Word of Salvation – July 2024

 

Gospel Maths: It Doesn’t Add Up

 

Sermon by Harry Burggraaf on Matthew 20:1-16

Scripture Readings: Matthew 20: 1-16; Ephesians 2:1–10

 

This morning I would like us to look at the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard and use it as a commentary on that well known passage of grace in Ephesians 2.

I don't know if you noticed during the reading, but how does this parable start?

'For...!' – a transition word – ‘for', 'because'.  What does that indicate?  That we are in the middle of a dialogue; the middle of an argument or debate.  We have caught Jesus as he is taking a breath, in mid-sentence.  So we'd better check what it’s all about.

The context is the question of who does and who does not get into the Kingdom of God, and who has priority in the Kingdom of God.  Jesus has told the rich young ruler, who thought that he would gain eternal life by doing 'good things', that entry to the Kingdom of God required total sacrifice, and that it's as difficult as a camel going through the eye of a needle.

Peter, good old Peter, responds by saying ‘look at us; we've left everything to follow you; will that do; what's in it for us'?  And it is to that question that Jesus responds with this parable to explain that 'many of the first will be last and many who are last will be first’ – “FOR, BECAUSE, the Kingdom of heaven is like a landowner looking to hire workers for his vineyard.”  He agrees to a fair wage with those who start work at six in the morning and in an act of silly, irrational, hilarious generosity he pays the same wage to those who start later in the day at 9.00, 12.00, 3.00 o'clock – and yes, even to those who started at five in the afternoon and have only worked one hour.

I want to suggest this morning that Gospel mathematics just doesn’t add up.

It was a long time ago now, but I vividly recall the day my dad received a letter to say that his car insurance had been cancelled.  The insurance people just dropped him.

Not because he didn't pay his premiums.

Not because he failed to renew or didn't do the paperwork correctly.

He was dropped for making too many mistakes.

"Dear Mr Burggraaf”

(I like the way they used the word 'dear', just before they were about to drop a bombshell.)

"Our records show that you have had three at-fault accidents in the current year and four in the previous year.

On March 4 we paid to fix another vehicle when you hit the rear of another car at a stop sign.  On June 23 you failed to give right of way and caused extensive damage to another vehicle.  On October 18 you backed into a parked vehicle in a shopping centre car park.....!”

And on went the list of misdemeanours.

It wasn't that my father wasn't a good driver.  There were just a few years when he seemed to be very accident prone.  I mean, it could happen to anyone.  Accidents always seem to occur in clusters don't they?  I remember when Hennie and I racked up three in one year.  The panel beater used to greet us – ‘Good to see you again Mr. Burggraaf.’

The letter went on...

"In view of the above occurrences, we are sorry to inform you that we are not willing to reinstate your automobile insurance policy.  The policy will terminate at 12.01am January 4.  For your protection, you are urged to obtain other insurance to prevent any lapse in coverage.

Yours faithfully, etc. etc.

I can still see my father's anger, embarrassment, confusion, and lack of comprehension.

Wait a minute.  Let's get it right.  Didn't he buy insurance to cover mistakes?  But then he gets dropped for making them.  Isn't that what insurance is for – because we aren't perfect and have accidents?

Had he missed some small print somewhere: 'We will consider Mr. Burggraaf insurable until he shows himself to be one who needs insurance, upon which time his coverage ceases.'?

Isn't that a bit like a doctor only wanting healthy patients?  Or a dentist with a sign, ‘no cavities please'?  Or the Country Fire Authority offering protection unless there was a fire.

Max Lucado, in his book 'In the Grip of Grace' asks us to imagine a letter from God.

Dear Congregation...

I am writing in response to this morning's request for forgiveness.  I am sorry to inform you that you have reached the quota of your sins.  Our records show that, since employing our services, you have erred seven times in the area of greed and your prayer life is substandard.  You have excessive tendencies to gossip and you often lose your temper.

You understand that grace has its limits.  Jesus sends his regrets and kindest regards and hopes that you will find some other form of coverage.

Instead Jesus tells us a story about a landowner who has no idea about keeping accounts, who is hopeless with figures, who keeps no record of who has done what.  Or at least he seemingly chooses not to so.

'You've only done one hour's work?'  'What the heck, I don't know how to calculate one twelfth of a day’s wage... or I don't want to.  Have what all the other workers get.  Gratis, free, it's on the house!'

As the apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians: "For by grace are you saved" – your life, well-being, eternity, forgiveness, security – it is the gift of God, it's free.  You don't pay insurance premiums for it; you don't work for it; you can't quantify it, or keep a ledger of profit and loss.  Grace is the generous, outrageous, incomprehensible action of God... and don't you dare try to question it.  That is the message of the parable.

