Divine Vineyard Owner, help us to see all people,
ourselves included, with the eyes of your gracious love. Amen.
I was listening to an interview recently with a professional taster. Doesn’t that sound like a fun job – people are so interested in your tasting notes that you can make a living out of tasting things and telling people what you taste? Well, someone asked him why it is that we can taste something today and then taste the exact same thing tomorrow and it tastes different. His answer was that the food or drink hasn’t changed, rather, we have. Our mood, how hungry we are, our hydration level, what our allergies are like, when the last time we brushed our teeth was, and what else we’ve had to eat or drink that day all change the chemistry of our mouths. The taste hasn’t changed, but the taster has.
The
fancy word for this idea and field of study is “hermeneutics” and it’s an important
concept for us to understand. Think of looking through a microscope to study
something. We can do all sorts of things to manipulate the object – we can put
it under ultraviolet light, we can use dyes to see different parts of it, we
can dissect it. And those are all valid approaches of study. When we think
about Scripture, those are things like considering the socio-historical
context, or the genre of the passage, or translation issues. But there’s another
essential part of interpretation, not only of Scripture, but of the news, our thoughts,
and our emotions.
We
have to not only consider what is under the microscope, but also what is above
it. That would be us, the observer. If the microscope’s lens is broken or
flawed, it’s going to impact what we see. And if we are ignorant of the lens through
which we are looking, we can easily mistake an opinion for reality, a bias for
a given, a perspective for totality. In science, this is referred to as the “Observer
Effect,” made famous by the example of Schrödinger’s cat. Or as our
professional taster would say, the recipe didn’t change, we did. To put it more
bluntly, avoiding the question of hermeneutics and our bias is like drinking orange
juice after brushing your teeth and insisting that something is wrong with the
orange juice.
You
all know that I’m an adjunct professor of preaching at Hood Seminary. I’m
teaching a class this semester and we’ve just had some lectures on hermeneutics
– the question of what we bring to Biblical interpretation and how that
influences our preaching of Scripture. That’s an example right there of why it’s
important to think about what we’re thinking about. If I were not teaching this
class, I can pretty much guarantee that you’d be getting a different sermon
this morning. There’s nothing wrong with being influenced by things, but it’s
downright dangerous to be ignorant about our biases.
As
a case study for how hermeneutics matters in Biblical interpretation, I walked
the students through the very Gospel text from Matthew that we heard read this
morning as an exercise in hermeneutics. I think that’s part of the mastery in
Jesus’ telling of this parable – this is a parable that messes with our
hermeneutical assumptions. To be sure, we’ll consider the text, but let’s also
consider who we are in relation to this parable. What makes this parable so
convicting is the way that it functions as a mirror. Yes, it tells us something
very important about God that we’ll get to later. But before the parable does
that, it also tells us something very important about ourselves based on how we
react to it.
Broadly
speaking, there are three groups of people in this parable; three sets of
laborers. We have the early to work, the middle of the day conscripts, and the
johnny-come-latelies. Instinctively, all of us connect with one of these groups
of people, and that tells us a lot about how we see ourselves and the world.
As you might guess, a lot
of people don’t like this parable. Why? Because, they say it’s just not fair.
But fairness is a social construct. Or using folk wisdom, assumptions are just
planned disappointments. This first group sees themselves as the industrious
and hardworking group. They are the glue that holds society together, they
think. Do they question why it is they were among the first to be hired? Probably
not. Maybe it was because they looked the part – young and strong. Perhaps it
was because their parents were known as hard workers and the landowner is
hoping the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. We don’t why this first group
was the first to be hired, but based on human psychology, it’s a safe bet that
they didn’t ask that question of themselves either. They likely thought that
their past performance and reputation were the reason why they were the first
group to be chosen.
If you want to know what
someone who was hired early in the morning looks like, you’re looking at him. Never
had a semester where I was not on the Honor Roll or Dean’s List, never was
given detention, never late for class. For me, or people who see themselves as
deserving and hard workers, this parable just isn’t fair. Why do they get for
free what we earned? We do also have to realize that if we identify with those
who grumble about fairness in this parable, others may well see as snobbish,
judgmental, or entitled – so we need to see the other side of what we think is
simply a good worth ethic. There’s nothing wrong with reading the parable through
the lens of the first workers, so long as we realize that is our lens and not the
only way to read this parable.
Because there are also
the groups that were hired at nine, noon, and three. These are the people that keep
their heads down and do what is asked of them. Maybe some of them see
themselves as part of the early group, but they’re also not going to complain
about what other people get because they’re also getting more than they might
have expected when the paychecks are handed out. If you are the sort of person who
likes to stay under the radar, you might well appreciate these people who stay
out of the drama later in the parable. The concern with seeing ourselves with
this group is that they’re just lukewarm and content with mediocrity. Yes,
sometimes good enough is good enough, but sometimes, when it comes to the
dignity of others, it’s worth standing up and raising our voices. While minding
our own business can be a good thing, we also have to remember that we are also
our brother’s and sister’s keepers.
