Do You Really Want to
Get What You Deserve?
Matthew 20:1-16
My father
told me this story on more than one occasion, usually to instill in me an
appreciation for the privilege of having a job.
On October 29, 1929 the Stock Market crashed and the Great Depression
began. His father, my grandfather, like
so many of that generation found himself suddenly wrenched out of work at a
time when no economic safety net existed.
There was no severance pay, no social welfare programs and no food
stamps. If you did not work, you did not
eat.
The only
factory in town manufactured fine china, and in the 1930’s there were not a lot
of people investing in gravy boats and tea sets. There was some work though, and the way the
factory parceled that out was to send the foreman out to the front gate every
morning and pick out the dozen or so workers he would need for the day. Usually there were hundreds huddled around
that gate hoping against hope that this day they would be chosen. My grandpa was one of those men.
If he was
chosen, Dad said Grandpa would come home at the end of the day proud to provide
for his family’s dinner. If he was not,
his shoulders sagged and his head drooped as he plodded back up the hill with
nothing to offer. Dinner that night
would have to come from the family garden and sometimes that was pretty meager.
My father has never forgotten the
helplessness and hopelessness of those years.
It motivated him and his whole generation to work as hard as they
possibly could in order to provide for their families. Their children and grandchildren and great
grandchildren have reaped the bounty of prosperity this country has enjoyed
because of men and women like these.
Jesus
parable points to the experience of men like my grandfather. He honors their
desire to find work and worth and dignity.
But, they are not the main point of the story. This parable is often called “the workers of
the vineyard”, but it is not about them.
It is about the master of the vineyard.
It is about God, and it has something very important to teach us about
the nature of God. It will tell us what
God is like if we but listen. Let us
prepare ourselves to listen. Let us
pray:
Lord, faith
can be such a paradox. The first shall
be last and the last shall be first is difficult to understand. Open to us your Word so that we might see
that “with you all things are possible.”[1] Amen.
Jesus said,
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the
morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.”[2] In this introduction something odd
immediately jumped out to Jesus’ audience. Most likely they looked at each
other startled, because that was not the way it worked in those days. In fact, it still isn’t. Did you catch the anomaly?
“In the
early morning the landlord went out to hire workers.” We learn later in this story that he has a
steward, what we would today call a manager or foreman, and it would be his job
to handle mundane matters like hiring day laborers. Landowners issue orders to the foreman at the
beginning of the day and receive the foreman’s report at the end of the day,
but they do not interact with day laborers, the lowest people on the economic
ladder of the day. In Jesus’ story, this
one does.
What does
that tell us? It tells us that the
master of this estate does not stand far off from those who work in his
vineyard, but becomes involved in their lives.
He talks to them, and even appears to care about them. If the master of the vineyard represents God,
and everyone believes he does, then what does that say about God?
It says
that the God we worship, unlike the god described in a popular song, does not
just stand off in the distance watching us.
He is not the lord of the manor who peers through binoculars from the
veranda at the workers sweating in the field.
That is the god of theism, the god Thomas Jefferson believed in, but it
is not God as Jesus taught. God is not
distant, but incarnate in the world in which we live. This willingness to get involved will lead to
some misunderstanding between God and his people. This familiarity will lead some to contempt.
Meanwhile,
back at the vineyard, “After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily
wage, a denarius, he sent them into the field.”[3] Now, Jesus’ audience nod in agreement. This made sense. It happened every day. A simple contract was
drawn up: a day’s pay for a day’s work.
A couple of
hours later the landowner, not the foreman, went back to the marketplace to
hire some more workers. He finds them
standing there. They are standing, not
sitting or slouching. They are not
vagrants who only want a handout. They
want a job not only for the money, but also for meaning and dignity. They want to be seen as having value, so they
stand tall in order to present themselves well to the master of the
vineyard. Don’t miss that verb
“standing” because it will be repeated again and again.
