Text: Matthew 20:1-16
The last two weeks we’ve talked about forgiveness and confrontation.
We’ve talked about how a person should go about pursuing reconciliation, the role of other believers and the broader church in the process of reconciliation, and how our reconciliation with God ought to (and must) work itself out in our relationships with other people.
We’ve talked about how there are tensions in these teachings—how the point of Matthew 18:15-20 isn’t to teach us about excommunication, but rather teaches us to do everything we can to heal our broken relationships; and how the parable of the unmerciful servant brings boiling to the surface the relationship between the law and the gospel in our lives.
Much of this might lead us to believe that God’s kingdom works on the basis of strict transactions. If we engage in Action A, Action B will be the result. If we engage in Action C, Action D will be the result. And there’s some truth to this, of course. “God will not be mocked,” Paul tells us in Galatians. We live in a cause-and-effect world, not only physically but morally and spiritually as well. “We reap what we sow,” and so forth.
But the Bible also makes it clear that grace is a surprising sort of thing.
If all we had to work with before God was cause-and-effect, “do this and you shall live,” we’d be cooked. That’s the principle of law, of right-and-wrong, of just desserts. It’s good and true, and as scripture makes clear in a variety of ways, God’s law is the basis of our universe.
“Do not murder, do not covet, do not steal,” are all good and true commands, universally applicable to lives and cultures.
“Honor your father and mother, love your neighbor as yourself, defend the orphan and the widow” are foundations for a healthy society.
When the Gospel of John says that God created all things through the Word, and when Proverbs says that Wisdom was there with God at the creation, and when Psalm 119 says that God’s word (his Torah, his law) is firmly fixed in the heavens, it all means that there is an order and a wisdom and a moral fabric to existence itself.
The biblical authors did not believe they lived in a morally neutral creation. God, the very ground of existence, is himself the very essence of truth, goodness, and beauty. Therefore truth, goodness, and beauty are the fabric of reality itself.
This means that how we live matters.
This means that how we treat people matters.
This means that our moral choices, for good or for ill, matter immensely.
To live for the good is to cut along the grain of the universe, making good things out of the good world God gave us.
To choose evil is to hack away against the grain, tearing and splintering and forcing reality to bend to our will and creating something ultimately ugly in the process.
This is the principle of law. Do good, and reap good. Do evil, and reap evil.
But if the only thing going on in God was law, we would all be lost. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Scripture tells us. And, “the soul that sins shall die,” writes the prophet Ezekiel. If we do not forgive those hurt us completely and sincerely from our hearts, Jesus told us last week, then God will not forgive us either.
If all this is true, of course, we are lost.
And it is true, but thank God for the cross of Jesus Christ.
Thank God that the beautiful and perfect justice of God dwells alongside (so to speak), and in perfect harmony with (again, so to speak), the beautiful and boundless love of God. The God who tells us, “the soul that sins shall die,” is the same God who said through the lips of his Son, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” The same God who said, “the soul that sins shall die,” said through the pen of the apostle Paul, “God made him [a.k.a. Jesus] who knew no sin to be sin for us.” When Jesus went to the cross, the law was fulfilled on our behalf. “By his stripes we are healed.”
So here we are, sinners that we are, confronted by a God who judges sin but loves sinners—who doesn’t wince at naming the things we do as evil, but who then follows it up by telling us we are loved with an everlasting love.
This paradox works itself out at the cross. For those who repent and believe, who respond to God’s call in the gospel, all things are worked out for our good—not because we deserve it, but precisely because we do not. And that means the way God treats us in this life and the next is…for lack of a better way of saying it…sort of funny.
In our parable this morning, Jesus is responding to some conversations he just had in chapter 19—about divorce and remarriage, about his welcome of little children (to the annoyance of his disciples), and about the possibility of rich people—you know, people like us comfortable, middle class Americans—getting into heaven at all. He has said some impossible things:
Divorce of any kind is against the will of God…
The kingdom of heaven belongs to the kids…
Obey all the commandments and you’ll go to heaven…
Sell all your belongings and come follow me…
It would be easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a sewing needle than for a rich person to get into God’s kingdom…
“Who then can be saved?,” his disciples finally ask in despair.