And then there’s the
final group that comes around at the end of the workday. Why they arrived late –
we don’t know. It could have simply been the luck of the draw. It could have
been the landowner’s fault – why is he so inept as to not realize how many
people he needed to hire at the start of the day? It might be that this last
group had a reputation for being lazy, for always playing on their phones.
Maybe they were older, or disabled, or weak.
Whatever the reason for
their being hired at the end of the day, we all can imagine what it’s like to
be passed over or to be the new kid on the block. We’ve all had times when we
weren’t sure it was all going to work out, times when we thought we had run out
of chances. If we see ourselves in this group we see the end of the parable
from a very different perspective. We wonder why the first group can’t rejoice with
us in the fact that we get to go home and happily announce to our family “Good
news! We can eat tomorrow.” Day laborers had no savings accounts and there was
no Galilee Helping Ministries that would be serving a hot meal for them. If
they did not find work, they would beg; and if that didn’t work, they’d starve.
More than we realize, many
of us belong to this final group. God’s promise of blessing was made to Abraham
and to the children of Israel. It is only by grace that non-Jews like us were
brought into the promise by Jesus. In this parable, the Church is one of these five
o’clock laborers. Unfortunately, the Church often has a greater sense of
entitlement than we do gratitude. And it’s the same story in our nation. The
vast majority of my ancestors lived in Ireland, Italy, or Romania as recently
as last century. As we know from history, there was tremendous discrimination
against immigrants from those countries in the early 1900s. Things have changed
dramatically though. Even though my family arrived here relatively lately, I’ve
been given all of the privileges one can imagine, and significantly more than the
indigenous peoples of this land or those who came here centuries earlier in
cargo ships against their wills. If our hermeneutic of entitlement does not
allow us to see the grace and favor that we have received, then we really need
to work to find some new lenses through which we view ourselves and others.
When the vineyard owner
pays out the wages, the grumbling group says “You have made them equal to us.”
How telling that statement is. There’s no gratitude for receiving the daily
wage, only a comparison to others. This is how idolatry works. Instead of
keeping our eyes on the God who provides, we focus on what others have. It’s
not a stretch to say that Original Sin is about scorekeeping. When the serpent
tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, it was using this strategy – “why
don’t you have what God has?”
With apologies to my wife,
there are no accountants in the Kingdom. We get into so much trouble when we
count that which is, by definition, infinite. The vineyard owner had more than
enough to make sure that everyone got all they needed, but, for some of us, enough
isn’t enough unless we have more. As we’re preparing for a stewardship campaign
that will call us to examine our relationship to money, it’s worth remembering
that, somehow, expenses always rise to meet income, which means we never get to
rest and enjoy the enoughness that we are given.
Some read this as a
parable about fairness and justice, but it’s not. There’s a commentary called “The
Gospel in Solentiname,” which is a series of islands just off the coast of
Nicaragua. A priest decided to present stories from the Gospels to the people
there and record their responses. The result is a hermeneutical lens that most
of us would never wear, but is one that is far closer to the people who lived
in the poverty and oppression to which the Gospel was addressed. When it comes
to this particular parable, the people don’t see the wages being fair at all.
Fairness, they say, would be if the laborers received not only their subsistence
wages, but a share of the actual profits. While the parable does call us to question
our own economic system, it’s bigger than that. It’s not so much a parable
about how we see the world, but rather how God sees us.
The vineyard owner
responds to the grumbling with a question – “Are you envious because I am generous?”
That’s a paraphrase, not a translation, of the actual text. The Greek text says
“Is your eye evil because I am kind?” In other words, is your lens so scratched
and dirty that you can’t see the goodness of the Kingdom that is happening
right in front of you? Is our hermeneutic so twisted that we can’t see the Good
News of the Gospel? Are we so selfish, myopic, and competitive that Good News
for someone else has to be seen as bad news for us? Are we so focused on
fairness and righteousness that we overlook mercy and compassion? Are we so confident
that we only focus on what we have earned instead of being grateful for all
that we have freely received? Do we see the world through our own sinful
lenses, or the through the lens of God’s love? Do we have a hermeneutic of deserving
or a hermeneutic of grace?
Ultimately, this parable
is worthy of the name “Good News” because it tells us something about how God
sees us. God has a hermeneutic of grace, seeing us through the lens not of what
we deserve, but rather through a love that has no limit. And the place where we
see this love is in the Laborer that was sent into the vineyard for us and for our
salvation. Jesus toiled in the scorching heat of human sin and endured the
Cross for those who have done even less to earn our salvation than those five o’clock
hires did. And for that work, Jesus was given Resurrection – the gift of
abundant and eternal life in God, and that Resurrection reality has graciously been
given to each of us. If we could only trust that God sees us all – our friends,
our enemies, our neighbors, and ourselves – as beloved children who are given a
seat at the Table of God’s grace.
