I read a neat book about the parables that did a materialist analysis of them from the perspective of poor farming peasants like Jesus’s audience presumably was. He thought we had a tendency to read these in a weird allegorical way that Jesus never tells anyone to do, and consequently we associate God with kings and bosses and powerful people that poor people in Palestine would have correctly identified as oppressors from an occupation that they had been trying to resist for decades.

He would say you’re right to pick up on how arbitrary it is and how angry it makes you feel because that’s what Jesus is also observing about life in his time. The parables end up being more of a reflection on effective praxis and resistance to a state that they were incapable of forcefully overthrowing.