Not about the Grapes or the Gripes, but the Grace

Proper 20A: Matthew 20:1-16

The noted preacher Fred Craddock once observed that there are two kinds of sermons that are difficult to hear: bad sermons and good sermons. Bad sermons are hard to listen to because the preacher has nothing worthwhile to say and often can’t even say that. But a good sermon, a good sermon is hard to hear because it gets under your skin and bothers you. It makes you feel worse, not better. Sometimes we preachers even aim for this. Which is why it can be disappointing when after the service, people at the church door say, “I really enjoyed that sermon, Father!” We want to reply, “Well, I was actually hoping you’d be disturbed by it.”

In the parable we just heard, Jesus gives us a lesson that is sure to disturb us. Like most of Jesus’ parables, the basic story is simple and mundane. A vineyard owner is desperate to get his crop of grapes harvested. So, at first light, the farmer goes to town to find some day laborers to gather his grapes. As in most towns, there are always people waiting for just such a job. So, he hires a bunch, promising the usual daily pay for their trouble. And they set in, ready for a full day’s work.

Apparently, however, despite their diligent efforts, the picking is not proceeding fast enough to satisfy the landowner. So, he goes to town again at 9am to hire more workers, then again at noon and again at 3pm. He hands them all empty bushel baskets and tells them to fill ’em up with grapes.

As the sun starts to set, though, it is clear they won’t finish on time. So, the vineyard owner goes out again to bring back some more workers for the final push. Now, these eleventh-hour workers are not the ‘eager beavers’ who had been standing at the farmer’s front gate at dawn. When everyone else was jumping to get picked, this bunch stayed in bed. Maybe these were the ne’er-do-wells of the community—the kind of people who are unemployed but lacked the initiative to do much about it. They’d been sitting around on the edges of the town square all day, sipping cheap beer maybe and just watching as the farmer came again and again looking for new workers.

Then, as the day was winding down, about the time these slackers were getting ready to head on home, to while away the evening scrolling Youtube videos while munching on the frozen pizza they bought with their unemployment checks, the farmer comes back one last time.

“Why have you guys been lazing around all day doing nothing?” the farmer asks. “Dunno,” they reply, “guess it’s cuz no one hired us.” Well, there was a reason for that, too, of course. But when the farmer tells them to get to work at last, they comply.

Here’s where Jesus lays in the surprise: At quitting time, the workers line up for their pay. And strangely, the landowner makes sure that the last-minute pickers get paid first. Had they been paid last, after the all-day workers had already left with their denarius tucked into their belts, there would not have been any trouble (or much punch to this parable). But, instead, the farmer makes sure the people who worked the longest were present when these lazy bums got paid a denarius, the usual wage for a day’s work.

Seeing this, the early-morning workers, being fair-minded men with a firm sense of right and wrong, assume that they must be in for even more. Maybe the going rate for this vineyard wasn’t a denarius for the day, but a denarius for each hour! What a happy night it would be if they came home with twelve denarii in their pocket!  Maybe they’d swing by the store on the way home and buy a special candy bar for the kids, some flowers for the wife, and one of those better brands of wine to go with dinner.

Except that it didn’t happen that way at all. All of them get the same pay, the all-day workers and the cleanup crew, one denarius. You know how people have a certain look on their face when they feel cheated. Pursed lips, sideways glance, head-shaking expression utterly transparent to the anger that is rising in the throat. That’s what I imagine the 12-hour workers looked like as soon as the pay-man plopped the single denarius into their sweaty palms. They stared at the coin in disbelief. “Can you even believe this!?”

The owner overhears their grumbling and reminds them that this was what they agreed to at dawn that day. They got the usual daily wage. “And as for the rest,” he goes on, “what’s that to you?  You’re not ‘out’ anything. Can’t I do what I want with my own money? Are you really going to give me the evil eye because I’m good to my workers?”

The long-suffering laborers have no reply. There’s nothing they could say to that. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a point. The owner can do what he wants, sure, but it still doesn’t seem right, doesn’t seem fair. By anyone’s reckoning, they did deserve more.

The owner’s failing to recognize that fact is not going to win him any friends, not in the long-run, and is only going to cause problems for his business. ‘Cause just wait till next year. No one’s going to volunteer to work all day in the sun when they know they can wait till the end of the day and get paid the same. The landowner’s “generosity” is sure to ruin his business and upset the labor market for miles around.

Now, Jesus, of course, isn’t telling us this story to teach us about how we should run our businesses or how to order a national economy. He’s talking rather about God’s Kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus wants us to understand, is not built on merit, but mercy. It’s governed not by justice but by grace. And that’s the problem. Or rather why we have a problem with it. Grace sounds high-minded and magnanimous, but, fact is, grace means people get what they don’t deserve, what they didn’t earn, what they haven’t worked work for. It’s not fair, and that irks us.

