How do you build? There can be lots of reasons to build a structure, and lots of ways to do it. What is our first experience of building? At least for me, growing up about ten minutes from the beach, I think it was sand castles. I remember hanging out in the sand and building tunnels and castles with my brother. We would race to build it up, hoping that the rising tide would not knock it down. We are all builders. We build careers, families, institutions, etc. But the important question is: Why do we build?
We can build for our own profit, for the good of our family, or out of some weird obsession. How are you building? In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 20, Jesus proposes the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. The owner of the vineyard goes out periodically throughout the day and hires new workers for his vineyard. At the end of the day, they all receive the same wage, and this bothers the workers who have labored all day long.
We can look at Mt. 20:1-16, the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, to understand how we should approach our work, in light of the teaching of Pope Leo XIV in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
Often, we can be tempted to look less at what we are building and focus more on our own gains. We must be wary of the idolatry of profit.
Idolatry of Profit
Pope Leo XIV compares the building up of the Tower of Babel to the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Nehemiah. We know from Genesis that those building the Tower of Babel were trying to build a tower to heaven. They wanted to make a name for themselves and establish their own greatness. Their pride led to God’s punishment of the Flood. How does this tendency to put man at the center in the place of God look in today’s world? We can see this as the idolatry of profit.
In itself, profit has an important role to play in business. It is one way that we can measure the success of a business. Every business should be providing goods and services, and provide for the sustenance of its workers and their families. We see an idolatry of profit when the bottom line becomes the only criterion to judge the success of the company. Both workers and consumers are subordinated to the profits gained by the business.
More than Data and Performance
We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance (Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 10).
We are more than data and performance. We have to be careful about the logic of the spreadsheet, which puts our value and worth into boxes. This opens us up to
the risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise (Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 10).
We can see this temptation even in legitimate efforts to solve real social and environmental problems. We talk about avoiding pollution, but rather than avoiding it, we simply move it. We can see this in the mining operations related to producing batteries. Often, the necessary minerals are being mined in poor countries, and the conditions for the workers are substandard. We can feel noble because we are solving a problem, but we have to be careful to make sure we are not merely creating a new problem for someone else.
We idolize profit when we make our entire being about achieving specific results, rather than taking a step back and taking in the bigger picture. Too often, we get caught up in action without reflecting on the “why” of what we are doing.
Looking at the Gospel parable, we see the men arriving at the end of the workday. Those who arrive at the end of the day receive a full day’s wage. When the workers who have withstood the heat of the day are paid the same, they feel cheated. The temptation to make profit an idol does not belong only to business. We can turn almost anything into a transaction, even our relationship with God.
Building the City of God
Instead of focusing on our recompense, we should think about how we are contributing to the project. In the encyclical, Pope Leo XIV focuses on the Israelites returning from the Babylonian Exile. They are faced with the task of rebuilding Jerusalem. At Babel, those building the tower were human beings seeking their own greatness. Nehemiah’s project is to rebuild a community that has been devastated. Nehemiah is the one who stands up and commits to the task.
Let us choose the “way of Nehemiah,” which highlights the importance of working together to make the City of God a safe place for returning exiles. Rebuilding today means recognizing that, precisely from the plurality of voices and visions which, even though they sometimes remind us of the confusion caused by the diversity of spoken languages, a bright possibility emerges (Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 10).
Nehemiah doesn’t just give the people something to do. He helps them to have something to build together. The rebuilding of Jerusalem becomes an act of restoring a people.
We live in a time that is often marked by confusion. It is hard to see where the world is going. Nevertheless, we have a great opportunity to build for unity. When we worry less about what we are getting out of a particular situation and instead try to build others up, we can participate in building the City of God.
We can be tempted to see diversity as a risk. However, we can make it into a resource when we learn to listen and dialogue. We build common ground by doing so. One of the great experiences of going on a mission trip is that we get to know a community in a situation completely different than our own. However, we see that they are more like us than we could have imagined.
Choosing to Build Over Profit
When we choose to build instead of focusing merely on what we will receive, we begin to see our work differently. We begin to become the kind of workers Jesus describes in the vineyard of God: people who labor without constantly calculating their own gains. One of my favorite scenes in movie history is from the movie Field of Dreams. The protagonist, played by Kevin Costner, has built a baseball field at great personal cost and is questioning what he is getting out of it. The other gentleman asks him, “What are you asking, Ray?” He feels bad for it, but he says “What’s in it for me?” Our challenge as Christians is to stop asking what’s in it for us and just dedicate ourselves humbly to building up the Kingdom of God.
Like children building sandcastles on the beach, much of what we accomplish may be washed away, and we may never see the finished structure. But that does not mean that the building was pointless. We build because we have been invited to build by the one who has saved us. We don’t have to control the final result or calculate what we receive in return. We just have to be faithful builders.