A Fair Wage? When God’s Grace Doesn’t Seem Fair | Lakeside Light Podcast

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Let us pray.

Gracious God, your word surprises, challenges, upsets, and overturns our way of seeing and thinking.

Come and find us today, wherever we are, however we are, by the power of your Holy Spirit, cause that which is withering in us to blossom, and see that which is exacting in us to broaden, until we see as you see.

Thereby limbs the kingdom you are bringing.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

The Old Testament scripture will be read in a bit, but first hear these words from the Gospel of Matthew.

Matthew chapter 20, verses 1 through 16.

Matthew 20:1–16

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.

After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard.

When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in his marketplace.

And he said to them, You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.

So they went.

When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same.

At about five o'clock, he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, Why are you standing here idle all day?

They said to him, Because no one has hired us.

He said to them, You also go into the vineyard.

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.

When those hired came about five o'clock, each of them received a denarius.

Now, when the first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius.

And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, These last only worked an hour, and you have made them equal to us, who have borne the burden of the day in swirching heat.

But he replied to one of them, Friend, I am doing you no wrong.

Did you not agree with me for a denarius?

Take what belongs to you and go.

I choose to give this last the same as I give you.

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?

Or are you envious because I am generous?

So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

For the word of God in Scripture, for the Word of God among us, for the Word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

As Olivia pointed out, I switched things up a little bit because I wanted to offer a little bit of context before reading this Jonah passage, and I was able to do most of that with the children, but it's good to remember before reading this section of Jonah that Jonah has resisted God's call because the people of Nineveh are enemies to Jonah and were known at the time for being enactors of uh cruelties and being incredibly unjust and for being a bit deserving of Jonah's scorn.

So Jonah has finally arrived in Nineveh and done the very least he could possibly do.

And that's where we meet Jonah in this passage at the end of this short book about the prophet Jonah.

So listen now to Jonah 3.10 to 4.11 and what happens after Jonah has finally revealed his prophetic ways and told them to repent.

When God saw what the people of Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.

He prayed to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?

That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.

And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

And the Lord said, Is it right for you to be angry?

Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city and made a booth for himself there.

He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

The Lord God appointed a bush and made it come up over Jonah to give shade over his head to save him from his discomfort.

So Jonah was very happy about the bush.

But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush so that it withered.

And when the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die.

He said, It is better for me to die than to live.

But God said to Jonah, Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?

And he said, Yes, angry enough to die.

Then the Lord said, You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow.

It came into being in a night, and it perished in a night.

And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals.

And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O you, our Lord, who is our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

So uh many of you may know that my spouse, a whole human being in his own right, my spouse will uh is a professor at the University of Cincinnati.

And his field is political theory.

So political theory, sort of like political philosophy, political science, all that stuff.

Uh we love to joke, you know it, right?

I do religion, he does politics, we're great at parties.

Yeah.

Anyway, Will studies, teaches, works in things like fairness, right?

Justice.

This is kind of his bread and butter.

Um and he is very wise.

He's a very wise person, and so I was sharing with you, I wanted to share with you one of his kind of truisms, a thing he uh often articulates and applies in the ways he thinks and teaches and works, and it's this idea that sometimes the loss of privilege feels like an injustice.

Feels like injustice.

Let me break that down a little bit.

The idea that the loss of privilege can feel like injustice.

First, he's not talking about privilege in the sense of like um like you've earned some special like privileges to be let out of your crate, like Polly, the dog, uh, you figured out how to open the trash and then eat out of it.

You've now lost your kitchen privileges.

That's my weekend, right?

This is more like privilege in the sense of special rights, right?

Having something that someone else does not have, having special access, a separate advantage.

That is a common use of the word and definition of the word privilege, right?

It is rendered, something is rendered a privilege, not because of the innate value of that thing, the club access, maybe the fast path line, the senior year off-campus lunch, right, or the love of your parents.

It's not the innate value of the thing that renders it a privilege, but because it is something other people do not get.

That's what makes it a special privilege.

That someone else does not get it.

Sometimes there is a loss of privilege, not in the sense that the thing itself is lost, but the specialness of it is lost, right?

The seniors get to go off campus for lunch, and that doesn't change.

They still get to go off campus for lunch, but the principal has decided that the sophomores and juniors can also go off campus for lunch, too.

