Scripture

Matthew 20:1-16

In this parable, God appears as a whimsical grapegrower who has no idea of how to run a business, and no idea of fair labour practices, or so it seems!

We've a friend who, a couple of years back, returned overnight from Tasmania aboard the 'Abel Tasman'. You should know it was March 31. She told us how the purser had announced that passengers who went early to the foredeck next morning could take advantage of the duty free shop before entering Port Phillip Heads. Some were still fuming as they drove their cars off the boat, having thought they could stock up on cheap spirits, perfumes and exotic Asian goodies! The late risers were still laughing!

On the face of it, this parable sounds like an April Fool's Day joke. The early starters didn't think so, but the late starters were certainly laughing. But, whatever does it mean? You see, the whimsical grapegrower is God. This parable is supposedly telling us something about the nature of the divine - and about the relationship between God and humanity. Before we try to figure out what that might be, I want to remind you of something very important about parables.

As we have said once or twice before, parables are not meant to package one clear and simple message. They are not like stories that preachers use to illustrate a point. It is a sermon 'device' to make a point, and then to dress it up with a story that (supposedly) drives home that point. Parables may sound a bit like sermon illustrations, but their purpose is quite different. They are designed as provocative, teasing exercises to get the hearers doing their own thinking.

Because of this, it is entirely possible for a parable to have as many shades of meaning as people who hear it, or read it. Contemplating a parable is rather like looking at a painting or a sculpture, and letting it speak to you. I have said this because I don't want it thought that what is said here 'contains' the meaning of the parable - much less, exhausts it! Let each one reflect prayerfully on it. To start this reflection, but not to end it, three things that strike me with some force.

1. The worth of a person

The first is that with God, the worth of a person is not measured by productivity. The workers who signed on early believed that, having produced more, they must obviously be worth more. To their consternation, they found it is not so.

If the worth of a person is not measured by productivity, whence does it come? The answer, of course, is that with God the worth of a person is inherent. This means the elderly Aboriginal in the Centre who is nearly blind, who has never been 'gainfully employed' (in our terms), and for whom a good week-end is a flagon of plonk, has the same worth in God's reckoning as Fred Hollows - feverishly spending the months left to him on treating eye diseases. It means the illiterate little child with bloated belly and limbs like sticks, starving in Africa, is worth the same in God's reckoning as the chief executives, the star entertainers and the distinguished scientists who have been showered with civil, monetary and academic rewards.

It is the realisation of this that has been the incentive for churches in our time to turn their attention to issues of social justice. It is not because they are looking for some new ideas to justify their existence. It is because they have realised what it means to say human worth in the sight of God has nothing to do with productivity. It is inherent.

2. A rebuke to spiritual pride

Second, I find in this parable a rebuke to spiritual pride. Those who had been working longer in the vineyard felt they were a cut above the late arrivals. They called the boss by his first name. At smoko they had swapped a few yarns. They were confident of being hired again tomorrow. These other layabouts weren't really in their class at all.

The early Jesus movement was initially, of course, a sect within Judaism. All the first disciples were Jews, as was Jesus. But as it spread, it incorporated more and more 'gentiles', that is, non Jews. Some of the Jewish Christians felt that being Jewish gave them a sort of 'head start' with God. After all, they were descendants of Abraham, members of the chosen people, inducted into the great tradition of Moses and the prophets. Some of these others were rank upstarts. While they had been working for the Eternal since time immemorial, these others hadn't signed on until the day was almost gone. The cheek of 'em!

The other day I ran across part of an address by the Dean of the University of Chicago, who happens to be an anthropologist. He said, 'I sometimes tell students that they're like missionaries on a bridge looking down at the poor benighted Hindus bathing in the filthy contaminated Ganges. The students' task, I say, is to learn to look up with pity at the poor missionaries - and imagine them bathing in a tiny tub of wretchedly warm water, made filthy and polluted by their own bodies!' It's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

The sad part is that respect for oneself seems to have as its 'flip' side contempt for the other. You find it at all levels.

