Barbara Brown Taylor says that this parable is a little like the cod liver oil that mothers used to give their kids to cure what ailed them: you know it's good for you, you trust the one who is giving it to you, but that doesn't make it very easy to swallow even so! Most of us are born into this world with a huge sense of infantile entitlement followed by, at a very early age already, a seemingly intuitive sense of fairness and unfairness. It's like Charlie Brown's little sister, Sally, in the classic "Charlie Brown Christmas Special." You may recall that at one point Sally is writing a letter to Santa Claus and in the process generates an enormous list of toys she wants. Then at the conclusion of her North Pole-bound missive she writes, "But if that is too much to carry, just send cash." When Charlie Brown sees this and despairs over his own sister's greed, Sally indignantly responds, "All I want is my fair share. All I want is what I have coming to me."

Apparently that's all that most of us want, including long after we become much older than Sally Brown. We want our fair share. We've got rights and the number one right we have in life is the right to have our rights met. So we chafe, we champ at the bit, we stomp our feet and wag our heads when we spy apparent unfairness in life. We go to a high school reunion and see former classmates who never went on to college. We've got four, maybe eight years more education than they have and so get driven clean up a wall when we discover they made millions in a car wash business even as we slave away teaching humanities at a Christian college, barely making ends meet at times. Driving home after the reunion, we mutter to our spouse, "Life's not fair." When we are children, we count how many M&Ms Bobby got from grandma to make sure it's the same amount as we got. When we are grownups we do the same thing, albeit counting up other kinds of things than pieces of candy. We are very sure that in life, hard work should be rewarded, education should pay off, yahoos and bumpkins should not be better off than thoughtful people.