I’ve been thinking a lot about the limitations of the world described in this morning’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew. There is no point fighting it. This story, told by Jesus, depicts a world in which the workers are small-minded and envious and the only one who can imagine any other way of being is a rich guy whose generous gesture feels a little random and self-satisfied. To me there is an overwhelming feeling of constraint in this story.
Think about it. In the world of a day laborer there is payment for a day’s work, but no other sense of mutual obligation: no assurance of adequate housing or a living wage or care when you are sick or pay when you are injured. At best, you do a day’s work and you get paid for a day’s work and you start over the next day, waiting like a commodity in the marketplace and hoping someone will hire you.
There isn’t a lot room for planning for a future in this system. It’s hard to know how you would feel confident about providing for a family. Everything operates on a day-to-day basis. There is no room, if your day’s labor is all you can lay claim to, there is no room for you to think differently or plan for a different future. In the story we’re told, there is just labor and precarious life. It’s a narrow world for the workers imagined here.
No, the only one who really has space for dreams in the world of this story is the landowner. He’s the one who is free to indulge a whim, take a risk. It’s the landowner in this story who gets to imagining. Or maybe he gets to praying. Something changes for him and he starts thinking and feeling a little differently one day. One day, maybe, it occurs to him that what’s “fair” by the rules of this game is actually exploitation. Or let’s not go that far. This is a pretty conservative story. Maybe one day he just feels like softening the edges of his world a little bit.
In St. Matthew’s story the workers have had their focus narrowed. They are all about the rules of the game that circumstances require them to play. You work for a day and you get paid for a day’s work. But the landowner has the space, the precious mental, economic, and social space, to change the rules of the game a little bit. At nine in the morning he goes back to the market and finds that there are unemployed people there. “Come and work in my vineyard,” he says. Maybe he relishes the sense of expansiveness. Or maybe he just needs the work done quickly. He goes back at noon, and again at three, each time welcoming some new workers into the ranks of the temporarily employed. By five pm, he is puzzled to learn that there are still people waiting in the marketplace for a chance to earn whatever he will give them. “Why?” he asks, astonished, “Why have you been standing here all day doing nothing?” I guess he doesn’t know that laborers wait all day to get the chance to earn whatever they can in this system.
And when the end of the workday comes, he finds it in his heart to pay each one of the day’s laborers for a full day’s work. It’s not a social revolution. It’s just a softening of the economic edge. Maybe it’s the start of a new way of thinking, or maybe it’s just a day’s experiment for a rich man who can indulge a whim. Certainly when questioned he is less than inspiring about his motives: “Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?” he asks. It’s not a very reassuring answer. And he’s quick to point out that the grumblings of those who worked all day are petty and mean. “Are you envious?” he asks. And then off they go, those small-minded workers, to the insecurity that envelops them whenever they think about the next day’s work.
And this, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of heaven is like.
Could anyone, could we, could these workers and their boss, ever respond to the grace of God breaking into a world so shut down and constrained? Even the generosity here seems tainted by the attitude of the giver. Many commentators note that this landowner arranges for those who have worked the least to be paid first, right under the noses of the ones who earned their keep. He almost dares the most exhausted workers to feel the most resentment. Would it have killed the boss to hand off a little cash under the table?
Grace arrives awkwardly in a hard world, and it lands almost like injustice. “The last will be first and the first will be last.” I’ve heard that saying so many times that I’ve almost forgotten how wrong it sounds. Pity me if you like, but I’m still holding out for a kingdom in which we all get there at the same time, and words like “first” and “last” have no meaning.
What I take from this parable, in this world we’re living in, on a Sunday morning in America in September of 2020, what I take from this parable is that there is no way I can jump from a world of privilege to a world in which “first” and “last” don’t matter. I can’t will myself into the kingdom of heaven by forgetting what it means to come in first or last. I’ve been first for too long. I owe a debt of understanding, and a debt of action, to those who have been coming in last all my life. The bliss of the kingdom of heaven has been much too easy for me. My visions of that kingdom, truth be told, are uncomfortably like the random gestures of the landowner in this story. I know that’s true because of two thoughts that occur to me more often than I want to admit. The first is “I should be able to do what I want.” And the second is “Those people shouldn’t be so angry.”
Grace arrives awkwardly in a hard world, so awkwardly that it looks wrong even when you think you are eager to cooperate. No one who wants to enter the kingdom, or to see the kingdom come, can avoid the awkwardness of grace. The problem with our parable this morning is not that God is like the landowner. The problem is that I am like the landowner. I need to accept a reversal of my own position.
Often this parable is read as an allegory about salvation and the Jews. The Jews are in this reading the ones who have been working in God’s fields for a long difficult day, and Christians are the johnnies-come-lately who get paid a full day’s wages—salvation—without having that whole long arduous history of Israel’s relation to God. I don’t disagree that this parable may have served that function in its original cultural moment. But we aren’t in that moment. We aren’t that audience.
And the word of God doesn’t get frozen in time. It lives and breathes and it grows and stretches with us if we are willing to grapple with it. Our problem today is not so much that we are overly convinced that God has chosen us. Our problem is that we have appropriated God for ourselves economically, positioned ourselves to become like little gods on earth. Grace—wages, sustenance, thriving, fullness of life, full personhood, supportive community—gets doled out according to our whims. We recognize no obligation but the obligation to follow our own desires, and our creation of the kingdom on earth is subject to our preferences. It suffers according to our blind spots. And we leave a trail of resentments wherever we go.
That’s not a lot of good news. But no one who wants to enter the kingdom of God can avoid, apparently, a reckoning with those words, “first” and “last.” Despite the constraint and awkwardness of this parable, its fundamental truth remains: the kingdom is open if we want to come in. The fields are there for tilling, and God will take us even if we are only just now, so late in salvation history, coming to some new awareness that we have work to do.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
September 20, 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia