place where either a father or mother might ask sons or daughters to do some work – is why? What good purpose does it serve to change the ‘father’ to a ‘mother’?
One possible reason to do that would be if you were aware that your audience struggles with the image of God as father. Their images of ‘father’ are of someone absent, distant, or even abusive. They might not ‘read’ the father as making reasonable requests of his children.
Another possible reason might be retelling this story for very young children. Even today, small children are often far more familiar with the idea of a mother telling children to tidy their room! Jesus originally told parables that related to people’s everyday experience – then took that experience in a new direction. For small children, maybe we should be trying to tell parables set in their everyday life. Rather than parables that sound like fairy stories.
Prostitutes and Tax Collectors
What’s the connection with the prostitutes and the tax collectors? Was it simply that Very Respectable People were complaining about Jesus eating with rabble like that? So Jesus told a parable which can easily be read as the ‘prostitutes and tax collectors’ being like the first son? The ‘pharisees’ on the other hand, were like the second son – good at lip service, but not at doing. They gave God the Father honour, but only with words.
Jesus’ point, therefore, was that these despised groups – notorious for going their own way and not paying attention to God’s wishes – were the ones who’d made a late life decision to believe John the Baptist and follow God’s wishes. Admittedly, we might wonder how many prostitutes chose to follow that life (especially in the Roman Empire, where many prostitutes were slaves). But in Jesus’ time, they were certainly treated as if it were entirely their choice.
What would they be today?
Who could the ‘tax collectors’ be today? Modern tax collectors, in most First World countries, are a harmless bunch of civil servants. In Jesus’ time, tax collectors were people who, firstly, worked for the hated Romans rather than for the Jewish community they came from. Secondly, they seem to have worked ‘on commission’. If the Romans wanted the equivalent of £1000 in tax, the tax collector was expected to demand £1100 – and then give the Romans their £1000 and live off the extra £100. In practice, that meant everyone felt they were paying more taxes than they had to just so the tax collector could make a living. Rich tax collectors, therefore, were especially annoying.
That’s why I’ve changed ‘tax-collectors’ to loan sharks. Tax collectors today want to collect the taxes people owe, but to return anything overpaid. Loan sharks, on the other hand, want to collect the money they’re owed – but will keep any extra interest. Like the tax collectors of the early Roman Empire, they’re notorious for adding on more than they need. ‘Prostitutes’ on the other hand, I’ve simply changed to ‘streetwalkers’. Just as in Jesus’ time, prostitutes are often blamed for ‘choosing a life-style’ when the reality is that they’ve been forced into it.
This does lead us to ask why Jesus used a group who’d often been forced into prostitution to demonstrate the real-life application of this parable. What he is talking about, however, is not ‘give up everything and follow me’, but belief and repentance. Is he selecting the two most despised groups in Jewish society? Or was he deliberately picking one group whose choices were very limited – to show that some choices are always open to us?
Whatever our circumstances, we can choose to work in God’s vineyard?
Previous parable: Ravens and Flowers (Matthew 6.25-33)
Next parable: Outside the Gate (Luke 16. 19-31)
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