Not fair [Proper 20A - Matthew 20:1-16]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Matthew 20:1-16

 

Not Fair

 

This parable is not fair.  And this landowner, he does not appear to be great at business. 

 

And I do hope the people in Jesus’ crowd understood that this story was a folksy parable – because if they took this as entrepreneurial advice, financial ruin was all but guaranteed.  In this strange parable, the owner of the vineyard is employing a highly questionable business model.  If the landowner followed this strange pattern daily, it would not be long before the morning shift suffered some serious atrophy; laborers would keep a lower profile at sunrise – even though the landowner, as the parable reminds us, does pay a fair daily wage.  Most of the laborers would apply in the late afternoon – knowing that their hourly rate skyrockets as the evening approaches.  As the word got out, and it would, the fields would become drastically understaffed and under-worked.  But this is a parable – and not a disastrous business plan.

 

Like all of Jesus' parables, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, this story would have sounded mostly ordinary to the audience.  It was not unusual for a landowner to hire day laborers to work in the vineyard; the situation was especially common during the harvest season.  That there were folks who worked as day laborers rather than holding more stable employment was a reality in Jesus' context, as it is in our own.  The landowner was offering the usual daily wage; that wage was usual which would have also been, well, usual.  Even that the landowner chose to pay the laborers at the end of the day was in no way remarkable to Jesus’ first century Jewish audience.  The Torah actually commands a landowner to pay day laborers each evening.  So there is a lot of pretty common stuff in this parable – stuff that Jesus' hearers would have found unremarkable.

 

Also like all of Jesus' parables, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, what at first appears normal, ends up weird.  Jesus loves throwing some weird stuff into his stories.  The weird stuff is what captures the audience’s attention.  So into this rather typical tale, Jesus drops a few off-centered details.  For example, it is a little strange that this landowner seems to have no idea how big a workforce is required for the day’s tasks.  Hiring the entire team first thing in the morning is way more efficient.  Instead he spends his entire day going back and forth, searching for laborers.  And he seems way more concerned with getting folks to work than with their work. 

 

And of course then there is the question of payment – certainly the most curious detail of this parable.  When the landowner hires the first laborers, he negotiates a fair daily wage.  And they accept.  When he goes out the second time, and the subsequent times, he is vague about the wage.  He simply tells the workers that they will be paid whatever is right.  The desperate laborers have little choice and so they agree to this vague wage and go to work.

 

As the work day comes to a close, the landowner instructs his manager to pay the laborers – as any observant Jew would do.  But his instructions are unusual – even dangerous.  The landowner instructs the accounting department to pay the last to arrive first and those who worked the longest hours last – so that the sweatiest, most exhausted laborers could see exactly how much the final shift is overpaid.  I do not own a vineyard but this does not seem like a great idea.

 

It was certainly not the best way for the landowner to endear himself to his hardest workers.  I have no doubt their expectations rose as the first paychecks were distributed.  You can almost feel the morning shift vibrating with excitement when the latest comers are paid the entire daily wage for working only one hour of the nine-hour shift.  The early birds were probably doing the math in their heads.  And nine times the daily wage would have been like hitting the lottery for a peasant worker. 

 

The expectations were devastatingly high.  And it didn’t have to be this way.  A fair, or shrewd, landowner, especially one hiring throughout the day, should probably just pay an hourly rate.  But if the landowner was feeling generous and was inclined to hand our identical checks, disregarding individual effort, he should probably pay the first their wage and then show them the exit before paying the last that same amount – so that no one would get upset. 

 

But he does not do that and the first laborers, who now feel vastly underpaid, are upset.  They are grumbling.  And justifiably so.  They did work much longer hours.  They did bear the burden of the day and the scorching Middle Eastern heat.  Even though they were paid the amount to which they had agreed, after a long, sweaty day in the vineyard, their hurt feelings are understandable.  The wild enthusiastic cheers coming from those underworked and overpaid employees likely did not make them feel any better.

 

I get where they are coming from.  During summer vacations, when I was in college, I needed to earn money.  And so I would work construction with my dad.  I would spend entire days hauling shingles from the ground to the peak of the roof – under a blazing summer sun, in the damp Ohio heat.  My dad, of course, always paid what he promised.  But if someone would have walked onto the construction site at the end of the day, helped us clean up a little, and then, right in front of me, was handed an identical paycheck, I would not have been happy.  And like the scorned workers of the parable, I would have stated my objections.  I would have grumbled.  And so I get it.

 

It is not fair.  I think that much is clear.  This parable is not fair.  Now whether that is a bad thing or good thing, I guess, depends on where one is located in that paycheck line.  I suspect the landowner is quite popular with the afternoon shift.  But not nearly as popular with the early risers.  Unfair is not always, or for everyone, a bad thing.  Just ask the worker who walked away with a day’s wage for an hour’s work.  Not fair, but not bad.

     

This would be nothing more than a curious story except that Jesus tells us that this unfair parable is actually about the kingdom of heaven.  And that raises the stakes because it tells us that there is something about God that is just not fair. 

 

After the first labors complain against the landowner, the landowner responds.  And he says, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?”  And the answer is Yes.  “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”  And the answer is Yes. “Or are you envious because I am generous?”  But, of course, once again, the answer is Yes.  Yes, yes, and yes.

 

It feels especially human to desire mercy for ourselves and justice for everyone else.  God’s generosity is probably what we love most about God.  And yet, that same generosity is also what we most dislike about God.  Yes and yes.  God’s most endearing and offensive attribute is God's mercy. 

 

Mercy is far more perplexing than justice.  Justice we get.  Justice is a balanced scale; it makes sense.  To the first laborers the landowner gives a fair wage.  That feels right; that is fair.  If they were paid less than promised, we might be upset and consider the landowner unethical.  But they weren’t; they got exactly what they expected, what they deserved.  And that does makes sense.  That is justice and we understand justice.

 

But mercy, mercy is hard.  Mercy does not make sense.  It offends every one of our notions of fairness; it is not rational.  The owner of the vineyard in this parable should have just paid an hourly rate.  An hourly rate makes sense.  And he didn’t have to be so generous; he never promised the latecomers the usual daily wage; he simply promised to pay them what was right.  But then he doesn’t.  Instead, he gives them more than they expect, more than what is right.  He chooses to be generous, too generous, offensively and dangerously generous.  He gives equally to the deserving and the undeserving.    

 

And that is not fair.  And it reminds us, as Jesus’ parables so often do, that God's mercy is, to us, a foreign concept; it is the way of a kingdom not yet of this world.  Mercy does not make sense.  And it is not fair. 

 

And that is really good news for us.  It is good to know that God will open the door even when we are late to the party.  It is good to know that God loves us more than other people think we deserve.  

 

And some days we are still envious because God is too generous.  We’re humans living amongst very human humans, after all.  But there are many more days when we find ourselves standing at the front of the line, receiving way more mercy than we could ever deserve. 

 

And that is not fair.  Thanks be to God.