The 18th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture
Hebrew
Scripture – Exodus 16: 2-15[1]
2The whole congregation of the Israelites
complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. 3The Israelites said to them, “If
only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the
4Then the LORD said to Moses, “I am going to
rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather
enough for that day. In that way I will
test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. 5On the sixth day, when they
prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other
days.” 6So Moses and Aaron
said to all the Israelites, “In the evening you shall know that it was the LORD
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, 7and in the morning you
shall see the glory of the LORD, because he has heard your complaining against
the LORD. For what are we, that you
complain against us?” 8And
Moses said, “When the LORD gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill
of bread in the morning, because the LORD has heard the complaining that you
utter against him—what are we? Your complaining is not against us but against
the LORD.”
9Then Moses said to Aaron, “Say to the whole
congregation of the Israelites, ‘Draw near to the LORD, for he has heard your
complaining.’” 10And as Aaron
spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the
wilderness, and the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud. 11The LORD spoke to Moses and said,
12“I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, ‘At
twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of
bread; then you shall know that I am the LORD your God.’”
13In the evening
quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of
dew around the camp. 14When
the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine
flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. 15When the Israelites saw it, they
said to one another, “What is it?” For
they did not know what it was. Moses
said to them, “It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat.
Gospel
Lesson – Matthew 20: 1-16[2]
1“For the kingdom of heaven is like a
landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2After agreeing with the laborers
for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3When he went out about
“Don't Just Stand There! Take What Belongs to You."
Of the two courses that I flunked in undergraduate school,
one was Economics; the only lesson that I learned from that class was that
there was no such thing as a free sandwich:
somebody, somewhere, pays for it.
There is at least one thing, however – a truly worthwhile thing – that
is free, something for which you need do nothing, except receive it as the gift
that it is. It is the blessing of true
love, the blessing of unconditional acceptance that the church has come to call
the goodness of grace.
In
his novel Bread and Wine, Ignatio
Silone describes a poor peasant woman who persuades Don Pablo to bless her
unborn baby. She then tries to
"pay" him for the blessing by giving him a chicken. He refuses it and tries to convince her that
she doesn't have to buy the grace of God.
"Grace costs nothing," he says.
"There's no such thing as free grace," says the
woman.[3]
Free grace was simply too much for this woman to
expect. Like you and me all too often,
she found it too risky to believe in such a wasteful, extravagant kind of love. Consider, though, what meager blessings we
would have if we were required to earn everything that we received.
Paddy Chayefsky catches this in a remarkable passage
of dialogue between God's messenger and Gideon in his play entitled, simply, Gideon:
GIDEON:
I thought of nothing but you the whole
night. I am possessed by the lunacy of your love. If I could, I would cover you with veils, God,
and keep you hidden behind the curtains in my tent. Oh! just say again you love me, God.
THE ANGEL: I do, Gideon.
GIDEON: I do not know why. I must say, I do not know why.
THE ANGEL: I hardly know why myself, but then [such]
passion is an unreasonable thing.[4]
In today's parable, according
to all reasonable standards of business practice, the owner of the vineyard
appears to be an idiot. But it's
precisely this shock value, that reversing of worldly logic, that Jesus uses to
create such disequilibrium in us – and yet because of it the processes of
imagination are let loose in the lives of all of those who will listen to him.
Even in those days when Jesus walked the earth it was hard
for people to find in their hearts and minds the reasonableness of such outrageous
graciousness. Today we still are plagued
by a whole host of its opposites: greed,
possessiveness, narcissism, racism, homophobia – all of those, and more, have
always blurred our vision of love. And
yet Jesus came to demonstrate to us that real love is unconditional, without
limits, and always there. The doctrine
of grace seems to have escaped our imagination in a way that today's parable
seems to blow it back into our faces like a breath of fresh air.
An airline executive once said about his, now sick and
ailing, industry: "Service is the only thing we have to
sell, but it's the hardest thing to teach." Today's parable is one enlightened rabbi's
attempt to do that very thing with us. But
we don't want to hear it. We live in a
time and place in which we experience an over-abundance of material resources,
but we're still afraid that there's just not enough to go around. What we fail to nurture are our personal
resources: the resources of people and
the relationships of those people to each other. In the novel Haywire, a story about the tragic forces that destroyed an affluent
theatrical family, the author (who's the daughter in the family) says that
"The simple fact is that we did not know our own best resource, ourselves
and one another." She goes on to
say that she and her family always thought there would be another day and
another time. Unfortunately for them all,
the realization came too late.[5] The day and time for us is now. But, sadly, we might still be looking
somewhere else.
The
implied question of this parable – and the one that we must never lose sight of
– is the one that asks, "How is the kingdom of heaven like this
landowner?" The kind of grace that
Jesus says exemplifies this lies in the realization that we are loved and
accepted beyond our wildest imaginings!
Once we do realize this, our transformation from mere creatures to
creators – people truly made in the image and likeness of God[6] –
is nothing less than miraculous.
