When Life Isn’t Fair

When Life Isn’t Fair

Matthew 20:1-16

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Rev. Jeanne Thomas

In the Peanuts comic strip, Linus is peacefully watching his favorite television program when in walks his older sister, Lucy. With total disregard for her brother, Lucy picks up the remote and immediately changes the channel. Linus is obviously distraught, but before he can even protest, Lucy opens the family Bible and says, “Matthew 20:16 says the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” Linus murmurs under his breath, “I wonder if Matthew had an older sister?”

Life isn’t always fair. Our brother or sister gets all the talent. Someone younger gets the promotion. A friend gets a better grade on a test, when we studied longer. Life isn’t fair. Hard work doesn’t always mean high grades or high pay. Sometimes the bad guys win and the good guys lose. The least deserving are rewarded and the most deserving lose out.

Life isn’t fair, which is all the more reason why we think God should be. God should be the one person we can count on to know how hard we’ve worked; to keep track of the sacrifices we’ve made; to make sure we get what we deserve. But in this parable of the vineyard, Jesus seems to be saying that all we have earned through our own blood, sweat, and tears count for nothing with God.

To put this parable in perspective, just before Jesus tells it, Peter asks Jesus what kind of reward he and the disciples should expect for giving up everything to follow him. And just after it, the mother of James and John asks Jesus to give her sons the best thrones in the kingdom of Heaven. In other words, there’s a lot of negotiating and jockeying for position going on in this section of Matthew’s Gospel. And so Jesus tells them this parable to set the record straight…to explain exactly what the kingdom of God really looks like.

In Palestine, grapes were harvested at the end of September, just before the rainy season began. Especially in Jesus’ time, when everything was done manually, harvesting the grapes was a frantic race against time, and hiring a worker even for an hour wasn’t unusual. So in our parable, the vineyard owner goes to the marketplace at dawn to hire day laborers when his grapes are ready. A group of men is already waiting, so the owner hires them on the spot. They negotiate a fair wage, a denarius, and return with the owner to begin work.

A few hours later, the owner realizes the work can’t be completed with the work force he hired at 6:00, so he sets off again for the marketplace and hires another group of laborers. There’s no negotiation this time, however. He just promises to give them “whatever is right.” And at noon and at 3:00 the same scenario unfolds. Finally, at 5:00 p.m. he hires whoever is left in the marketplace without any discussion of wage at all, and they go with him to work for just one hour.

Up until now, the day progressed just as the workers and the disciples hearing this parable expected. But all that changes at pay time. The first who were hired naturally stand at the front of the line. After all, they had worked the longest and hardest, were the hottest and most tired, and they should get paid first and go home first. Or so they thought. But the manager tells them that on THIS day, the last hired would be the first paid, and those who had worked all day would need to wait their turn.

Now, have you ever stood in a line about four or five people deep at the grocery store, when someone else comes with his cart and stands behind you, and then the manager comes along and whisks them away to a checkout line that’s just opened up? Maybe you are more gracious and patient than I am, but my adrenaline starts pumping when that happens. And I’m not too happy. And I guarantee you that those now at the end of the line in our parable weren’t either.

But the vineyard owner doesn’t just move the last hired to the front of the line. He also gives them the same daily wage promised to those who have been there since dawn. And the grumbling now erupts into anger. “It’s not fair!” They cry out. “They worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat?” It went against every principle of justice and fair play that they lived by.

And the truth is, this parable goes against everything we know to be fair and just, too. We may claim that “all men and women are created equal,” but would you work for a company in which everyone received the same salary, regardless of years of service, training, or job performance? Have you ever been told that your new boss would be someone with less education and experience? Has your company ever been downsized, and you were out of a job because you were on the higher end of the pay scale? It’s why we join unions and file class action suits.

What makes this parable so difficult for the followers of Jesus – or us – to swallow is that what’s fair and what’s not is wired into every corpuscle of our being. Even as a child, we expect rewards to be distributed equally. Two brothers were eating the lunch their mother had prepared, and two pieces of cake sat before them—one larger than the other. They younger brother quickly reached out and took the larger piece. The older boy said reprovingly, “Don’t you know that when there are two pieces of cake, you are supposed to take the smaller one?” The younger brother said, “Well which one would YOU have taken?” “The smaller piece, of course!” “Then what are you complaining about? You have it!”

And our sense of fairness doesn’t change much as we grow older. When something happens to tip that scale of grace a little too far in someone else’s favor, we, too shout “Unfair!” If we work twelve hours, we expect twelve times as much as those who work one. Otherwise, we begrudge the boss his generosity.

But what if God’s accounting were the same as ours? How well would we really fare? If we actually got what we deserved in life, how good would the Good News be for us? Frankly, I’d rather NOT be judged on the basis of what I have done or deserve. For truth be told, we are ALL undeserving of the grace and mercy of the vineyard owner. And I am grateful that God’s justice looks entirely different than it might in your vineyard or mine; that it looks more like generosity than fairness; more like compassion than retribution; more like grace than payback.

Can you imagine a world that resembles this kind of vineyard, where everyone has opportunity and hope? What would it take for us to live into the power of this parable?

There is an old Rabbinic tale about a father and two sons. The father took his boys to the fields as soon as they were big enough to walk and taught them all he knew about farming. When he died, instead of dividing their inheritance they continued to work together in partnership, dividing every harvest down the middle. One of the brothers married and had eight children, the other remained a bachelor.

One night, during a particularly bountiful harvest, the bachelor brother thought to himself, “My brother has ten mouths to feed and I have only one. He really needs more of this harvest than I do. However, I know he is much too fair to renegotiate our agreement. I’ll take some of my harvest and slip it over in his barn at night so that he can have more for his family.” At the very same time, the married brother was thinking to himself, “God has blessed me with this wonderful family. My children will take care of us when we are old. My brother is not as fortunate. He really needs more of this harvest to provide for his old age, but I know he is far too fair to renegotiate our agreement. I’ll take some of my harvest and slip it into his barn to build up a nest egg for the future.”

As you might have anticipated, one night when the moon was full these brothers came face-to-face, each on a mission of generosity. And the Rabbis who used to tell this parable said that although there was not a cloud in the sky, a gentle rain began to fall, as God wept for joy because two of his children had gotten the point.[i]

You see, we miss the point of what the kingdom of God is like if we only see God as the magnanimous vineyard owner. For we are ALL called to be co-laborers WITH God in the vineyard and to demonstrate to others the same kind of grace and love that Christ has for us. It is a vineyard in which everyone receives more than they deserve and we are called to share that abundance freely with one another.

When a businessman sat next to a missionary on a plane returning from China, he was so impressed with his knowledge and understanding of Chinese people and culture that he asked him to come work for him, and he offered to pay him five times what the church was. The missionary immediately declined. “What’s wrong?” the man asked. “Is the SALARY I offer too small?” “No,” the missionary replied. “It’s just that the JOB is too small.”

When we become co-laborers in God’s kingdom, we will no longer see our reward as payment for services rendered, but instead as a gift we do not earn or deserve. For in God’s vineyard, our pay is always too much. For by grace we have been saved through faith, and this is not our own doing. It is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. (Eph. 2:8-9).

Life isn’t fair. But, praise God, neither is God. God will always dole out grace and mercy in a seemingly indiscriminate and inexhaustible supply…to the leper, the tax collector, the Gentile, the least and the lost, even…to us. And if we are judged unfairly, then there’s a chance we will be rewarded far more than we deserve. And that, we can be sure, is very good news, indeed. Amen.