We need to understand what is going on here, as Jesus' hearers would have identified with the story.

God is compared to the owner or manager of a vineyard.  Not quite the scale of Seppelts or Orlando, but quite a respectable show.  Here is this gentleman in the second Sunday of October (remember it's the northern summer).  They've had a perfect September – hot and dry.  The grapes are just right for the best vintage ever.  He switches on the evening news.  The weather bureau predicts a change for Wednesday – a cold snap, possible hail and thunderstorms.  Just when the grapes are ripe for the picking.  A potential disaster for the season if he doesn't get the fruit in.  Two days in which to do it.

At the crack of dawn he gets up, goes to the market place (a bit like the Centerlink before the government changed it) and offers $120 (some scholars say he offered top dollar for the day because he was competing with all the other vineyard owners who also wanted their harvest in; others say it was the minimum wage, peanuts; so let’s say $120; teachers get about $150 for a casual day).  He gets all the workers he can, loads them on his open tray truck and into the fields.

Just before 9.00 he hears the weather update.  Three weeks of rain predicted, starting Tuesday.  Half his crop could be damaged.  He scours the town for more labour at 9.00 and again at 12.00 noon and at three.  By five he's desperate.  Still a lot of grapes to get in and thunderclouds are on the horizon.  So down to the local shopping mall’s pin-ball parlour and to the park to get the local layabouts – there’s lots of leather, more mousse than brains, stubbies, ghetto blaster.  Come on give me a hand, only an hour.  What the heck, it won't take long and whatever he pays it's a couple of six-packs for the night.

Now you need to run your mind over the story so far.  You know exactly what happens.  As the new batches of workers arrive they check with the original group how much they're being paid.  And like the rest of the human race they're inveterate bookkeepers and figure out how much they'll get at the end of the day.  Yep – divide $120 by 12 and multiply by the number of hours you work.

Can you imagine the surprise, the stunned delight, when the girl with the purple hair, who only worked one hour, finds six crisp, new twenties in her pay packet.  'Hey you losers who slaved all day, I got $120 for one hours work...!’

You can imagine the mental bookkeeping machinery in reverse.  Wow he pays $120 per hour, that's 120 times 12, $1440 dollars.

But the vineyard owner is only crazy, not stupid.  He has arranged for their recompense to be based on his weird goodness, his outlandish generosity, not on the just reward that the workers have figured out for themselves.

Can you imagine their faces as the last ones open their envelopes – six twenties...?  No more for those who worked all day, and no less for those who didn't.

I must confess I find this parable hard to take.  Grace is hard to appreciate!  My wife has a friend, a lovely active Christian, who in her early thirties married a man nearly twice her age.  We always found it a little difficult to understand why, but especially difficult was the fact that he was quite sceptical about faith.  All his life he resisted and ridiculed the notion of God.  The other day my friend rang my wife to say her husband had died at the age of eighty two, sad, but with the hopeful words, 'he found God on his deathbed'.  Of course we rejoice, and I'm a little embarrassed to confess this, but the bookkeeper in me says – isn’t this a touch unfair.  All his life he's resisted God, and in the last hour, no the last minute, he is treated the same by God as his wife, who has faithfully served God, and had the burden of an unbelieving husband, all these years.

You read of murderers who have committed the most awful crimes, coming to a jail conversion.  And just in an instant, with a snap of the finger, all their history is supposed to be forgiven.  Grace is outrageous...!

In a fantastic book (read it if you can) 'What's so amazing about grace' Philip Yancy has a chapter called, 'The new math of grace', and he writes about the atrocious mathematics of the Gospel.  God, it seems, just has no sense of appropriate reward, of keeping account, of weighing the balance.  I mean -

* Which shepherd leaves ninety nine sheep (vulnerable to rustlers, wolves and a feral desire to bolt free) to search for one lost sheep?

* Which person applauds the absurdity of pouring a 200ml bottle of ridiculously expensive Este Lauder perfume over someone’s smelly feet?

* Which person in his right mind says that we need to forgive someone who's done us wrong, not once, or twice, or three times, but seventy times seven times.

* What father, after his son has told him to drop dead, and then leaves home with the family inheritance, waits night after night, rain hail or shine, for his rebel son to return and then throws a party when he does, without so much as wanting to hear an apology.

* How can heaven rejoice more over one sinner who turns around than over ninety nine righteous people?

It's just beyond reason.  And grace is beyond reason.

Grace is a gift.  Grace happens in the most unexpected ways and unexpected places.  It shatters any sense of reward for good things accomplished, or punishment for bad things done.  God tears up any mathematical tables.