This time the terms of the simple
contract are not so clearly spelled out.
Remember the day is already a couple of hours along now, so the master
of the vineyard promised only to “pay whatever is right and fair and
just.” Remarkably, they take him at his
word. They don’t haggle. They don’t negotiate. They believe that whatever they receive from
him at the end of the day will be just.
It will be fair. In the church we
call that faith.
So, we
learn that the very least we can expect to receive from God is justice. God
will honor his promise. This was a big theological shift for those who came
from other faith traditions. For example
the gods of Greece and Rome were always arbitrary. They played with people’s lives like pieces
on a chessboard and you never knew what to expect from them. You could reap a rich harvest or a lightning
bolt. You just never knew. The gods operated on whims and could only be
placated by sacrifice. They were not known for justice.
God
described throughout scripture and in this story is first and foremost fair.
You can rely on his word and on his promise.
Those workers who climbed in the back of the master’s pickup truck
believed that. That’s why they got in.
Well, this
scenario was repeated again and again throughout the day. When we come to the last trip to town,
something new enters the story, or rather is left out of the story. It’s five
o’clock now and the workday ends at six.
Even now we still find people standing in the heat of the day, all day,
waiting to be called to work. How
desperate is that? Who is going to hire
them at the end of the day, and what would they get for that anyway? Still, they are there because their longing
to be seen as people of worth is that strong.
This job means something.
This time
when the master of the vineyard pulls up, he doesn’t even promise to “pay them
what is right or fair”. He doesn’t
promise them anything. He just says,
“Follow me”. And they do! This last group doesn’t even have a promise
to hold onto. There is no contract at all.
They don’t ask, “what’s in it for me?”
They just trust the man himself.
They believe at the end of the day he will do right by them.
Maybe that
is why this group gets paid first. They
trusted the master for who he was and not for what he promised to give them.
Finally, the foreman has something
to do. He gets to hand out the
paychecks. The master tells the steward
to hand out “the wage”. In other words,
everyone will receive the same amount regardless of how long they had labored
in the vineyard. The steward, though, is the only one to hear this instruction.
So, as each
group comes forward from last to first, those who had been working all day saw
that those who barely broke a sweat got a denarius. Immediately, they conclude that the master of
the vineyard is extremely generous to give those latecomers a whole day’s pay. They figure if those guys get a denarius for
working an hour, when it comes time for them they’ll make out like
bandits.
Their great expectations are dashed though, when they rip
open their envelopes and find only the denarius they had been promised. Remember what I said in the beginning that the
master took a big chance by coming directly to the would-be workers rather than
sending an intermediary. Familiarity can
breed contempt, and that is exactly what was born that day.
Those who
had been working all day complained that those who worked less, in effect, got
more. At least that’s the way they saw
it, and that’s the way you’d see it if your company operated that way. Even in the Church it’s hard not to look at
it like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
So, when
someone comes back from what the Bible calls “the far country”; when they have
been living a promiscuous lifestyle but now desire to return to the Father, to
confess Christ and become an equal member of the church, the older brothers
among us, look up in protest and complain, “Wait a minute Lord, these many
years I have been serving you, and I never disobeyed your command.” Why should they get what I deserve?[4] That’s not fair.
I remember feeling that way some almost some thirty-five
years ago. I attended a prayer breakfast
in Irwin, Pennsylvania. This was a
rather large event filled with important and influential people. The speaker was Chuck Colson, convicted
Watergate conspirator. He had just been
released from prison, but while he had been incarcerated he received and
accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.
Because of his infamous notoriety, this particular conversion made all
the papers, and that’s why he received the invitation to speak before this
august group.
As he stood
up, I remember feeling jealous and even a little angry. I thought, “Why should he be up front instead
of me?” I’d graduated from seminary. I’d
taken courses on preaching. I had been a Christian longer than he, and I, you
will be happy to know, had never been convicted of a felony. Why, I’ve never even been charged with one.
