Read Matthew 20 here.
___
A
man named Steve retired in his early 50's and started a second career. But he
just couldn't seem to get to work on time. Every day he was 5, 10, 15 minutes
late. He was a good worker, and clever, so the owner was in a quandary about
how to deal with it. Finally, one day he called Steve into the office for a
talk.
'Steve,
I have to tell you, I like your work ethic, you do a great job, but you're
being late so often is a bit of a problem.'
'Yes,
I realize that, sir, and I am working on it.' replied Steve.
'I'm
pleased to hear that, you are a team player. It's odd though, you're coming in
late. I know you're retired from the Navy. What did they say if you came in
late there?'
'They
said, "Good morning, Admiral."’[1]
--
Show of hands- Are you an early person or a
late person? If you’re an early person,
do you resent people who arrive late? If you’re a late person, do you resent
their resentment?
In
the parable of the laborers in the vineyard that Blaine read from Matthew
today, there is resentment for those who
come late because they get paid the same.
We don’t know why they weren’t there at the beginning, but we do know
that at the end of the day, the workers who worked twelve hours get paid
exactly the same as the workers who worked one hour. We have no trouble understanding why the
twelve-hour workers are upset. This is
not fair pay…in the kingdom of earth, but Jesus is telling us about the kingdom
of heaven.
The
actual value of a denarius varied quite a bit.[2] But we know from today’s text that whatever
its actual value, it was a standard wage to give a worker for a day’s work.
I’ll
admit I wasn’t quite able to wrap my mind around what’s happening in this
parable at first….until I was reading Psalm
73 in which we see the value system that the Bible teaches us.[3]
I
have found that whenever I am having trouble understanding something in the
Bible, the first thing to do is to ask
God about it. I don’t always get the
answer right away, but I do get answers.
The second thing to do is see if
other parts of the Bible help explain it. Reading more – the whole chapter,
for starters – helps us to have the context. It’s important to be reading the whole Bible,
because there are parts that won’t make sense until we read other parts. For instance, Hebrews makes much more sense
to us if we have read the first five books of the Bible, because Hebrews is
full of allusions to those books.
Psalm
73 helps us understand the value system
at work in today’s parable. In Psalm 73,
the psalm-writer is working through feelings that are similar to those being
expressed in our parable by the workers who had worked the entire day. The psalmist is upset about unfairness in the world, and wondering why good things
happen to bad people. He says in verse 3,
For I was envious of the arrogant;
I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
The
psalmist goes on in the psalm to describe how he was envious of their success
and prosperity, but then comes to a turning point in verses 16-17 when he says:
But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God.
it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God.
When he turns to God, he realizes he was focusing
on the wrong things. The highpoint of
this realization is expressed in the verses that are most often quoted from
this psalm:
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
He desires nothing more than God. God is his
strength and his portion. This is a
statement of the value of God, or rather more specifically, the value of having
a relationship with God, which is worth more than worldly possessions or
status.
That word portion might seem odd to us, until
we read in the book of Numbers about Israel when they have finally arrived in
the Promised Land and they are dividing up the land, deciding where each tribe
will live in Palestine. One tribe, the
tribe of Levi who are the priests, gets no land, and instead this:
And the Lord said
to Aaron, “You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have
any portion among them. I am your portion and your inheritance among the
people of Israel.” -Numbers 18:20
Instead of a portion of land, they get a special
relationship with God.
In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, if
we stick with the idea of workers getting paid for hours of work, we fully
understand the resentment of those who worked the full twelve hours. But if instead we think of this in terms of
something else of even greater value, the parable makes much more sense. If the
most valuable thing we can have is a relationship with God, and it is, then it
doesn’t matter who worked more hours.
Our portion is not the denarius, the wage we get paid. Our
portion is God’s grace.
If we still think this parable is about money, we
need to look back at the conversation that is happening just before Jesus tells
this parable. A rich young ruler comes
to Jesus asking what he must do to achieve salvation. Jesus tells him to sell all he has and give
it to the poor, and the man goes away sad.
Jesus further explains to the disciples that it’s harder for a rich man
to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle. The disciples are amazed and
ask, “Can anyone be saved?” Jesus reply
is one of my favorites of his words.
“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are
possible.” You’d think that would end
the conversation, but Peter still doesn’t quite get it. He says, “But Lord, what about us? We’ve left everything behind to follow
you.” Jesus answers:
“Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things,
when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed
me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29 And everyone who has
left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields,
for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal
life. 30 But
many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Matthew 19:28-30)
I imagine the disciples probably still had some
quizzical looks on their faces, and so Jesus continues with the parable we read
today, and ends with a repeat of his earlier statement, “the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
In the kingdom of God it’s not about who is the
best or has the most or does the most work, it’s about God’s incredible
generosity. God doesn’t treat us
fairly. He loves us all the same. He sent Jesus for the salvation of us all, so
that we might all have a relationship with him forever.
We get
off track with this so easily because we don’t always recognize the value of
this relationship. We take
it for granted. God becomes like that
loyal friend we don’t have to pay much attention to because they’re always
going to be there anyway.
We begin
to have greater appreciation of the value of our relationship with God when we
remember that Jesus Christ died on a cross so that we could have it.
We do a lot of different things as a church, but
all of them revolve around fostering our relationship with God, encouraging one
another to grow in our relationship with God, and helping those who don’t know
God to find the joy that we have found in having this relationship. Our acts of
service are about our service to God because we have this relationship. We
aren’t in competition with other churches because we want people to be wherever
they find encouragement in their faith.
Another
way we get off track is we, without realizing it, start to focus on and place
too much value on those things that have been a part of helping us to find
God. We might begin to
idolize a particular song because we’ve connected with God in it. We might become obsessed with going to a
particular place or event, or a particular speaker or pastor because they were
instrumental in connecting us with God.
All of those things are great and important means for connecting with
God. We just have to be careful not to
get so caught up in the means that we forget about the end, the reason for
those things, connecting with our amazing, wonderful, beautiful God.
The
landowner says that the problem is that the 12-hour workers are envious of the
one-hour workers. Haven’t we also been
envious of those who get paid more than we do? Or seem to have more than we do?
It’s true that Homer doesn’t deserve any of the
breaks he’s had in life. What makes it
work in the world of the Simpsons is that Homer never claims to be anything but
the bumbler he is, and so nobody except that co-worker gets upset about it. Homer
doesn’t look down on others, and even tries to make friends with that coworker
who despises him.
We, too, have blessings we don’t deserve. We live in a world that is full of
conveniences that others invented. We
are worshipping in a church that was founded before many of us came along, and
we are recipients of a faith that others died for us to have.
We cannot be prideful or self-righteous about our
faith because none of us has earned the grace we have received from God through
our faith in Jesus Christ. Grace is an
amazingly generous gift. All we have to
do is accept it and give thanks for it, and use it to continually reach out to
God and enjoy our relationship with him.
What time zone are you in?
It
doesn’t matter how early or late we are, or what time zone we’re in.
Whenever
we connect with God is the right time.
Now is
the right time to say
thanks to our amazing God.
[2] Zondervan Pictorial
Dictionary of the Bible, 1963, page 554-5.
[3] I was reading Psalm 73 as
part of this devotional in Our Daily
Bread http://mobi.rbc.org/odb/2017-09-19.html
[4] “Homer’s Enemy” (The
Simpsons, season eight, episode 23; originally aired 5/4/1997). A discussion of
this Simpson’s episode here: https://tv.avclub.com/a-classic-simpsons-episode-explores-the-universality-of-1798237956 Watch the episode here: http://www.simpsonsworld.com/video/436466755640
No comments:
Post a Comment