A homily by Fr. Gene
Tucker, given at The
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Springfield, Illinois, on Sunday, September 21, 2014.
“LEGAL CONTRACT, OR GRACIOUS GIFT?”
(Homily text: Matthew
20: 1-16)
We begin
with two questions this morning:
1. Is our relationship with God a legal
contract, wherein we receive from God in
direct proportion to what we, ourselves, have done?
-or-
2. Are we the beneficiaries of God’s
graciousness and gifts, receiving things for which we did not work, and for
which we do not deserve to receive on our own merits?
Essentially,
that second question seems to be the point that Jesus is making as He tells the
“Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard”:
We cannot earn God’s goodness toward us.
Allow me to
suggest that a correct understanding of the nature of our relationship with God
has been a problem for God’s people at various times in the history of our
relating to God. We’ll explore that in
some detail shortly.
But first,
let’s take a look at the parable before us this morning in some detail.
Jesus lays
out a very commonplace scenario as He describes the hiring of a group of
workers at daybreak in a marketplace…..the workers are hired, told that they
will be paid a denarius for their work that day,[1]
and are sent off.
Then, the
landowner comes, again and again throughout the day, and enlists other workers
to join in the work. It is an
interesting and important detail to notice that these later-hires are told that
they will be paid “whatever is right.”
No set amount is agreed upon before they head off to the work.
The last
set of workers is hired at about five o’clock in the afternoon, and they manage
to work only one hour.
Then, Jesus
says, the last-hired are paid first.
They are paid one denarius, the same as the first-hired.
(Wouldn’t
our modern sensitivities which have to do with labor laws and with equitable
treatment for work performed be offended by such an action?)
Jesus’
parable must have spoken very powerfully to the Christians who made up the
early Church to which Matthew was most likely addressing his gospel
account. After all, it seems possible
that Matthew’s church was dealing with Jews in their community who were
practicing a legalistic sort of religion, one which was based on a contract
with God.
That
contract with God was – in the Jewish estimation of 2,000 years ago – the Law
of Moses. God’s people in those days
attempted to keep every requirement of the law, and expected, thereby, to win
God’s favor. There is evidence to
suggest that people, in Jesus’ day, believed that if a person was wealthy or
was blessed with good health, that that person was blessed by God because they
were living a holy life. Such an
approach comes down to the idea that “OK, God, we’ve done so-and-so, so you owe
us such-and-such.”
But
Matthew’s church seems to be composed not only of Jews who had come to faith in
Jesus, but also Gentiles, who were pagans before coming to Christ. Perhaps many of these Gentiles felt like they
were the later-hires, or the last-hired, in Jesus’ parable. And, they were sure, that God’s goodness and
graciousness was theirs just as much as it had been for the descendents of
Abraham.
We need to
return to Jesus’ parable for a moment.
Notice that
Jesus says that the landowner agreed to pay the later-hired “whatever is
right”. No set amount is agreed
upon. Those who were called to go into
the field in the later morning, or in the afternoon or evening, responded in
faith to the landowner’s assurance that they would be paid whatever the
landowner’s judgment decreed was fair and equitable.
The
latecomers to faith in Jesus who were members of Matthew’s church had also
acted in faith, knowing that God would be gracious to them, showering on them
out of God’s essential goodness and generosity the gifts that were made
available to those who had come to faith earlier on.
These Gentiles
had an important lesson to teach those who were born into the family of
Abraham:
·
We have no inherent claim on God’s
goodness.
·
We have no right to demand that God treat us in
any specific way in direct relationship to our actions.
·
Yet God will relate to us in generosity, love
and care, if only we will have faith in God’s essential character.
Our default
posture toward God is one of faith. We
cannot claim that we have earned God’s actions toward us. God, out of His essential nature, will relate
to us in generosity of spirit and actions.
Of that we
can be sure, for God will act toward us in accordance with His sovereign will
and in the generosity which is His alone to bestow.
AMEN.
[1] In Jesus’ day, one denarius was the wage for
a common day laborer for one day’s work.
Such a wage would have barely supported a family at a subsistence
level. The New Revised Standard Version
(NRSV) translation of the Bible that we are using omits this fact, instead
saying that the laborers were hired “for the usual daily wage”.