This is true when we’re talking about monetary rewards, but it’s just as true when it comes to spiritual rewards. Many of us, without meaning to do it, peg our spiritual worth, our eternal value, to how long we’ve been Christian, and how much work we’ve done for the church. In the heat of the day, in the dark of night, throughout the week and twice on Sundays, serving on committees, donating time and money, coming to church rain or shine, even when we don’t feel like it. Before we realize it, we get to thinking that maybe we don’t need as much grace as other folks do. That maybe we are getting to heaven on the “installment plan,” rather than by grace.

In a self-help culture like ours, it’s easy to think this way, to get confused into thinking that our relationship with God, our salvation, is due to our working for it. Grace, though, comes not in response to what we do, but in spite of it. It’s not a reward but a gift. It derives not from our deserving but from God’s desire, his desire for us to share in his life and in what he’s doing.

Recall that vineyard owner, how he kept going out again and again looking for workers. He’s not locked up in an office waiting for workers to arrive. He’s on the road, looking, recruiting, inviting. He spends more time in town than he does in his vineyard. What kind of farmer does that? It’s as if he cares more about gathering people than he does gathering grapes!

God, Jesus suggests, is like that. He’s like the vineyard owner who seeks out everyone, not just the early-bird, eager-beaver types, but also the reluctant, the scared, the lazy—everyone!—to bring them into his vineyard. And it doesn’t matter whether we are in the first shift or the last, so long as we get there. For regardless of when we get there, the reward’s the same—a place in his kingdom.

Now, that’s rather appealing, if you are the last one in. But if you are among the first, part of the hard-working, long-suffering, early-morning crew, then this is not so welcome.

So the question is, Which ones are we in this story? Many of us assume we are with the early-morning workers. But the truth is, no matter how old we are, no matter how long we’ve been a Christian, we are all johnny-come-latelys, the last ones to the party, not the first, with no claim to our place. No matter how much we feel we’ve earned it, our being here is a gift, an undeserved blessing.

In fact, that’s what it means to be Christian—not that we made some “heroic” attempt to find God, but that God found us. If you think you chose to be here this morning, think again. The landowner came looking. God came out and found you, hired you, recruited you, brought you in and gave you a job to do.

And that job isn’t to be fed, fixed, inspired or comforted. You’re here because God has work to do—and God needs you. He needs you in the vineyard, for the harvest. God needs us? Apparently so. Some chapters before this one, Jesus instructed his disciples: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest" (9:37-38). The answer to that prayer is us.

Now, that may not seem much like good news. We tend to see work as a burden, an imposition, something we do for the sake of some other good. But what if work is not a means to an end, but is itself the reward? What if the invitation to work is not a burden to be borne, but a gift to be used? What if our having work to do and the talents to do it is itself a grace?

Notice, that even the workers hired early in the morning, the ones who later complain about the owner's generosity, they rolled out of bed unemployed. But then the owner finds them and gives them a job. And he does the same for the rest. Before the farmer came along, they were all idle, doing nothing, not employed in any meaningful way, ineffective, unfulfilled, unproductive. The “cure” comes when someone invites them to come and work, to put their energies towards a larger purpose, to be part of an effort towards a greater good.

Before, they had no purpose or place, but now the landowner gives them one. And that too is grace. Not just paying the latecomers the same wages, but extending the invitation to all to come and work. 

Of course, the all-day workers don’t see it that way. Rather than be grateful for being given work with which to provide what they need, the all-day workers resent not having been given more. Instead of rejoicing that the other workers who waited all day can go home happy to have been useful for once, the all-day workers grumble at being treated as equal to them.

But if the work is the reward, the injustice in the story, if there is any, is not that the early-morning workers weren’t paid more for their work, but that the latecomers didn’t get to join the crew sooner. They didn’t get to share in the landowner’s work as long. They had to go longer without meaningful work, without purpose, feeling useless.

Looking at it that way turns the story on its head, doesn’t it? Seen in this light, Jesus' parable is not about our earning a wage as much as it's about God sweeping up idle people, lost people, and giving them a job, a purpose. Indeed, given that this is a parable about God’s kingdom, what we're talking about here is the purpose we've been looking for, or avoiding, all along: God's purpose for us, his desire for everyone to share joyfully in the produce and productivity of his kingdom.

To be sure, this universal invitation is not “fair,” not in the way we calculate fairness. It’s unjust, and that offends us. But that’s grace for you. If it doesn’t offend, doesn’t challenge our expectations, then it’s not grace.

Jesus got killed for precisely this reason, because he gave good sermons, sermons that were full of grace, sermons that offended people, disturbed them. And if we don’t like hearing such stories, we best not bother with Jesus either. But if we have any suspicion that maybe, some day, we might need some of that grace, then we best stick around, because the landowner has work for us to do and a place in his kingdom waiting for us. For that we say, thanks be to God!