Philip Yancy describes it this way "grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love as more" AND "there is nothing we can do to make God love us less”.

Grace is outrageously generous, but it is not cheap.

Immediately after the parable Jesus speaks of his death.  "The Son of Man will be betrayed, condemned to death and mocked, flogged and crucified."

Grace baffles us because it goes against our intuition, our gut feeling that there is something unfair about it.  We feel that in the face of injustice some price must be paid.

A murderer can not just go free.

Someone who has resisted and rejected God all their life cannot just waltz into heaven on their deathbed.

And of course a price has been paid.  The parable of the labourers only makes sense in the shadow of the crucifixion to come.  God paid the exorbitant price of the death of his own son.

In the movie ‘The Last Emperor', the young child anointed as the last emperor of China (before the communist revolution) lives a magical life of luxury with a thousand eunuch servants at his command.  "What happens when you do wrong?" his brother asks.  "When I do wrong someone else is punished," the boy emperor replies.  To demonstrate he breaks a jar, and one of the servants is beaten.

The Gospel is that Jesus reverses the pattern; when the servants erred, the King was punished.

Grace is generous and free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.

The workers in the vineyard is a parable of grace.

In it there is the comfort of God.  It doesn't matter when we turn to God, late or soon, in the dawn of youth or the dusk of age, after living less sinful (ha!  is that ever possible?) or more sinful lives.  We are equally loved and accepted by God.  (Revelation’s picture of the holy city – gates on the East, direction of dawn where people enter in the morning of their days; and on the West, direction of the setting of the sun, where person can enter at the sunset of life – no difference to God; the gates are open).

In it there is the compassion of God.  There is work for all.  No one is left out.  Everyone is invited to enjoy life in the service of God.

In it there is the generosity of God.  All are treated the same.  There is no account keeping.  Rewards in the kingdom of God are without favour, the sheer gift of the king.

But the story it is also a parable of judgement.  It has an edge.

The owner of the vineyard is not at all impressed with the grumbles of those who worked all day and objected to being paid the same as the others.  The translation of the NIV is very polite – 'Friend, I am not being unfair to you.  If I want to give everyone the same, don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money?  Are you envious (are you stingy) because I am generous?'

Actually the Greek word 'hetaire' is something like - 'Look friend', or 'now listen here Pal', or 'Look Buster' – a distinctly unfriendly word for 'friend'.

'Look Pal', he says to the bookkeepers of the day, and to all those who have gagged on this parable for two thousand years, ‘if I want to give some pot head in smelly sneakers the same pay as you, so what; are you telling me I can't do with my own money what I want.'

'Am I supposed to be less generous just because your nose is out of joint?  I decided to put the last first and the first last to show you there are no insiders or outsiders here.  For goodness sake stop whinging about the bad deal I've given you and go and have a good glass of Chardonnay in the wine tasting room; compliments of the house.’

The parable is a warning to the disciples.  You're in first guys, but there's many more coming.  Don't claim a special honour and a special place just because you're the first Christians.  Everyone is equally precious to God.

The parable is a warning to the Jews, especially the Pharisees.  They knew they were the chosen people.  They looked down on and despised the Gentiles.  This would have been a disastrous attitude to carry into the early church.

The parable is especially a warning for us, the church today.  It is a warning against all forms of ‘ungrace'.

Does the church demonstrate the same form of crazy, irresponsible, indiscriminate, unconditional generosity as the landowner.  Or do some people feel unheard, unaccepted, shut out, unforgiven, diminished?  Are people expected to meet standards for entry and acceptance that Jesus never sets?

Ungrace is so subtle, so devious, it creeps in unnoticed.  The famous

theologian Helmut Thielicke once wrote "the devil succeeds in laying his cuckoo eggs in the most pious of nests.”

We are all bookkeepers at heart.  We love to keep account.

It's fascinating that the actual phrase the vineyard owner uses to reprove the grumblers is: "is your eye evil because I am good?"

When people look the church, this church, in the eye, when they look you and me in the eye, do they see the gentle, compassionate, welcoming, accepting eye of Jesus?

A parable of grace!  A parable of judgement!  This world is desperate for grace.  People hunger for grace.

A story goes that a father in Spain decides to reconcile with his son who had run away from home to Madrid.  Remorseful, the father takes out this ad in the main newspaper 'El Liberal' – “Paco meet me at Hotel Montana, noon Tuesday.  All is forgiven."

Paco is a common name in Spain, and when the father goes to the hotel square he finds eight hundred young men named Paco waiting for their fathers.

"We have left everything to follow you" says Peter, says the church today, "what then will there be for us?"

And Jesus replies with this parable – "Help people to find their Father.  Let them experience the grace of God in this place."