Sermon for Proper 20, Year A
“Grace isn’t a paycheck” is a hard truth to wrap our minds around because many of us grew up with the belief that life should be fair. We think that good deeds and hard work should be rewarded while bad deeds and laziness should be punished. This belief persists, even though the world we live in often fails to live up to our belief that life should be fair.
We can see this deep-seated belief on full display in the workers who appear in Jesus’ parable in today’s gospel. The first group of workers begin their day at the usual time and agree to work for the usual rate. As the day wears on, their employer keeps going back to the employment line to hire more workers. At the end of the day, the employer pays all the workers the same wage, regardless of what time they started their work.
Those who had worked the longest have every reason to be upset at this new development. Equal pay for unequal work doesn’t exactly incentivize working harder. In fact, it does quite the opposite. Moreover, it undermines that deep-seated belief that life should be fair, that people should only get what they deserve. And that, according to Jesus, is the whole point.
The central fact in this story, for Jesus, is not the balance sheet of right and wrong but the generosity of God. Jesus tells this parable immediately after a conversation with his disciples where they ask about what they can expect to receive in return for all they have given up to follow Jesus. He tells them, in short, “That’s not how God works. Grace isn’t a paycheck. God’s generosity is not limited by what people deserve.”
The meaning of Jesus’ parable becomes more apparent if we hear it from the perspective of the workers who were hired at the end of the day. For all we know, those workers might have been standing out in the hot sun for just as long as those who were hired at the beginning of the day. The story doesn’t tell us why they weren’t hired with the others, just that they weren’t.
All of the workers in this parable were day-laborers, meaning that they had no secure employment. Their entire living depended on what they could earn by their labor in a given day. And no work beyond the present day was ever guaranteed. This is the same boat that all the workers were in at the start of the day.
As the hours wore on, those who were left on the hiring line were probably starting to think about what they would have to tell their families when they got home that night. They had tried to find work but no one had hired them. They may have been dreading the look of disappointment on their children’s faces when dad came home with nothing to put on the table that night. That’s where the generosity of the landowner comes in.
The most remarkable thing about the landowner in Jesus’ parable is how he keeps going out, again and again, hour after hour, until everyone has been invited to come work in the vineyard. At the end of the day, the landowner’s offer of a day’s wage for an hour’s work was incredibly generous, even though it was undeniably bad for business.
The workers who were hired at the beginning of the day would have been perfectly content with their daily wage, had the latecomers not received the same amount. The only thing they lost in this deal was the distinction between themselves and their co-workers. In that moment, their concern for fairness eclipsed the needs of the people standing beside them. For the landowner, who is a symbol of God in this parable, fairness is not enough.
Human institutions, like businesses, governments, and churches, need rules in order to keep things fair. But those rules can sometimes fail us. A social system can function in exactly the way it was supposed to and still leave some people out. A person can follow the rules and do what’s right, but still fall through the cracks of the system. After the rules have decided what people deserve, grace asks, “What happens to them now?” Grace doesn’t say that fairness is wrong; it just refuses to let it have the last word.
I can imagine, for example, a single mother working her way through school while raising her kids on her own. Then government changes the rules for work requirements, forcing the mom to choose between continuing her education or providing for her children. The rule was designed to prevent abuse of the system, but ends up hurting the very people who were not abusing the system. What is a good employer supposed to do for an employee in such an unfair situation?
The landowner chooses to be more generous than fairness requires. That is what grace does. It refuses to let what someone deserves set the limits of what generosity can give. And once grace has broken that boundary, it becomes possible to ask not only, “What do they deserve?” but, “What do they need?” When fairness fails, grace makes exceptions.
Grace is willing to risk the fallout that comes when generosity gives people what they need instead of limiting them to what they deserve. The landowner in Jesus’ parable says to the upset worker, “Friend, I have done you no wrong,” and asks the worker outright, “Are you envious because I am generous?” A more accurate translation of that question would be, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”
The phrase, “are you envious” is not entirely wrong because an “evil eye,” in that culture, was a Jewish figure of speech for begrudging another person’s good. What I like about the more literal translation is that it draws our attention to the way that grace changes how people look at one another.
When we look at each other through the eyes of grace, we see neighbors, not competitors. We look into our neighbors’ bowls, not to see if they have more than us, but to make sure they have enough.
That’s how grace sees the world. That’s how God looks at us. And that’s how we see each other, when we look at each other through the eyes of God.
We see someone who God came back for.
We see someone who God chose when nobody else wanted them.
We see someone whose children will not have to go hungry just so I can feel like I got what I deserved.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 