Radical Stories, Radical Christianity: The Laborers In The Vineyard

"Radical Stories, Radical Christianity:
The Laborers In The Vineyard"

Matthew 20:1-16
January 28, 2007

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to
hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage,
he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o”clock, he saw others
standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard,
and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon
and about three o”clock, he did the same. And about five o”clock he went out and
found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all
day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go
into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager,
‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the
first.’ When those hired about five o”clock came, each of them received the usual daily
wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of
them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled
against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made
them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he
replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for
the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the
same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?
Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be
last.”

I don’t know if you have ever had this experience—though I suspect you have—but I
wonder if you’ve ever been in a line, a long line, maybe at Department of Motor
Vehicles, and you’ve been waiting patiently or perhaps not-so-patiently, and in the
midst of your waiting you see someone walk up and cut in front of the line, or
somewhere in the middle of the line—but, wherever they cut in, they cut in front of you!
Maybe this person thinks they have a greater right to get their license renewed
because they’re in hurry—they’ve got an appointment they can’t miss, or the kids need
to be picked up, or whatever—they just know that their need to get their license quickly
is more pressing than your need to get your license quickly, at that moment. And you
and the rest of the folks in line behind this person just can’t believe the gall of this
person in thinking they can break the rules of the line—and we all know what those
rules are, whether it be at the amusement park, or the DMV—people should not cut in
line because that is just unfair to those who have been patiently waiting for their turn. If
I show up before you, you should wait to be served after me—that just seems fair to
me, and I think to most of us.

So, I admit it—there are very things that make me angrier than someone thinking they
don’t have play by the rules, and it angers me even more when the woman at the driver
licenses renewal desk doesn’t listen to our pleas about this person cutting in line—all
they care about is servicing the person right front of them—they don’t care about the
unfairness of it all, like we do! You and I—and even that person who cut in line—we
know the rules when it comes to waiting in lines, even in lines that seem endless. The
complete arrogance—I can’t even begin to tell you my frustration with people like that!

And yet, this parable that we just heard earlier, this parable about laborers in the
vineyards, seems to show me a God I would be angry with, a God who seems to not
play by the rules that fairness calls for. I think its that kind of outrage that people feel
sometime when they hear of someone having a deathbed conversion to Christianity—
sure, go ahead and have a lifetime of hell-raising, and then change your mind, now,
when the chips are down, so to speak—and I’ve spent my whole life being a follower of
this Jesus, being a good guy, following the “religious rules” and yet my reward, so to
speak, gets to be the same as some guy whose spent a lifetime being cruel, arrogant,
mean, carousing, etc, etc! Now, how fair is that! Of course, I realize that the whole
reward thing is not the point, that there is some value in being a good person on this
side of eternity in and of itself, but I think you can get that sense of some people’s
outrage at God for not playing by the rules—good people should get rewarded, in this
world or the next, and bad people should get punished, in this world, or the next. That
question about the fairness of God has been one of quandaries that both Jews and
Christians have struggled with—because we know that bad things happen to good
people, and good things happen to bad people all the time. And in our adult Sunday
morning Bible Study on the Apocrypha, we have these people of faith struggling with
that very question, all throughout these texts. It haunts the Jewish and Christian faiths
because we are religions that believe that God is good and powerful and yet it is so
obvious that the world is not so good, and God seems to be either indifferent or
powerless, and that is difficult for many of us to deal with—if God asks me to be good
and to make a difference in this world, why shouldn’t I expect the same of God?

Now, that eternal and unanswerable question is not going to be answered here, and, of
course, as I’ve said a couple of times already, the parables are meant to confound us
as much as they are meant to enlighten us. There will be no easy answers from the
stories that Jesus told his earliest listeners—and there will be none of those easy
answers for us as well. In fact, this parable is meant, I believe, to elicit the kind of
outrage from us that I experience in those lines when some idiot thinks they don’t have
to wait like the rest of us. The Gospel is not easy thing, it is not meant to satisfy our
sense of fairness—what it is meant to do is to remind us that God’s choice of mercy
sometimes supersedes God’s powerful desire for justice—and that, that causes
outrages us in many of us. And yet maybe that is what we are meant to learn from this
parable: that God’s ways are not our ways, and our work is to align our lives, our
choices, with God’s life, God’s choices, in this world. But first, let’s look at the parable
again…

You heard the story from Matthew, chapter 20—the story about the landowner who
hires some laborers in the early morning, and then hires more and more people
throughout the day, as he finds them hanging about, presumably unemployed at the
moment. At the end of the story, the landowner starts handing out the day’s pay to
each person, starting with those he hired late in the day. He hands out the usual
amount of money for a day’s worth of work to the ones he hired just, literally, at five o’
clock that evening, and so the workers who were hired much earlier in the day think
they are obviously going to get more because they worked longer. But it doesn’t
happen that way—they get the same amount—and to be honest, I think most of us can
understand their frustration. You work hard all day, you have borne the heat of the
day, as the text says, and you get the same pay that someone who has worked for
maybe 2 hours? It doesn’t seem fair to me—and it doesn’t because essentially, if a day’
s wage is $100, you’ve worked 10 hours for $10 an hour, while that guy who showed up
at 3 PM, they worked 2 hours for $50 an hour. Doesn’t sound fair to me! It would have
been more fair, I think, to have the folks who worked those two hours to get $20 rather
than $100 for the folks who worked 10 hours or whatever

But listen to what the landowner is essentially saying to those who are grumbling about
what has just happened: “He replied to the one speaking for the rest. ‘Friend, I haven’t
been unfair. We agreed on the wage of [$100], didn’t we? So take it and go. I decided
to give to the one who came last the same as you. Can’t I do what I want with my own
money? Are you going to get stingy because I am generous?’” (The Message) Its as if
the man at the Secretary of State’s office says to you and me—look, if I decide to let
people cut in line, that’s my business. I’m running this office, and I’ll run it the way I
want. You’ll get your license renewed, one way or another, so just shut up!” I think we
can make the leap that the landowner in this story is God, and that the disciples, which
includes us, are the folks in the vineyard, doing the work in the fields—that is a guess,
like all interpretations of Jesus’ stories are. But I think the question of what is being
handed out by the landowner to the workers is harder to answer, or to take a guess at—
but I do think there are some real clues to what it might be in the story.