Yet, people were making a fuss over him and not me.
I made the
mistake of confessing these feelings to a friend of mine, who promptly reminded
me of today’s lesson. He pointed out,
“This is not about you.” It is about the
master of the vineyard calling people with different spiritual gifts and
experiences to serve in different ways.[5] The question is not “what’s in it for
me?” The question should be, “What’s in
this for God? How may I best serve the Lord?”
For the
early workers in the vineyard “what’s in it for me” was first and foremost on
their minds, and that’s why they believed they had been cheated by the
Master. Why, would they think that? They had received the wage they themselves
had agreed upon, so they really had no argument there. So, it wasn’t really the
master’s justice they were questioning.
It was his grace.
Grace just
drives some people crazy because folks don’t seem to be getting what they
deserve, and in a perfect world everyone should get what they deserve. Isn’t
that right? The problem with the
assumption that “everyone should get what they deserve” is that we may not be
wise enough to know exactly what other people deserve, or that we may not be
objective enough to be able to correctly determine what we deserve. Being an arbiter of justice is not an easy
thing to do. Ask any judge in a
courthouse if that isn’t so?
Certainly
those early workers had confidence in their ability to determine what was right
and fair and that’s why the Bible says they were “envious because the Master
was generous.”[6] That’s what’s driving this whole
exchange. The early workers envied,
coveted what the latter workers received, and this can be a dangerous thing. That’s why God concluded his Ten Commandments
with a prohibition against coveting.[7]
Coveting
always begins by comparing. We compare
what we have with what others have and it feels like we always come up
short. It’s a funny thing, but more
often than not we choose to compare ourselves to those who seem to have more
than we do than to those who seem to have less. We will never compare our homes
to the shacks you’ll find clinging to a hillside in any third world
country. Even if you have traveled to
one of these countries and seen the conditions in which the majority of this
world live; and even if you have prayed a prayer of thanksgiving, “there but
for the grace of God go I”; and even if you promise yourself you will never
take the blessings you have for granted again – you will. As long as you are in the business of
comparing yourself with others, you will.
That’s why
gratitude has such a short shelf life. We are thankful for the blessing we
receive until we see someone whose blessing seems better. Then thanksgiving wanes and is replaced with
envy.
That’s the
dilemma that prompted this parable in the first place. The reason Jesus pulled this story from his
pocket at this time was in response to the disciple’s question, “Who then can
be saved?”[8] And that question fell out of Jesus’
teaching; “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”[9]
The disciples
rightly recognized there will always be those who have more than you and there
will be those who have less than you.
Whenever we measure ourselves with a yardstick created by someone else,
we will always come up a day late and dollar short. Whenever we measure our lives with the life
of someone else we see as smarter, richer, or stronger, we will always have
that feeling of being cheated.
That’s why
Jesus began and ended this parable with the paradox, “The first will be last
and the last shall be first.”[10] What did we learn about the first? They were the ones who asked, “What’s in it
for me.” They were the ones who got the
contract down in writing. They were the
ones who were comparing what they got to what everyone else was getting. They thought they knew what others
deserved. They believed they knew what
they deserved. They saw themselves as
the arbiters of justice, as the ones who have the right to determine what is
right and wrong.
What did we
learn about those who came last? When
the master came to the marketplace and bid them, “come and follow and work”
they did. There was no contract. There was no fine print. There was no
negotiation. No haggling. They didn’t
even have his promise to pay them what was “right and fair”. They just trusted the master. They had faith in him. No matter what happens, by the end of the
day, they believe he will take care of them. They believe in him and that
evidently is all God asks.
Let us pray:
Lord, you
bid each one of us to come and follow and trust that at the end of the day you
will be there to take care of us. Grant,
O Lord, the faith to follow and work in your vineyard until our day is finished
and we receive from you not what we deserve but
what you graciously desire to give. Amen.
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