Jonah 3.10-4.11
Psalm 145.1-8
Philippians 1.21-27
Matthew 20.1-16
It’s Not Fair!
The story is as deeply engrained as it is compelling: the lowly unsung good, truly deserving but of no account in this world, vindicated. The successful wicked, proud and wise in the world’s ways, in the end cast down. The truth will come out. Things will be set to rights. Everything will turn out the way it should; justice will be done: God will see to it. The last will be first, and the first will be last.
The faithful, obscure good, quietly doing God’s work, unknown to the world but great in the kingdom of God will, when all truths are told, receive the honor due them. If you’re lucky, you’ve been blessed to know some of these anonymous saints. But those who have clawed their way to the top, raking in money, power and privilege, will see it turn to dust and ashes and, past all remonstrance, know they have wasted their lives.
I love the story in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce; the damned can take a bus from Hell to Heaven to have a look around and, if they choose to, stay. The story’s narrator is getting a tour from his old Scot teacher:
All down one long aisle of the forest…the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light…a procession was approaching, and the light came from the persons who composed it. First came the Spirits…who danced and scattered flowers…then, on the left and the right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face. “Is it?…Is it?” I whispered to my guide. “Not at all” said he. “It’s someone you’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” “She seems to be…well, a person of particular importance?" “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” The guide goes on to describe this woman’s anonymous faithful life, explaining to the visitor from Hell how her small acts of grace and kindness were like stones thrown into a pool, the concentric waves spreading out further and further. “Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”
This is great stuff. Indeed, it’s at the heart of Christian faith:
Jesus, despised, rejected, crucified, made least and last is revealed as
the first, very God of very God, the Lord and Savior of all. It’s part
of the fabric of our hope in God. Yet I don’t think it has much immediate
to do with Jesus’ parable about the laborers in the vineyard, nor about
what he means when he winds it up saying “So the last will be first,
and the first will be last.” In fact what Jesus says here is
closer to the opposite. His story is not about the loyal, underpaid guy
who uncomplainingly does most of the work and then inherits the vineyard
in the end. It’s about the guys too lazy to make it to the labor hall at
the start of the workday coming out O.K. and the good guys being ticked
off about it.
The laborers hired early in the day complain, but they don’t appreciate just how badly they’ve been had. They say “These last have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us!” Yes, equal since they got the same amount of money. But suppose the early risers were hired at 8:00 and that everyone knocked off at 6:00, so they worked a ten hour day (though it was probably longer); on another reckoning the landowner is saying “Your work is worth only one tenth as much as these lazy guys’ work!’ That’s a blow not just to their pockets, but to their self-esteem. It’s like when senior full professors discover that newly hired assistant professors are getting paid more than they are: not a happy day, and it’s not just about the money.
In class I sometimes tell a story, legendary in the annals of the Wacome family, to illustrate how deeply the insistence on fairness is hard-wired into us. We don’t have to learn it; it’s bred in the bone. We crave it, like water, like air. One day at my Aunt and Uncle’s summer house in New Hampshire there appeared from somewhere a cupcake with half a maraschino cherry on top. My four young cousins immediately started clamoring for it so my ever judicious Aunt Ruth announced she would divide it among the four of them. She produced a knife and with great precision – she used to be a nurse - cut it into quarters, while the children anxiously observed and awaited their shares. We’re now down to an eighth of cherry for each kid. Before they could be parceled out my cousin Todd’s hand shot out, grabbed two of the pieces and popped them into his mouth. All hell broke loose. His three sisters began wailing at full volume. The pandemonium drowned out my aunt’s scolding of her cheating son. The hysteria continued at great length, for us adult onlookers hilariously out of proportion to the stolen quarter of a half cherry. As I recall it ended with my cousin Kim, Todd’s older sister, simultaneously weeping, hyperventilating and bent over trying to vomit. It was great!
There are two ways to read the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. We could take it as saying there’s a certain way things are ordered now in terms of who gets what, but that God is going to reverse it, making those who are first last and those who are last first. (Those who are in the middle now will, I suppose, stay where they are.) This fits with the way we often understand the saying, but I don’t think it’s the right reading for this text. Instead we should hear “The last will be first, and the first will be last” as saying that God is going to throw everything topsy turvy: not a transition from an unjust distribution of rewards and punishments to a fair one where everyone gets what they really deserve, but that there’s a new world coming where what you deserve - good or bad – in some deep and profoundly unfair way just doesn’t count.
Sometimes it’s really off putting; conscientious folk that we are, we don’t much like God’s playing fast and loose with what his creatures deserve. We cling to the old economy of fairness as desperately as my cousins did to their bits of cherry. We want our little sum of worth recognized and rewarded; we don’t want to be tossed in with those lazy lowlifes. Or, truth be told, we’re afraid that the good news is after all too good to be true, that cosmic books are being kept and that we might be found in the red.
Sometimes, though, we get into the spirit of things, glorying with perverse delight at the thumbing of the divine nose at the rules; I think especially of Chrysostom’s sermon, the one we read at each Easter Vigil, the one that joyously welcomes everyone in gleeful indifference to who deserves what:
And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.
For the Lord is gracious and receives the last
even as the first.
He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh
hour,
as well as to him that toiled from the first.
To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
The last word is that not even something as great and important as justice defeats God’s love. Grace crashes down on everyone, the latecomers and the early arriving, the lazy and the toiling, the good and the bad. It’s crazy to get bent out of shape about who gets the fragment of cherry when there are orchards of cherries and cupcakes galore in the kingdom of God. It’s ridiculous to get up in arms about those latecomers getting a full day’s pay for an hour’s work because now the harvest is in, the wine is made and everyone – those who did the work as well as the freeloaders - is invited to the landowner’s never ending party where there’ll be too much fun being had for anyone even to think of settling old scores or to dream of keeping anyone out.
So let’s take that fine advice St. Paul gave the Philippians: live you life in a manner worthy of the gospel. I know good Christian people have had a couple thousand years working to turn this sort of thing into its opposite, to get out of it something like: here are the rules you have to follow if you’re really going to be on the receiving end of God’s love. As tempting as that might be, it’s a lost cause: God is going to get his way and save the worst right along with the best. So why fight it? Let’s forgive as we are forgiven and follow God’s example, giving up on keeping score. Why wouldn’t we want to listen to Paul and live lives that make sense in light of the gospel? If Christianity is really true, anything else is just absurd. That’s what he’s talking about, not about duties or rules or conditions. Surely the fact that God will at last break into the hardened hearts of the likes of Osama bin Laden is no reason not to want to be more like Sarah Smith of Golders Green. That God will relentlessly show his mercy even to the ungrateful is all the more reason for us to live joyful lives of gratitude; it’s not a reason to want to be a miserable ingrate. Sure, we’ll all get the same pay at the end of the day, but why waste the day idling about with those boring characters on the street corner when there’s interesting and worthwhile work to be done in the lord’s vineyards?
Amen.