My colleague, Alasdair MacIntyre got it right. When you talk about “justice,” the real question is whose justice? All accounts of justice are subservient to some social order, some vision of the world, of what ought to be, where we're all headed, of who’s in charge.

Christians get our accounts of justice from Jesus.

Just after telling us that the "first will be last and the last will be first" (an odd sense of justice, that one!) in this morning's gospel Jesus says, a far1c1er has a job to do. His vineyards are ready for harvest. So he goes downtown and hires some people, agreeing to pay them the usual daily wage. He takes them to the farm. They go to work. End of story.

But if you've ever heard Jesus on a roll with stories, you know that his stories hardly ever end when we expect or as we ex…