Ugh.

You're an oldest child, right?

You used to have the unique love of your parents, but then they had a baby.

And you still get the same love from your parents, but now it's it's not as special.

Someone else gets it too.

Or you can expand the idea.

You know where this is going, right?

You get to be a lawyer.

You still get to be a lawyer, but now women can be lawyers too.

Right?

Or broadly, right?

You can you can apply this to any broad number of things.

How does this apply to access to education, to social security, to other relations, to immigration?

Are there times a loss of privilege, in the sense of it being special, can feel like an injustice?

The benefits have not changed, the gain, the value, the love, the lifestyle, these things haven't changed for you, but now someone else or some other group of people that didn't used to be able to have that same thing can also have it.

It is no longer a privilege only for you.

And while nothing has changed for you, something feels wrong.

It feels like you've been slighted.

It feels unfair, it feels like injustice.

That is, of course, very much the topic of today's gospel reading in the verses preceding today's reading from Matthew.

We have a conversation where Peter points out how much he and the disciples have sacrificed to follow Jesus, because they've just experienced an example of somebody not willing to sacrifice anything, the rich man.

And so Peter says to Jesus, look, Jesus, we have left everything and followed you.

And then he wants to know, what then will we have?

What will we get in return?

And Jesus responds, you will get so much.

You will get so much in return.

When the Son of Man is seated on the throne in his glory, you, Peter, you disciples, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones.

Peter, you, my inner circle, you will receive so much, you will receive eternal life, it says, You'll receive a hundredfold of everything you've given up.

That's what Jesus tells Peter.

But then Jesus keeps going, right?

Because also, Jesus then tells this parable.

Right after telling Peter and those close friends, you will get everything.

He tells the story of a landowner.

A landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard, as they would be wont to do.

It's time for the snow reaping, and so it's time to hire laborers, and he he goes out and he finds the first crop of workers, and they work out an agreement.

Uh they agree to a day's wage, a denarius, uh, for these early morning workers, and those workers get to work.

But the landowner's not done finding helpers, and so he goes back out again.

He goes back out at nine o'clock, he gets a whole group of workers, and then he goes back out at noon, he pulls the truck up, he has more people hop in and drives them to the fields.

And then three o'clock rolls around and he still has more work to offer, so he goes back out, he picks up some more workers, brings them back at three, and then he does the same thing again at five o'clock, five o'clock, he goes left of the day into the workers' groups, he goes out, picks them up, brings them all back.

And they probably have an hour or so of work left.

Every time he hires more workers, and notice here that he's actually been hiring folks who've been waiting to work.

It's translated that these folks are idle, but the Greek word doesn't really mean lazy.

It really just means they're without work.

So people who are without work.

Um, we don't know why they don't have work and why they haven't maybe been picked up by any trucks, other trucks.

Maybe they're older, maybe they're physically compromised, maybe they look funny, we don't know.

For whatever reason, they've not been picked up by any of the other landowners to work that day.

But this landowner keeps going back out.

He collects any folks who want work, and then it's the end of the day.

And the workers all line up to get their pay.

And strangely, this landowner starts with those who started last.

He decides to pay first the people who worked only one hour.

Only one hour, you get one denarius.

You got a full day's wage.

You work three hours, you get one denarius, full day's wage.

You work six hours, you get one denarius, full day's wage.

You work nine hours, you get one denarius, a full day's wage, and now by the end of the line, we have a group who started working at the crack of dawn.

They have had a 12-hour day.

And finally, they too are each handed the agreed-upon wage, right?

One denarius.

And they are mad.

They're mad.

Yes, they had agreed to one denarius, but they had assumed that denarius would only be for those who actually worked all day.

They had assumed they would be privileged in their payment.

They will have earned it their way by working all day.

What originally felt fair now feels unfair to them.

It now feels like an injustice to these workers.

So the landowner sees their grumbling and responds to one of the hard workers who worked 12 long hours.

He says, Friend, calls him a friend, friend, I am doing you no wrong.

Take what belongs to you and go.

I choose to give this last the same as I give you.

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?

The landowner is being generous.

And then he finishes by saying to this grumbling worker, are you envious because I am generous?

And this is another great little Greek thing, right?

