Grace Isn’t Fair (That’s What Makes It Grace)

Sermon

People really do not like this parable! It flies in the face of everything we think is fair; it negates our belief that hard work pays off; it convicts us with that last line “…are you envious because I am generous?”

If Frederick Buechner and Lindsey are right, and parables are like jokes that Jesus tells, this is a pretty good one. The joke is on everyone who thinks they know what justice is; the joke is on everyone who thinks they can predict what God will and will not reward. In other words, the joke is on us. The question is: Are we laughing at ourselves as we hear it?

I’ll tell you, this is a meaty parable to preach on and I love it because it is so dang confounding. When I read it, I have no choice but to admit that it calls out certain behaviors and assumptions that I make, and it makes me wonder if I should be behaving and assuming differently. So let’s look a little more closely at things.

For day laborers in Jesus’ time, the system was rigged against them. They were almost always at the very bottom of society, and whatever caused them to seek work every day was likely the result of losing land or losing family. Because they didn’t have steady work, they were considered shiftless and unreliable.

But they were essential to the harvest, as most landowners did not employ enough people on a permanent basis to do the work in that particular season; indeed, the harvest was plentiful but the usual workers were too few. So these day laborers hung out wherever they would hang out and the landowner or his right-hand man would hire them, negotiating a wage that would be paid at the end of the day. His word was his bond, so the laborers expected they would get paid the amount agreed upon.

But—there’s an assumption on the laborers’ part that the more hours they put in, the more they will get paid, that those who worked ten hours in the fields would get paid maybe ten times what those who worked one hour received. Turns out, the joke’s on them. Instead of laughter, we get grumbling. Who can blame them?

As Jesus told this parable, not only did it raise questions about the value of work, but it raised the larger question of whether God is just. Is it just to pay those who work ten hours and those who work one hour the same amount? Why doesn’t God reward those who work hard?

Perhaps you have asked yourself that question now and then; I certainly have. That desire instilled in me as a child for fairness has never left. Sadly, neither has my childishness that goes along with it when I see something that I think isn’t right and I stomp my foot and clench my fists and shout to myself, “But that’s not fair.”

It’s the same sort of reaction we might have when we feel like people aren’t pulling their weight. We get that at church, of course—“Why don’t these fill-in-the-blank people step up?” It could be young people, it could be retirees, it could be new members, it could be longtime members, but when there’s work to be done and not enough people willing to do it, rather than question whether it’s work that we should be doing, we blame other people for not doing it.

Most of us here were raised with the idea that we earn our merit. As Gregg and I go walk with our daughter, Sarah, through the college application process, that becomes so very clear. Things like GPAs and SAT scores, extracurricular activities, and leadership positions all become currency that will determine if she and thousands of other kids will be accepted somewhere.

Work hard, volunteer for extra stuff, take the lessons, get the certification, and you will be rewarded. Show up at dawn and work till sunset and you’ll get more than the other folks. This parable turns all of that upside down.

In some ways, this parable lays out a tension between justice and grace, something we might know. As one scholar says, “[This parable] appears not to resolve the claims of justice into the wonders of grace but to highlight the contrast between them. The parable not only supports both justice and grace but insists that they are and will always be in tension with one another. Justice and grace cannot be reconciled with each other. They are both part of the character of God.” (Lewis R. Donelson, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4, p. 97)

Sometimes we want justice, like when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin for the crime of being a Black teenager walking through his neighborhood. We want justice for the mob that rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. We want justice when our car is totaled in a hit-and-run.

Sometimes we want grace, like when we’re pulled over for going 45 in a 25-mile-an-hour zone. We want grace when something we said that wasn’t meant to be heard was heard and our words wounded another person. We want grace when we miss a deadline and hope it’s okay to turn in the assignment, register for the event, make the appointment after we were supposed to.

Does this parable ask what would happen if the folks we want to get justice get grace instead, and the folks we want grace for get justice? I don’t think it’s a simple as that, but it does make one think: Who gets to decide who gets justice and who gets grace?

Perhaps we need to think about this a different way. When we say the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray, we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” We don’t say, “Give me and the people I like our daily bread but don’t give daily bread to the people we don’t think deserve it.” No. We pray for daily bread for everyone, whether their pantries are full or bare, whether they’re on food stamps or rolling in the dough, whether they have earned it or not.

That’s how daily bread works, or at least how manna worked for the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. You remember the story—God freed the people from Pharaoh’s tyranny and sent them into the desert for forty years as they made their way to the place God promised them. God provided food for them in the form of manna, a bread-like stuff that appeared with the morning dew. Everyone got what they needed; but if someone tried to hoard it or save it, it spoiled. Daily bread—everyone gets what they need for that day.

Can we mean it when we pray, “Give us—all of us—this day our daily bread”? I hope so. Remember that this parable is not an allegory about how God works, but a description about what the empire of heaven is like. The empire of heaven is a place where everyone gets what they need for that day. Leave merit out of it. Leave deserving out of it. Leave rank out of it. Make sure folks have what they need—wages for labor, food and drink, shelter. Friendship. Community.

Scholar Warren Carter moves this thought along as he writes, “Instead of maintaining [the difference between] the laborers based on performance, instead of reinforcing the superiority of some at the expense of the rest, [the landowner] has evened out the distinctions and treated them … as equals. Instead of using wages to reinforce distinctions, he uses them to express equality and solidarity.” (Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 397)

And that punch line to this parable joke, “Are you envious because I am generous?,” might be understood a little differently. The Greek actually asks, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” The evil eye was understood to be a characteristic of envy and jealousy. Are we jealous because God is good?

By no means! We praise God for being good because we benefit from that goodness. And we praise God for being good even to people we don’t think deserve that blessing because we trust that God knows more than we do. Or at least, that’s the ideal way this works.

I wonder, too, if this parable speaks to us today about our notions of justice and grace. I asked Chris about it, because Chris helps me think a lot about justice, and we thought about this for a while and came up with a different idea. For these day laborers, the system was rigged; they would never move up from the bottom rung, they would never make more than a denarius a day no matter how hard they worked. They would not receive justice.

So maybe we need to change the system. And maybe we need to redefine what justice is in light of grace. Justice that wants retribution is incomplete justice. It’s the justice that says this person broke the law and deserves to go to jail. There is no sense that this person will serve out their sentence so that they can rejoin society. There is no hope for this person to grow and change and be better.

But justice is a means to an end and not the end itself. In terms of our faith, we might say that justice is a step toward reconciliation and healing. For the laborers in the vineyard, we might say that the justice of getting a wage for daily bread is a step toward reforming a system so that it doesn’t keep people down.

Part of what makes this parable so hard is that it challenges the assumptions we might not even be aware that we have. We have assumptions about how the world works, the consequences of being good, the consequences of being bad; we have assumptions about who deserves what.

But my friends, those assumptions are not at play in the empire of heaven, which is not some sweet by-and-by in the sky, but the way God moves in the world right here, right now. In that place, there is no getting ahead and there is no falling behind; there is only everyone getting daily bread.

Maybe we need to let go of our assumptions about who deserves what. As one pastor wrote, “It would be wonderful if these were the only assumptions we made:

• God loves me and all creation deeply and profoundly.
• I and all others are made in the image of God.
• God’s generosity is beyond our wildest imagination.
• There is nothing I can do to earn or deserve God’s generosity.”

(Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4, p. 94)

Maybe the best assumption we can make is that God knows what God is doing, that God knows how to create the empire of heaven right here and right now. Let’s trust God, and keep on praying for daily bread for all.

Amen.