“Nobody,” Jesus essentially responds (Matthew 19:26), “unless God makes it possible for them to be saved.”
“Therefore,” Jesus goes on in our text this morning, “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner…”
The start of the story is conventional enough, by the cultural standards of Jesus’ day. The landowner heads out to the marketplace looking for workers. It’s 6am or so, though our text doesn’t say that. The sun is coming up and it’s time to get things going. He hires some folks and sends them out to the field. Then at 9am, noon, and 3pm he does the same thing. About an hour before sunset, he goes out to the market again. He sees some more people standing around because no one has hired them.
“You also go and work in my vineyard,” he tells them (verse 7).
When the day is over, all the workers are given a denarius—the appropriate amount for one day of labor. (Remember the hundred silver coins the one servant owed the other in last week’s story? Those were one hundred denarii.)
Those who barely worked an hour have got to be excited. Those who worked three, six, or nine hours have also got to feel pretty good about things. But those who worked the full twelve-hour day—6am to 6pm, sunup to sundown—feel cheated. “These, who were hired last worked only one hour,” they complain (verse 12), “and you have made them equal to us.”
“I can do what I want,” the landowner essentially replies. “The money is mine and the field is mine, and I haven’t been unfair to any of you.”
Not a single worker has been short-changed. Every person has been given a fair day’s wages. Some have not exactly earned it, that’s true. But no one has been cheated. And nobody would have gotten anything if the landowner hadn’t hired them.
“So the last will be first,” Jesus concludes, “and the first will be last.”
There are a lot of things going on in this passage. Some of it is clearly about the rich and the poor from the previous chapter. There are also probably allusions to the future inclusion of Gentiles in the kingdom of God, alongside God’s chosen and ancient people. There’s the honor Jesus gives to children, which was quite countercultural for his day—not to mention the respect he gave to women, allowing them to be learners alongside the men, and to tax-collectors, sex-workers, and other social-cultural outsiders.
Everyone is given what they need in the parable—even those who don’t deserve it, who are overlooked, or who show up late to the game.
Those who show up first, who most seemed to deserve the good things they’ve been given, will often be last in the kingdom of heaven.
Those who’ve been missed and overlooked, who didn’t make it to the market in time for a full day of work, who haven’t even been in the vineyard for an hour—those are the ones who are first. Those are often the ones that God chooses to honor.
Because, at the end of the day—for as well as some of us appear to be doing at obeying the commandments of God—none of us have a claim on God’s goodness and grace. He could have walked past us in the market of life and left us to our fate. But he called us. He gave us his word. He welcomed us into his vineyard and said we could be a part of his harvest. He forgave us our sins, even though he saw how poorly we forgave others. And he forgave those others, too, who embraced the word of the cross.
Because when all God has to work with are sinners—which happens to be the case, after all—the goodness and justice of God’s law just isn’t enough. What you and I need, more than justice, is mercy. We need a master who does things sort of odd.
We need a master who says, “You know, all this is mine and I want to share it. You don’t deserve this, but I want you to have it. You’ve done almost nothing, but that’s not how I’ll treat you. I will treat you as well as I treat everyone else.”
Because “love covers a multitude of sin” (1 Peter 4:8). And “God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Romans 11:32).
More than servants who are paid a wage we didn’t earn, we are made co-heirs with Jesus Christ (Romans 8:17) because of his death on the cross—and not because of our works.
Now we are released to go work in God’s vineyard—not merely for the wage of a servant, but because as co-heirs with Jesus it is our vineyard, too.
We get to bring the goodness of God to the world.
We get to bring the message of the cross, the forgiveness of sins.
Because if God has forgiven us and set us free to be his children, why wouldn’t we want to be messengers of his forgiveness to the world?
Let’s Pray
Mikael Ivaska 