In the Greek, this is literally, if you knew the King James Version, this is how they uh translate it.

Is your eye evil because I am generous?

Do you have an evil eye?

Do you see things with an evil eye because I am generous?

Have you ever had an evil eye?

Have you ever had one?

Have you ever seen others with envy or resentment?

Does the well-being of others ever make your eye twitch?

Have you ever seen the joy or success of another and it ruined your day?

To my mind, there are two valid ways of interpreting this end-of-the-day workers in this passage.

There are two equally valid ways of thinking about this passage, and both of them offer us insights into God's ideas about fairness, about justice, right?

One way to read this passage is that what the landowner is doing is in fact extremely fair.

It is, in fact, fair the way that this landowner is deciding to pay these workers.

While the all-day workers see fairness as being about being equally compensated for numbers of hours worked in the day when you punched in and when you punched out, perhaps they, these all-day workers, do not see a larger story and do not see the larger dynamics that this landowner might be taking into account, some of the bigger systemic things the landowner sees.

Yes, they labored all day in the fields and the others technically did not, but those other laborers, it was not by any choice or wrongdoing on their part that they did not get those earliest hours, right?

They were not picked in the first round.

And we know they were waiting to be picked, waiting to be offered a bed of a truck to hop into.

One imagines that that final group of 5 p.m.

stragglers was made up of a strange mix, right?

Maybe exhausted women or scrawny kids are in this group.

Maybe this is the group with mothers who couldn't be waiting for the truck at 6 a.m.

because they had to feed their kids and could only be available beginning at 3 p.m., right?

Or maybe that's the group that includes the older men with bad hips who used to be able to plow for 12 hours, but now they need help getting through too, right?

And here is this landowner who keeps coming back again and again to collect whoever's been missing, to scoop up the lost and the leased into his pickup truck and to ensure that they get the dignity of a job, right?

The full wages of a day, even if many of that day's hours were spent doing the labor of disappointment, the labor of rejection instead of the labor of a plow, a different kind of challenge.

In this interpretation, right, fairness takes into account a much broader story.

It moves past those first impressions we might have of these idle workers.

How often, after all, do we see others unfairly?

How often do we overlook the real labor happening in different ways without a punch clock to kick off the day?

How often does the evil in our eye create justifications for the profound inequalities that surround us?

That is one way of thinking of this story, but there's another one as well, right?

And it's important to remember this other version of the story too, because maybe those late-day workers really are deserving of a full denarius at the end of the day and simply need to be understood differently, but maybe maybe they don't, right?

Maybe some of them really were the worst.

Maybe those laborers were like most of the people of Nineveh.

Maybe they were lazy.

Maybe they were scheming, right?

Maybe this was their way of getting away with something.

Maybe one of them is gonna use that whole denarius and blow it on drugs, or maybe use it on a dumb car, right?

Maybe God's grace really does extend to the people who simply, full stop, do not deserve it.

Maybe sometimes God's generosity feels unfair because at the end of the day, it is unfair.

Sometimes we are like Jonah, right?

We want to sit back in the shade and watch the people who deserve a little punishment get their just desserts.

Sometimes we love a comeuppance.

Sometimes we are like the all-day laborers, exhausted after trying so hard for so long and annoyed that someone else seems to fail up.

Someone else seems to coast on mediocrity and a great smile, or like just being really tall.

It makes our eyes twitch, imagining all of the ways our God is not fair.

But here's the other thing, of course, right?

You know where this is going because sometimes, the thing is, sometimes we are more like those last-minute laborers, aren't we?

Sometimes it is us waiting on the curb.

How often do we feel like we're doing our best but keep seeing that truck pass us by?

How often are we the ones yearning for good work to do, for purpose, for the validation that comes from being picked, being hired, being titled, being compensated.

And of course, how often are all we also, maybe sometimes, the one being the jerk?

The citizens of a Nineveh that abuses its neighbors, the citizens of a Nineveh that so often is a part of injustice, right?

The mess-ups, the idol worshipers who, by all rights, should not be getting anyone's generosity, much less God's.

Friends, we worship an unfair God.

Ours is a God who offers others far more than they deserve.

And who, thanks be to God, offers us far more than we deserve.

Instead of letting this turn our eyes evil, may it inspire us to go and do likewise.

Amen.

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Have a great week.