Lectionary Readings
Gracious Lord, guide us to seek your truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
One of the great preachers of the 20th century said that there are two kinds of sermons that are difficult to hear: good sermons and bad sermons. Bad sermons are hard to listen to because they are a waste of everyone’s time. But good sermons are also hard to listen to because they point to truths that we’d rather hide from. Well, through today’s parable in Matthew, Jesus delivers a hard to hear, but very good, sermon.
Sometimes, as a preacher, it’s helpful for me to use my training and resources to take us into the world of 1st-century Judea so that we can more fully appreciate what’s going on. But this isn’t one of those parables. You can tell this story to a 4-year-old and they’ll immediately find the rub in this parable – “That’s not fair.” As an ambitious, rule-following, type-A person, I’ll tell you that I don’t particularly like this parable. I don’t like it because it offends me, it convicts me, it suggests that my way of evaluating the world is wrong.
As I said earlier this summer when we started reading parables in Matthew, these short stories by Jesus are not puzzles where we try to decipher the meaning of every detail. Nor are the parables fables that give us a short and sweet moral lesson. No, the parables are wisdom literature and they function something like a doorway. They allow us to see into the Kingdom of God and would have us enter into its reality. And given this reality, the parables are trying to move us from where we are into living under God’s Kingship. So, the parables are often told as traps that shock us into repentance – into seeing things in new ways. And this particular parabolic trap is loaded with our assumptions about fairness and justice.
We’ve all witnessed this parable one way or another. The adult child who dutifully cares for aging parents for years, making sacrifices to do so, while the other siblings can’t be bothered to help, and ends up getting the same share of the inheritance as the others. Or you go to your high school or college reunion and you learn that the student who was the biggest slacker in your class ended up opening a business that has done exceedingly well and now has a yacht and lives in a mansion, meanwhile you’re not sure how you can afford to send your kids to college and save for retirement at the same time. Or, in a closer parallel, you’re one of the top employees at your company and then you learn that, because you’re a woman, you only earn 82 cents for every dollar that men at your company make. None of this is fair. And to be very clear – discrimination is never acceptable and this parable ought not be used to condone it. But this parable does challenge our cries of “That’s not fair.”
In a 2012 book, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt advanced the theory that what divides us, particularly along political and religious lines, are not ideas like conservatism or liberalism. Instead, he says that there are six moral foundations that drive our gut reactions, and therefore determine our beliefs. He helpfully compares these six moral categories to our different senses of taste: sweet, sour, salty, and so on. And what we know, and accept, about taste is that everyone has a slightly different palate, but none of these palates are innately wrong, just different. Haidt argues that morality is like this – good people disagree about politics and religion not because they disagree with each other’s ideas, but because their moral “taste buds” are differently developed. And one of these moral foundations that he identifies is called “fairness” or “proportionality,” with the opposite being “cheating.” And, for most people, a lack of fairness leaves a bitter taste in our mouths.
This is deeply ingrained in us. There is a primatologist who wanted to see if monkeys had an innate sense of fairness. So, two monkeys have pebbles in their cages and if they hand one to the researcher, they are given a cucumber bite – a decent reward. After giving a cucumber to the first monkey, when the second monkey gives the pebble, it is rewarded with a grape – which, in monkey terms, is a vast upgrade from a cucumber. So, the first monkey very excitedly gets a pebble ready to give the researcher expecting a grape in return, but receives another cucumber while the second monkey continues to get grapes. Well, to mix metaphors, the first monkey then goes bananas. You can find the video online if you’re interested in seeing what our inner thoughts look like when something isn’t fair.
Against this accusation of unfairness, the landowner retorts “Friend,” and here “friend” isn’t a congenial word, it’s more like “buster.” “Buster, 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?” Jesus then frames the parable by closing with “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” Notice that the landowner makes no attempt to argue that the pay was fair, because it wasn’t. Nor was it even necessarily just – we have labor laws in this country that are more just than this. And this is where the trap of the parable springs on us – we think it’s a story about fairness when it’s actually a parable about abundance.
In human societies, fairness and rules are important. Just look at how cankerous this election season is – and essentially it’s a fight over who gets to make and enforce the rules. We love rules, even if what we love about them is finding ways around them without getting caught. But the ethics of the Kingdom are different – when Jesus Christ is Lord, it’s not about rules and getting what we deserve, it’s about abundant grace.
