September 4 2011
Ezek 33:7-9; Rom 13: 8-10; Matt 18:15-20
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
I’m very glad to be with you this morning. This morning’s gospel passage is so familiar; we’ve all heard it many, many times. Obviously, the householder who hires the laborers represents God, and the message is that even the Johnny-come-latelies will be welcome in the kingdom and do just as well as those who worked through the heat of the day.
The first hearers of the Gospel of Matthew were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah. They may have been concerned that non-Jews were converting and being accepted as if they had been worshipping the true God all along. Law-abiding citizens may have been worried about the riffraff the young church was attracting, such as tax collectors and public sinners. Their natural expectation was that people who had put in more time being good should have some greater reward. And that is our natural expectation, too.
Jesus tells his disciples and these hearers of the Gospel that they shouldn’t worry. They will be richly rewarded. On the other hand, they also shouldn’t worry if people come after them and put in less effort at discipleship, and are also generously rewarded.
Is Jesus telling us to change the way we do business? I don’t think so. My son worked for the city of Raleigh for a year, before he joined the Army. Most of his fellow employees hardly worked at all, but they drew the same pay as the few who shouldered most of the load. Is that fair? More to the point, how hard will people work if people are paid for not working? If a teacher assigns a 10-page paper to his or her students and then at the end of the course gives every student an A, whether they write the paper or not, is that just? More to the point, how many students will study if they get an A for doing nothing? The next time that vineyard owner goes out at 6 AM to find laborers, I think very few will sign up. The smart workers will sleep in until 4 in the afternoon and then start looking like they are eager to be hired.
If Jesus isn’t telling us how we should do business, what is the message?
On Sundays, we get to hear only snippets of the Gospels and other readings; we often miss out on the context that helps us understand what the Gospel is trying to tell us. This passage in Matthew’s Gospel comes just after Peter asks Jesus what the disciples’ reward will be, since they have left everything to follow him.
Jesus tells his disciples that they will be rewarded a hundredfold. But, he adds, rewards are not the right way to think about it. God’s thoughts are different, and theirs must be, too, for “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” Then he tells today’s parable of the vineyard. And then he repeats, “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
The next thing that happens after today’s Gospel passage is that the mother of two other disciples comes and asks Jesus for special honors for her sons. Jesus is clearly having some trouble getting his point across.
As I reflected on today’s gospel passage, I realized that the problem of the full-day laborers in the vineyard was that they were comparing. If the vineyard owner had not gone out for more workers, they all would have been happy. It’s when we start comparing rewards that we get into trouble. We get into the area of status. Status is always a zero-sum game. The only way you can have more status is if I have less. As Gore Vidal once said, “It is not enough that I succeed. My friends must fail.” His friends!
This kind of thinking seems to be built into us. That’s why salaries tend to be a deep dark secret in most companies; knowing the salaries of others might tell me that they are more valued. Then they have higher status. If they win, then I lose.
That kind of thinking, Jesus tells us, does not belong in the kingdom of heaven. If we compare ourselves with people of higher status, we feel envy. If we compare ourselves with people of lower status, we tend to feel proud. Neither will make us happy. If we want to be first, we’ll always be most aware of the people ahead of us. Only if we don’t worry about being last will we be the first to enjoy God’s rewards.
Wealth in itself doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, but he didn’t get that way by making other people poorer. He created a huge amount of wealth for other people by helping them do wonderful things with computers, and by doing so he became a multi-billionaire. But status—who’s ahead—is a zero-sum game.
There are limits to how much wealth a man can create, even Bill Gates. But there are no limits on the wealth God can give us. He promised that Peter would be rewarded a hundredfold, and I have no doubt that Peter was.
My sister once met a man who was severely crippled from birth. He was often in pain and was frequently hospitalized. But she noticed that he was always cheerful, and she asked him why he always seemed so happy. He told her that every morning when he woke up, he said, “Good morning, Lord! What is it that you want me to do today?” Then he would get ideas of what God wanted from him that day and work hard at doing it. That man is getting a taste of the kingdom of heaven right here on earth. He is enjoying the privilege of being a laborer in the Lord’s vineyard.
I believe that man had the right idea. There is something that the Lord wants each of us to do today. Let’s find out what it is and get to work. Jesus has promised that the labor will bring us rich rewards. So we don’t have to wait until the eleventh hour to get started.