15th Sunday After Pentecost Lectionary 25 Sept. 21, 2014
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie G. Hutson
Jonah 3: 10-4: 11 + Psalm 145: 1-8 + Phil 1: 21-30 + Matt 20: 1-16
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
God is not fair. Simply not fair. It’s true. And thank heaven for that, or else we would all get what we deserve and not what God has given us.
Well, that’s actually the end of the story, the punch line, if you will. So, let’s back up and take a closer look at our readings from the Old Testament book of Jonah and the Gospel reading from Matthew. Both of these stories are about the terrible, wonderful unfair ways of God.
In the Jonah reading, we need a little more of the story to understand exactly what was happening. God had sent Jonah to Ninevah, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, what is present day Iraq, to warn the Ninevites that they had 40 days to mend their ways or God would smite them all. Now, the Ninevites were pretty horrible characters. They had devastated all of the Jewish cities and killed the Jews and deported those who managed to survive, and turned them into their slaves. And Jonah didn’t really want to go relay God’s message to them, which is how he ended up in the belly of a big fish, but that’s another story for another day.
On this day, Jonah has finally made his way to Ninevah, and prepared to give ‘em a dose of righteous prophecy. And he only gets out one sentence of warning before the Ninevites respond: they all throw down their weapons and shout “Yes! We believe you!” and then they fast and repent and all is right with the world, or at least their world.
You might think that Jonah would be rather pleased with himself. That was some top notch prophesying! You might think Jonah would be glad that rather than destroying so many people, God’s mind was changed and an entire city, a powerful capital city, was saved. But noooo.
Jonah became angry. And this is where our reading from Jonah picked up. It picks up with Jonah’s little temper tantrum. Jonah says “Just kill me now, because I’d rather DIE than watch you forgive these wicked people.” And he sits down, there in the middle of the desert, in the hot sun. So God sends a bush to shade Jonah, which made Jonah pretty happy…until God sent a worm to destroy it. God wanted to make a point….that Jonah was concerned about the bush, which came to pass through no effort of his own. And why then, shouldn’t God be concerned about the people and animals of Nineveh?
God is not fair.
And then consider the Gospel reading for today. A landowner needs workers to work in the vineyard, and so he goes out at the crack of dawn, hires some day laborers, agrees to pay them a days wage and off they go, into the fields to work. Only as the day wears on, the landowner needs more workers, so he goes out at 9:00 in the morning, and again at noon and at three o’clock and at five o’clock and he hired them all to work in the vineyard. When the end of the day came and it was time to pay everyone, he paid them all the same amount, a day’s wage. Those who had worked one hour received the same pay as those who had worked for eight hours.
What’s key to this story is to note that the landowner paid the workers he hired early in the morning exactly what he had promised them. They weren’t cheated out of anything. The problem was, they didn’t want the others to have what they also had. But that’s exactly what the generous landowner did – he treated them all the same.
But that’s not fair, they cried! You’ve made them equal to us. And the landowner answers them with a hard questions, revealing a hard truth: “Are you envious because I am generous?”
Both of these stories are hard to hear for those of us who want God’s mercy for ourselves and God’s justice for other people. Those of us who want God’s mercy for ourselves and God’s justice for other people. But God is a terrible bookkeeper. While we are keeping track of all of the good things that we have done, all of the commandments we’ve kept and all of the ways we’ve followed the rules, God is not spending time figuring out who is worthy and who is not.
How often am I, how often are we the ones objecting to the way God showers grace upon those we think are less worthy….undeserving….whose score in the ledger books doesn’t quite measure up?
If the world could have been saved by bookkeeping, Moses would have been the person for the job. Moses who delivered the law to the people. The law that said “These are the rules, follow them and live.” Only nobody could. Nobody. And God gave them a good thousand years or so to try. But it was soon determined that there was not a righteous person on earth, not even one, everyone was under the power of sin.
And that was when God knew that something radically different and unique was going to have to happen. That bookkeeping wouldn’t work any longer. That God would need to erase all of the bookkeeping and reward everyone equally, through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
And in his life Jesus taught us….he taught us about one concept, one idea, one great commandment….love. A love that is so wide that it includes everyone, even those we think don’t deserve it. Even those whose ticks in their column in the ledger doesn’t contain nearly as many as ours.
It’s a hard, hard lesson, this grace. Hard for those of us who want God’s mercy for ourselves and God’s justice for other people. If I’ve labored in the vineyard all day long I don’t want to receive the same pay as someone whose only been there for an hour. And if the word of God is spoken to an evil city I want them to somehow pay for what they have done, I don’t want God’s grace to give them some sort of Get Out of Jail Free card.
God is not fair. But it is God’s grace. It is a grace that “works by raising the dead, not by rewarding the rewardable.” [1]
A part of the problem is that we have forgotten what a mess we have made of our own lives. We like to think that we are the righteous prophets, called to speak a word of judgment to the people of Nineveah. We like to think that we are the hard working laborers who deserve more pay than the last minute arrivals who show up an hour before quitting time. That’s how we see it. But we make a mistake if we think that’s how God sees it too. Because maybe from where God sits, we are all a mess – we have all sinned. Oh sure, some of us clean up better than others and some of us have managed to hide our fears and some of us have managed to pretend that in the light of day there are not things that keep us up at night. But God looks at all of us equally. God sees that we are all broken, hurt, lost children. God sees how far we have wandered. And God welcomes us all. Every one. The Ninevites and the priests and the prophets. The landowners, the tax collectors, the disciples. To all of us, every one, God says….you are loved, all equally. You are worthy….all equally.
No, it is not fair. It is grace.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Capon, Robert. “Kingdom, Grace, Judgment.”