So
much of what makes us inhuman is our refusal to accept ourselves, which leads
to a kind of hoarding and jealousy of others that then destroys the very possibility
of being human. Isn't this just what
happened to those workers in the vineyard?
Isn't that the fear that created enemies out of those who simply came
late in the day? This fear begins in our
childhood: a fear that we won't be cared
for or shared with, so it keeps us from caring and sharing. That was the real cause of the destruction
along the
The
parable of the workers in the vineyard shows us a strange, new justice – not
the justice of strict calculations, of adding and subtracting our worth as if
it were simply a matter of credits and debits – but the justice of recognizing
the right of all human beings to the basic necessities of life.
Why
is this parable, then, so hard for us to understand? Because it forces us to give up our limited
notion of justice for one that's far more radical: the realization of a grace that's so
boundless we don't have to "keep score" anymore! In Jesus' little story he speaks of a
graciousness, a generosity, that isn't revealed in who gets what for whatever
amount of work has been done, but in that invitation – being made over and over
again – to simply join in the labor.
There's enough there for everybody, whether we feel some deserve it or
some don't.
Yes,
like children who feel as if they should've gotten more jelly beans because
they worked longer and harder than some of the rest, we want to stomp our foot
and say, "It's not fair!" But
that's just the point. We've come to
speak of "fairness" as a kind of provisional standard of conduct – a quid pro quo: do something for me and I'll do something for
you. We've come to think of it as a way
of maintaining social order based upon a vision of humanity as competitors who
will always and forever be implicitly hostile toward each other. No wonder we continue to move from one
conflict to another, one war to yet still another war. Jesus holds up before our eyes a new way of
seeing: a vision of human beings bound
together in radical love.
Again,
remember how Jesus begins this parable:
"…the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in
the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard." He agrees to pay whatever's the "going
rate" – what the law determined was enough to buy food and shelter. To pay anybody less than what it takes to
live is an injustice that he finds intolerable.[8] In the wake of Katrina's passing, Jesus'
little parable here raises a number of questions for our society: Does our minimum wage truly provide a
livelihood for individuals and their families?
What motivates those who want more than they can use at the cost of some
not having enough? What keeps the
conditions in place that prevent some people from having what they need to
live? You tell me. What mandate does this parable give to us who
are called to imitate its outrageous graciousness and expansive generosity?
Our
sense of what's "fair" always leads us to ask, why didn't the
landowner pay more than one denarius to those who'd worked all
day in the "scorching heat?" They
should've been paid more. They
"earned it!" They deserve
more. For us to speculate about this
landowner's financial ability to add to the agreed-upon wage is, finally,
beside the point. None of the parables
of Jesus are meant to be seen as strict comparisons to contemporary situations
but, instead, a glimpse of life as it was meant to be lived. Issues of hierarchy or seniority have no
place. Jesus embraces everybody
equally. I hope that you noticed: the parable places no blame on the latecomers
for their situation – they're not condemned as being lazy or shown to be
unworthy in any way.
Did
you ever think to ask yourself:
"Who are these people?"
Who has the audacity to come late when there's work to be done, and yet
who are guaranteed a full wage – a full share of grace? At first the question was, can gentiles be as
acceptable as the Jews? Can the poor,
the oppressed, and the marginalized be as acceptable as the rich, the
privileged, and the powerful? Can Jesus
be as acceptable as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all of the patriarchs? Can
One
last thing: in a letter to the
Christians at
A very
wise theologian was once asked:
"Don't you think that we'll all be asked at the gates of heaven
about everything that we've done wrong, and won't somebody notice all of the
good that we've done?"
"No," was this wise one's answer, "I think that we'll be
asked only one question: 'Where are the
others?' And if we've lived as we ought
to have lived, we'll be able to say, "They're all here with me."
* * *
[1] This
story of the gift of bread and meat to the people of
[2] The primary focus of this Sunday comes here in our gospel lesson – what I might call the surprising, and often outrageous, nature of God's grace represented by Jesus. The first thing for us to remember is that this is a parable, and it is the nature of a parable to provoke listeners into thinking about familiar things in new ways. A parable typically draws those who listen to it into identifying with one or more of the characters – or at least to the situation – rooted in common human experience. But it then contradicts their (our) assumptions and cherished beliefs and, in effect, turns them inside out or at least upside down. This one is a classic.
A second thing
to remember is that this tradition of hiring day-laborers should be as familiar
to us as it was to the people of ancient
[3] Ignatio
Silone, Bread and Wine (New York: The
New American Library, 1955), p. 83.
[4] Paddy
Chayefsky, Gideon (New York: Random
House, 1961), p. 67
[5] Brooke
Hayward, Haywire (Knopf: February 12,
1977) – see a review at Amazon.com from this rather lengthy URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0394493257/ref=cm_cr_dp_pt/103-0552330-3639827?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155&s=books.
[6] This is
my reading of the meaning behind Genesis 1: 26a.
[7] These
words ring like a litany throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. Take a look at and compare Exodus 34: 6;
Numbers
[8] The words from the Torah read:
You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them… (Deuteronomy 24: 14-15a).
[9] Matthew
20: 14a.