EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

Jesus tells a parable: a landowner goes out early one morning to hire some folks to come work in his vineyard. He agrees to pay them the usual daily wage and off they go to work. A little while later, the landowner sees some other folks waiting around, hoping for a job, and he hires them, too, promising to pay ‘whatever’s right’. And so it goes through the day: the landowner keeps going back to the marketplace, finding people there looking for work, and hiring them on, even at 5:00, right before the end of the day.

We know the rest: evening comes and the landowner has all the workers line up and begins to pay them, starting with the folks hired on last, the ones who worked the least. And when the people who’ve been working since dawn see that the people who only worked long enough to pick a couple of grapes are getting a full day’s wage, they get excited.

“Wow, if those latecomers are getting that much, how much are we going to get?”

And the answer, of course, is that they’re paid exactly what they were told they’d be paid: a full day’s wage, a just amount for the amount of work they’ve done.

They’re not happy. And we’re sympathetic. Yes, ok, we understand that the all-day workers weren’t shortchanged, that they got what they had coming to them. But it seems so unfair-compared to the amount of effort they put in, those other folks got so much more. And I’ve read loads of commentaries and articles and even sermons about this passage, and they all get it, too. This is God’s upside down world, they say. God’s justice isn’t like human justice. This is all about God’s grace which He bestows on the least of us as well as on the greatest of us.

And that may be true, but it doesn’t take away the sting. Some of those folks worked the whole day out in the vineyard under a hot sun and some got there right before the sun went down, but they all were paid the same amount. How is that fair? Ok, the folks who didn’t work as hard are just as entitled to God’s grace. That’s good news, but in the sense that yucky tasting medicine is good news-it’s good for us, but it’s a little hard to swallow.

A lot of commentaries on this passage try and make it easier to swallow.  They speculate that the 5:00 workers faced other challenges like maybe they had sick children at home, or they were unemployed because the economy was stacked against them, or they weren’t able-bodied and therefore couldn’t work a whole day.

Whatever. There’s nothing about that in the actual story. Nowhere does it say anything about the lives of the latecomers. Nowhere does it offer any mitigating circumstances that would somehow even things out with the workers who’ve been there since dawn. If we take the story at face value what we get is, these folks got a great deal-the flip side of which is that the folks who worked all day didn’t. This is what the kingdom of heaven is like? Arbitrary? Unfair? How is this good news? It’s outrageous!

And that, actually, may be the point.

Again and again, Jesus tells parables that make no sense-a sower who throws seed all over the place; a merchant who sells absolutely everything he has to buy just one pearl of great price; a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep alone to go find the one sheep who’s gone wandering. Again and again, Jesus tells these stories that just don’t add up in worldly terms, stories with rough edges we can’t smooth away. They’re shocking and that’s why Jesus tells them. He tells these parables to jolt us out of hearing only what we’re listening for, to shock us out of waiting to have our expectations confirmed. These stories conform to God’s logic, not ours, and that hasn’t changed.

Jesus’ parables always take place in the day-to-day world of ordinary people. They’re always about people in their everyday lives, making a living, interacting with their neighbors. And we hear a lot of these parables during the part of our liturgical year known as Ordinary Time. The ‘ordinary’ comes from the word ‘ordinal’ because each of the Sundays is counted-today is the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, for instance. But Ordinary Time also means ‘common’ time, Christian Standard Time as someone once said. And these parables break into Ordinary Time just as Jesus’ incarnation breaks into everyday life.

To our ears, some of Jesus’ parables may have lost their sting. Sowers and pearls and sheep sound bucolic or slightly quaint. That’s not true of this story about the hired laborers. This story is still jarring. It’s still offensive. It has it all, from the exploitation of the poorest workers to not giving each his due. It makes no sense, economically or otherwise.

But Jesus doesn’t tell this parable by way of laying out an economic alternative to capitalism. He’s not looking to make amendments to an existing system or to offer up an economic case study we’re meant to apply. He tells this parable to startle us into seeing something we’ve never seen, to help us name something for which we’ve had no words.

We hear things in the language of rights: a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work; to each his due; the rights of the workers. But Jesus is teaching us a new language, a language of need being met, of payment determined by generosity, not contract, of being loved rather than merely compensated.

That doesn’t mean the folks who worked all day were loved any less than the folks who worked only an hour. That Jesus ate dinner with all kinds of sinners doesn’t mean the faithful people he didn’t eat dinner with were damned. The ninety-nine sheep who weren’t lost aren’t worthless because Jesus does whatever it takes to find the one who is lost. This parable about the vineyard workers isn’t about measuring their relative worth. It doesn’t mean that the ones who worked the least are loved the most. Really, it’s not about them at all, but about God. About God whose criteria for who gets what is God’s love, not our merit. To the extent this parable is about us, it’s about our need rather than our deserts being God’s criteria for giving.

It’s always tempting to believe that God is somehow bound by our sense of what’s fair or what’s just. It’s tempting to believe that those who came to the vineyard early and worked longest should have a greater claim on God’s love and generosity. But Jesus tells us that the last will be first and the first last. That is the truth of what we mean when we say, “God is love.” God’s love stretches far beyond the bounds of our sense of fairness or our inclination to weigh one another’s relative merits and worthiness. God’s grace breaks open the limits we set on God’s love, just as Jesus’ parables break open our limited vision, and Jesus’ existence breaks open our understanding of what it means to be human.

God loves without limits and God gives without limits. And because we are created in God’s image, we are created to live in that limitless love and that limitless generosity. We are created to be as startlingly generous with others as God is with us, to love without measure, because by doing so we’re following Jesus, the last who is first, right into the center of God’s kingdom.

Praise God that this is true. Pray God that we may live into that truth. Amen.