He Didn’t Need a Far Country to Find the Father

What the parables remember about work, wages, and the people waiting to be chosen.

NOBODY HAS HIRED US

There is a story Jesus told about a man who owns a vineyard and goes down to the market to hire.

He goes at first light. He goes again in the middle of the morning. At noon, and again in the afternoon, and then near the end of the day, the eleventh hour, one hour of light left, and there are still men standing there.

He asks why they have been standing all day doing nothing.

Because nobody has hired us.

Every legend of the missing years gives Him a teacher. A monastery in Tibet. A school in India. An initiation in Egypt. He leaves Galilee unfinished, finds the wisdom other men kept from him, and comes back carrying it.

But Luke makes the secret-master story difficult before the silent years even begin. At twelve, Jesus calls the Temple his Father’s house. Whoever he met afterward would not be introducing him to the Father.

He did not need a far country to find the Father.

He may have needed one to meet everyone else.

Look at what he reaches for when he wants to make something plain.

A man building a tower sits down first and works out whether he can finish. If he cannot, he lays the foundation and stops, and everyone who walks past afterward makes a joke about him. That is a construction story with the mockery included.

A steward about to lose his job goes to his master’s debtors one at a time. A hundred measures of oil. Write fifty. A hundred measures of wheat. Write eighty. That is a man who knows what a written debt looks like and knows how it can be altered.

A woman with ten silver coins loses one. Each coin is worth about a day’s labor. She lights a lamp and sweeps until she finds it.

The eleventh hour carries more than it reads. The law required a hired man’s wages before sunset because his life depended on them. The men still standing at the eleventh hour had nearly missed the day.

Mark calls Jesus a tekton. Matthew uses the same word for his father. English Bibles usually give us carpenter. The word carried the broader sense of builder or craftsman. It is the root of our word architect.

Wages. Foundations. Debt. Tools. Hired men. The hour of the day.

A man’s stories come out of his hands, and out of whoever was standing next to them.

I wrote a story about those years. Two years of freight schedules and wage rates, what deck passage cost, which ports a working man could reach from that coast and in what season.

The first man he meets at sea is a crusty old sailor with two fingers gone off his left hand. The sailor tells the young carpenter his Greek is bad and gives him five words to have by morning. Rope. Sail. Wind. Water. Bread. If he does not have them, he does not eat the fifth.

No secret master appears.

Just one worker handing another the terms he needs for the job.

The years themselves are gone. Obviously. But what came out of them is a man who told a crowd about a vineyard and never stopped to explain the hour. Many of the people in front of him knew that market with the light going, waiting to be picked.

<3EKO

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Far Country is out today.

Book Two of The Nazarene Saga.

It begins on the sea and ends at the Jordan, before the water.

or

Paperback, Kindle, PDF, and EPUB. However you want to read it, I got you. And I just dropped the Kindle price of Book One, Son of Man, to 99 cents.

Now the work continues.

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P.S. The title is Luke’s. The younger son takes his journey into a far country. I spent a whole book retelling the parables at length, and the Prodigal is chapter one. You may know it. I call it Parables Unsealed.

Thank you for reading this work and supporting the mission.

I love you so.