First, whatever it is that the guy is handing out, we know that the way he is handing it
out, almost with abandon, it seems to outrage the other people who are receiving that
very same thing. I think it’s reminiscent of that gut sense of outrage you feel when you
see that woman cutting in line—it’s unfair and its wrong: that seems to be the kind of
outrage these folks are feeling when that landowner is indiscriminately handing the
same daily wages to people who started work at different times of the day. Secondly,
whatever it is that he is handing out, it is the sort of thing that is worth Jesus’ attention,
and worth the telling of this story, so its something big, something profound, and worthy
of the controversy surrounded by this “wage” being handed out by God, this wage
unfairly being handed out by the landowner. And thirdly, despite what the landowners
says, that whatever the workers may feel, he’s kept his word to them, and that he has
every right to run his business the way he wants, it still seems to grate at us, the
unfairness of it all, even if the landowner is right about keeping his word and his right to
run his business the way he wants to.

And my guess, my best guess, is that the gift, the wage, that so offends us in the
church, us in the vineyard, and even the beyond the church—what has so offended so
many of us is God’s choice of mercy, of grace, when it seems more fair for God to
choose justice, or punishment, for those who have wronged others, and thus have
wronged God. Instead of punishing those who cut in line, those who break the rules,
those who get paid much for little work, God chooses to welcome those cheaters to the
front of the line, God chooses to love the line cutters, and God chooses to pay a full
wage for only a quarter’s days work. It is outrages, these actions by God—its offensive
to those who have waited patiently in line for hours, its offensive to those who have
lived good and honest lives, and its offensive to those who have worked a full day,
those who have borne the heat of the day, as the parable says. You ought to be
rewarded for the good stuff and punished for the bad stuff—it should not be this way:
the world, the universe should be fair and equitable.

We all know the rules, you and I. We know that good people, people who work hard
and stay in line until its their turn should go before the people who think they have the
right to break into the line because they feel their need is more pressing than yours.
People who work long and hard should get more than those who have barely begun to
work. It makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s the fair thing, isn’t it? And you know what? IT
IS the fair thing and it is the just thing that someone who works long and hard in the
field should get more than someone who just started a few hours before the shift ends,
no matter the prerogative of the owner of the vineyard. The rules are right, the rules
are just…but you know what? The reality is that grace, this gift of unmerited favor, to
put it in traditional language, the reality is that grace is all about God not being fair and
just. The reality is that God seems to be obsessed with mercy, with inclusion, with
wholeness, rather than fairness, or with determining who’s in or out. No, this doesn’t
mean that we shouldn’t try to be fair or good, or just—we should do all those things,
and then, and then, know that God ultimately has chosen a greater way, the way of
love, and a way that says even those who are not fair, who are not just, who are not
good—even those people are included in the realm of God, the kingdom of God. And if
Christ does it, maybe in our quest for personal justice and personal goodness, those
things that we should always be striving for, we need to remember that there is even
something more important than fairness, than justice, and that is mercy, and that is
grace, something none of us really deserve, but that which God has chosen to give to
all of us, everyone of us. In the end, this is a God who says to us, “What I give you, this
mercy, this grace, is not based on what you’ve done but is based on what I have done
and what I’ve done is welcomed you because I love you, not because you were good
enough or because you stayed in your place in line, or you worked longer and harder
in the fields.”

At the end of this parable, Jesus says something that he says many times throughout
his ministry—“So the last will be first, and first will be last.” Our values, that good
people should always be rewarded more than bad people—for some reason, this clear
and good logic doesn’t work for God. And maybe the challenge for us is make to make
that divine value our personal value—and so in that moment of outrage at how unfair
others or even God is being, that we remember to be thankful to God for God’s choice
to be unfair with them and with us. I suspect if we really wanted complete and utter
justice, if we wanted God to settle the score fairly, I think that at the end of the story,
most of us fuming and angry people in line would find ourselves at the wrong of the
divine scale, or at the wrong end of the line. I just think the radical nature of grace is a
good thing, for “good” and “bad” people.   I think if we really got how amazing grace
was, how it includes all of us who don’t ever really deserve to be let off the hook for our
lack of action in this world—in our lack of caring for all those who are starving to death
in this world, or any other issue we ignore—if we really got it, grace, it would change
our lives, because we would see how much it includes, and we would do the justice that
we don’t seem to be willing to do even when we are threatened with punishment, in this
world or in the next world. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think grace includes us all—but
our acceptance by God is not the end—it’s the beginning and it means something, it
means something, as I’m seething about that person who cut in line a second ago. It
means remembering that God’s love includes him as well, like it includes me, and that
both of us need a lot of more grace and mercy than we need fairness. And so maybe
then my heart will stop beating so fast, and my red ears will return to their normal color,
and the steam will stop coming out of my ears. But its hard, you know, accepting that
this grace might include all of us, including that jerk who just cut in line—and yet, in the
end, I’m pretty sure we’re all going to be glad that all of us are in that line, wherever we
find ourselves, first or last, or somewhere in between. Amen.