9/21/2008 7:50 AMAlthough the conversation was more than 20 years ago, I still remember it. A good friend of mine had just been to his own church and had heard the parable that I just read in today’s Gospel. He was really bothered by it. It offended his sense of fairness, his sense of justice.
I imagine that it also offended the disciples who first heard it. They like most of us are bothered by something that is blatantly unfair. We don’t like it when someone is rewarded for something that they didn’t earn and don’t deserve. Our justice system is based on the concept of fairness. We believe that all people are created equally and ought to be treated fairly.
I have to admit the parable in this morning’s gospel may be puzzling even to the most accepting and tolerant of people. As the work winds down for the day, the owner of the vineyard pays all the laborers the same amount, whether they worked for just one hour or worked all day through the heat of the day. The owner of the vineyard simply decides to be generous to everyone.
Can you imagine what it would feel like to be one of the crew that worked all day and then found out that those yahoos who showed up at the last hour, get paid the same?
Let’s imagine another scenario on a vastly smaller scale. Many years ago when I was a student in the seminary, and I wanted to see a play at the Guthrie, I would go to the theater a couple of hours early to stand in the rush line. I felt that standing in line was a small price to pay to get the best seats in the house for a vastly reduced ticket price. I felt especially smug if I was the first person in line. After a long time of waiting, the anticipation would grow until that moment when the ticket window opened, and I was able to buy tickets for great seats at a cut rate price.
Now as you imagine that scene, imagine something that never happened but if it did would give us a taste of what those laborers in the parable who worked all day must have felt.
What if the manager of the theater decided to mix things up a bit, and came out to the rush line and reversed the order, telling those of us at the front of the line to stay put while he asked those at the end of the line…the ones that had shown up at the last minute to come to the head of the line, buy their tickets and enter the theater first. If that had happened I would have been hoppin’ mad! I probably would have stormed out of there vowing to never come again…because it was not fair. The people like me who had been at the front of the line had earned our place. It would have been outrageous to reverse the order.
The outrage that I would have felt had something like that actually happened may give us a tiny taste of what those all day-long hard-working laborers in the vineyard must have felt when those “Johnny-come-lately’s” got paid the very same wage for doing just 1 hour of work.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell us that this was surely unfair. We all like to be compensated fairly for the work that we do. If we show up on time and work hard, we expect to receive a fair wage.
And what does this story tell about God’s fairness. We all know that life is often unfair, so we expect at least God to be fair. One would expect that God would reward people according to what they had done, and the fact that some of us have attended church our whole lives and have tried to do the right thing. Why should those who have squandered their whole lives away receive an equal share of God’s favor in the end? This is an affront to our piety. If everything is going to turn out this way, then why bother being religious or moral at all.
The last will be first and the first will be last, Jesus says following the parable. Divine mercy is not based on fairness, but on God’s love for all of us. God’s grace is simply beyond our comprehension. For some reason, God seems to love us without reservation, and also seems to delight in shaking up the rules that we have used to explain why God loves some of us more than others. But by starting at the end of the rush line, God lets us know that God’s ways are not our ways. If we want to begin to understand God’s ways, we need to let go of our ideas about fairness, and stop getting so upset when everyone including the latecomers are treated the same, because God’s generosity is for us as well.
God is not fair. God is more than fair. God is generous. And that’s grace. This story tells us that grace to be grace, it needs to be the same grace, the same amount of grace, and the identical dispensing of grace for everyone. For grace to be grace, the amount of sin a given person has is not an issue.
In God’s vineyard, what is right is that all of us are cherished and loved equally. God has freely poured out for each and every one of us God’s love and forgiveness, goodness and mercy.
It is to this God of grace and amazing compassion that we make our needs known in this service of hope and healing. It is to this generous and loving God, that we come today with our prayers for healing and reconciliation. It is into the loving and gentle hands of our Savior that we place our heavy burdens that we might find relief and rest from all that has been weighing us down.
This is God’s way: to meet all of us in our need, those who come early or late, at the crack of dawn or the eleventh hour. Here everyone shares the same bread, the same cup. Here each is a part of the whole and all are one. Here we are all nourished for our labor in the vineyard by the one whose grace is more than fair and whose mercy is like the wideness of the sea. Amen