'Well of course, we Catholics can trace our pedigree back to the apostles. You Prots can't go back beyond Henry VIII!'
'So what? The Reformation freed people to think for themselves. That sure beats blind obedience to an old bachelor in the Vatican!'
'Who are you to talk about being 'born again'? Why, I was born again forty years ago.'
'And died not long after - like most of the people your age in the church! Going to our god-box on Sundays is like being at a funeral, every week!'
'You mean to say you don't speak in tongues? That's too bad. Don't you want to get saved?'
'The only thing I want to get saved from is people like you. You give religion a bad name.'

Good Lord, deliver us from the error of thinking different means better!

3. The grace of God

Third, it seems to me that this parable is also a statement about the grace of God. This is the implication in the grapegrower not only paying the late-comers first, but making it a lavish gift they could not possibly have earned. The theological word 'grace' means something freely given - the unmerited favour and love of God.

A lot of us have real problems with this. It's partly because we live in a society that teaches us everything has its price. 'There's no such thing as a free lunch!' Those who accept handouts tend to be regarded with a certain disdain by people who earn every penny in their pockets. And, in fact, the former often lose what vestiges of self-respect they might have had, as a result of accepting something they feel they've not earned. I have talked with many on the dole who would happily work for that amount of money, in preference to taking it as a handout.

There's a tricky issue for clergy over the acceptance of fees for certain services; funerals are the most sensitive. I had never accepted a fee for a funeral until we moved to the U.S. in 1967. Riding to a cemetery in the hearse, I was surprised by the undertaker slipping me a rather substantial cheque. 'Oh, no', I said. 'I don't take fees for funerals. We never do that in Australia'. Well, you do here!' he barked. 'If you don't, the family will always feel they have an undischarged debt to you. People here aren't good at accepting something for nothing.' Actually, things have changed in Australia since then. Maybe we've become 'Americanised' in one more way.

Christian faith flies in the face of this way of thinking. It says the 'grace' (or love) of God is something you don't earn. In fact, you can't earn it. And paradoxically, it is the realisation of this which can bestow a sense of self-respect the world can never give. Even clergy need to learn this. Why should I say 'even' clergy? Because my story concerns a minister of religion. He will not mind my telling it, because he has done so himself.

About ten years ago I had a phone call from a doctor friend who had just ordered three months' sick leave for this chap to try to clear up his health. 'I don't think it's medication that he needs. Would you talk to him if I could get him to see you?'

This man had become increasingly sleepless and irritable, was losing weight. Tests had confirmed a gastric ulcer. He was uneasy about talking with the head of his own church, for fear these troubles would go into the files and interfere with his getting other appointments in his church. So, what had happened?

He had been reared in a tradition that put great store by good deeds, and which had a fairly literal interpretation of heaven, hell and judgment. His father (also a minister) was one of these 'driven', 'compulsive' individuals who had bred this into his children. They were all regarded as wonderful people, and it surprised nobody when the son went into ministry.

But he was doing it for the wrong reasons. His self-respect was dependent on driving himself harder and harder, and he would listen to no one. 'It's the Lord's work', he would say, as he swallowed more aspirins and antacid pills. More often than not, his sermons were angry diatribes that made the congregation uncomfortable and guilty. The fact that he was visibly destroying himself before them exacerbated their guilt.

I told him the story of a sensitive German youth named Martin, who also had been trained in a hard school. Martin's parents were peasant stock. They thought religion was a matter of keeping rules, and that if these rules were broken, terrible punishment awaited one. From his earliest days, Martin had lived under this fear of punishment.

His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but he gave this up to seek peace in a monastery. The Augustinian monks received him warmly, but he found no peace, despite fasting and self-inflicted punishment. He wearied his colleagues with confessions, fasted until he grew thin, and scourged himself until the blood was drawn. But peace eluded him until an older monk told him all his fears arose from a wrong idea of God. 'Instead of torturing yourself', he said, 'remember that God is merciful. God is not against you; God is for you'.

The rest is history, as they say. 'Martin' was Martin Luther, of course. And the rest is history with the man whose doctor could not cure him. The three months' sick leave gave him the chance to step back from what he had been doing so feverishly and to reflect on the central meaning of the gospel: that we do nothing to gain the prodigal love of the whimsical grapegrower!

It put a spring in his step and song in his heart. May it be so for you also!

Reproduced here on the Warragul Uniting Church web site with the permission of the author,
Rev Dr John Bodycomb -2004.