What’s Fair Is Fair

This parable is not about economics or ethical business practices.  It is not about what is right to pay or about minimum wages or living wages.  It is a story about God’s love and where disciples stand with God.

The parable about the workers in the vineyard and the landowner is Jesus’ response to the disciples’ shock over the rich young ruler not joining the followers of Jesus.  If you remember, the rich young ruler came and asked Jesus what he needed to do to have eternal life, which remember means life with God or a life like God has.  Jesus says, give up everything you have, because the young, rich ruler is trusting that what he has – his money, his power – will be able to get him what he wants.  He wants to buy his way in good with God.  As it turns out, he goes away grieving because he can’t see his way clear to give it all up and trust that he can then get God’s favor.  And, the disciples can’t believe it either.  If he can’t buy it, then who can?

And Jesus says, it’s not for sale.  For humans it is impossible to gain God’s favor, but for God all things are possible.

To which Peter says, “Whew – we’ve given everything up.  What are we getting?  We’re bound to be rewarded!”

And Jesus’ response is that the landowner, who symbolizes God in the story, went several times throughout the day to the market to hire laborers.  The scene was typical of life in Palestine.  The market was a place where day laborers came every day with their tools and hoped to get hired for a day’s wages.  These people stayed all day long hoping they got hired because they needed whatever they could earn…they didn’t have savings to fall back on.  A denarius was just enough to live for a day.  If you didn’t get hired, you went without food that day, so anything you earned was better than nothing.

Landowners would come and hire in the morning at 6.  And certain times of the year, there was a rush to finish in the fields.  Like, this time of year, toward the end of September, the grape harvest ripened and then right on the heels of the grapes reaching ripeness the rains came.  If the harvest wasn’t gathered in before the rains broke, then the harvest was ruined.  As the clouds got greyer, the landowner would be anxious to get the harvest in.

Now, I have read all sorts of explanations from the workers at the end of the day working faster and harder than the ones who had been out there all morning to all of the workers being in the marketplace all day long and equally eager to work, just hired at different times.  Here’s the thing.  It has nothing to do with Jesus’ point.  It’s not fair.  It is not fair.

God’s love is generous.  So generous, Jonah couldn’t stand it.  God called Jonah to go and preach God’s love and challenge the Ninevites to repent and follow God’s commands and he just could not bring himself to go there.  What if they did believe?  What if they did change?  The Ninevites – Nineveh was in Assyria, Israel’s enemy and eventually their conquerer.  With a population of 120,000, it was one of the largest cities, if not the largest city, in the world.  Pagan, sinful, immoral, cruel, wicked…all good descriptors for the city and its citizens…Jonah didn’t want them to repent…he couldn’t stand them, and God loved them.  It is not fair.

Fair is based on one of two concepts:  either calculation or comparison.  What’s fair is for me to get what I have earned….I have calculated what I am owed.  The focus is on ourselves.  Here’s what I have done, so this is what I deserve, God.  What have you done for me?  What benefits have I received?  A tit for tat, transaction-based relationship…and if that is how we approach God, then we never enjoy the generosity of God.  We never acknowledge the grace of God.  We will find ourselves bargaining with God like God is a tyrant who doesn’t care anything about us other than what we do for him.  We don’t need to bargain with God.  We just need to serve God and trust that God will take care of us.

Or, fair, if it is not based on calculation, is based on comparison.  It is fair for me to get what I have earned in proportion to what everyone else gets…I have compared my efforts to others and calculated what I am owed.

But God isn’t fair.  We don’t get what we are owed.  We cannot calculate or compare to determine our compensation from God.

There’s a joke about a wealthy woman who died and went to heaven and was given a bicycle to ride up and down the golden streets.  It was a nice day, weather was good, as she pedaled along, she saw her maid go by in a Cadillac, and two streets over she passed her gardener driving a Mercedes Benz.

She went immediately to complain to St. Peter.  He explained that he had no control over the transportation that each person received in heaven.  It depended upon how you lived when you were on earth.  She pedaled away in a huff.

But, a couple of days later, he saw her pedaling along with a big grin on her face.  “What has made you so happy?”  St. Peter asked.

“I just saw my pastor going by on a pair of roller skates!”

The I-want-my-share approach is related to the “Why me” attitude.  Why don’t I have what she has?  Why do I have this burden?  Why does he have that blessing?

The workers in the vineyard did not receive what was fair.  The ones who were hired in the last hour got a full day’s wage.  Now, notice that there was no talk about what they would be paid when they were hired.  The ones who were hired throughout the day received a full day’s wage.  When they were hired, they were told they would be paid whatever is right.  The ones who were hired first thing in the morning and worked a 12-hour shift were paid a full day’s wage, which was what they agreed upon in negotiations when they were hired.

Well, that’s not fair.  Either by calculation or by comparison.   If you calculate what each group should make, you know it is not all the same.  And if you compare the work, you know that the ones who worked 12 hours deserve more than the ones who worked 1 hour.

So, the workers who have been in the fields all day long complain.  And the landowner claims, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?  Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.  Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?  Or are you envious because I am generous?

Sounds an awful lot like God’s response to Jonah, doesn’t it?  “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?  You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty-thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

God chooses to be generous, not fair.  Literally, the phrase translated “are you envious because I am generous” says “is your eye evil because I am good?”  The eye was a symbol for the spirit of the whole person, through the eyes, you saw the soul, so what the landowner is saying is “Does my generosity expose the poverty of your own spirit?”

How do we respond to God’s good will?  Embrace what shows up in your life and be grateful for it.

It’s very important to remember that we are not God’s puppets or doll house toys, so everything that happens to us is not God’s will.  A lot of what happens is an effect of brokenness in our world, and not at all what God wants to have happen to us.  But God is faithful to his promise that all things work together for good for those who love him.  So, if we embrace what happens, and allow God to work through those things, good will come of it.

And as we look back at our life, we will see that some of the times when we were most shaped and taught and made faithful and aware of our dependence on God, were our hardest times.  And that’s why for even the hard times, we are grateful.

So, to respond to God’s good will, we embrace what shows up in our life and are grateful for it.  Everything we have is a gift.  And we live in a way that reveals the truth that we don’t choose who receives the gift of God’s love.  It’s not fair – it’s generous.

Jonah did not want to tell the Ninevites that God loved them.  In fact, he stowed away and fled in the opposite direction to keep from telling them that in spite of how wicked and sinful and cruel they were, they were important to God.

David Platt, in his book, A Radical Idea, tells about a struggle in his church with members not participating in mission opportunities that they were organizing because they were involved in their own areas of ministry.  He says, “we decided to stop planning, creating, and managing outreach programs and to start unleashing people to maximize the ministry opportunities God had already planned and created for them…Now our people are busy leading Bible studies in their workplaces and neighborhoods, helping addicts in rehabilitation centers, supplying food in homeless shelters, loving orphans in learning centers, caring for widows in retirement homes, providing hospice care for the elderly, training men and women in job skills, tutoring men and women in reading, helping patients in AIDS clinics, teaching English to internationals, and serving in a variety of ways.”  See, we aren’t all sent to Nineveh, but we are all sent somewhere.

Who does God choose to love?  To be generous toward?  What is your response?  To calculate your standing?  To compare yourself to others?  Or to embrace what shows up in your life, be grateful for it, and share God’s message of love with others?