Let’s think about what it would be like to be a character in this parable, particularly, one of those who got hired just an hour before the end of the workday. Now, we don’t know anything about these laborers. But those of us who have ever been in a middle-school gym class know how it works. The most capable get picked first and the runts get picked last – and I say this as someone that was always closer to the back of the line than the front. Perhaps those who were still hanging around at the close of the day were there because they were elderly and couldn’t do as much work, or maybe they were disabled, maybe they were foreigners and there was some racism at play, maybe they had earned a bad reputation for being lazy. But I’ll give it to these workers – they were persistent. I’m not sure I would have waited around all day after having been passed over four times. Or, perhaps, these were capable workers, but the real problem is the landowner was really bad at figuring out how many workers he needed that day. If he had just hired them all at the start of the day, the whole problem could have been avoided; but then we wouldn’t have a parable, now would we?
The point is that we don’t know exactly why that last group was there all day without work. But when they are asked “Why are you standing here idle all day?”, they respond by saying “No one hired us.” They were ready to work. For one reason or another, circumstances prevented them from working. Maybe that was their past mistakes, or discrimination, or just bad luck. But, here’s the amazing thing about the end of this parable that gives us a reason to rejoice – everyone went home with their daily pay. Each of these laborers could walk in the doors of their homes and proudly tell their families that they had been hired and they had enough money to buy dinner tonight. It doesn’t matter that those late in the day didn’t really earn a full day’s wage, but they were given the dignity of receiving their daily bread.
With apologies to my wife, whom I’m very proud of for recently going back to school to make a career change from being a speech pathologist to an accountant, this parable tells us that there are no accountants in the Kingdom. And that’s because there’s nothing to count – all are given what they need. Grace, like being alive, doesn’t have a quantity to it – there’s no such thing as more or less loved. Grace, by definition, is infinitely abundant. It’s when we try to count our blessings that we get into trouble. That’s what happened to those who grumbled. They, like us, instead of being thankful for what they have, just had to go and compare themselves to others. And we see this when they complain, “You have made them equal to us.” They don’t complain that they received too little, because they didn’t. Their complaint is that grace erases the idea of their superiority, which they thought they earned “fair and square.”
See, if things were fair, only those who were hired at the start of the day would have gone home with enough to care for their household. Everyone else would have gotten a reduced rate. And we might say, “Well, maybe those working 12 hours should have gotten 12 times as much as those only working one hour.” But all that does is create economic inequality – and again, we don’t know on what basis those being hired first are being hired. So, the “fairness” question still might not be settled. That’s why this isn’t a parable about fairness or justice, it’s actually a parable about the dangers of fairness. One scholar writes, “Justice cannot be used to erect a wall between those whom God would join together.” In this parable, all of the workers are joined together as those given what they need. Justice, or fairness, would have divided them into different groups. Instead, they are all the recipients of the generous abundance of this landowner.
If we are offended by this parable, then that tells us more about where we think our standing is than it does anything else. For a lot of people, this parable is truly good news that God will not overlook them and give them less than what they need, because that’s how the world treats them. In the Kingdom, the last will be first and the first last. And all will receive the abundant grace of God. The grace-centric priest and theologian Robert Farrar Capon has written, in the words of the landowner, that, “Heaven, in short, is fun. And if you don’t like that, buster, you can go to hell.” Because, the truth of the matter is that if we reaped what we sowed and received what we earned, most of us would end up being a day late and a dollar short, and hell would be our only option if we didn’t want to be in the place where the last are first. But, by God’s grace, this parable shows us a different reality.
Parables are disorienting so that they can reorient us to the Kingdom. This parable challenges our infatuation with fairness and instead directs us towards God’s abundance. And in forcing us to rethink whether or not fairness really is the foundation we want to live our lives by, this parable introduces to us the possibility that this parable could, one day, not be something that makes us think “That’s not fair” but instead “That’s how it should be – everyone receiving enough from the abundance we have been given by God.” Because in the Kingdom no one goes home without the daily wage of grace. No one has to hang their head in shame from not being loved. No one receives less mercy than they need.
Grace might be shockingly offensive; but this is not grace’s fault, it’s that we’re not used to living under the gracious rule of Christ our King. This parable about the workers in the vineyard helps us to see the Good News that fairness is not a moral foundation of the Kingdom, and in its place, we find abundant grace. The last will be first and the first will be last – that might be hard to hear, but, by God’s grace, it’s exceptionally good news.
