Suppose you’re out and about at lunchtime, you don’t have time to go home and make lunch, and in a rush you go into the supermarket to buy a Meal Deal. The options before you can be overwhelming. A main, a side, and a drink.
But which drink isn’t loaded with sugars? Oh well, Coke Zero again.
And the side? Do you take junk food like some crisps or a small chocolate bar, or do they have those nice small pots of grapes or pineapple?
And the main: just look at the varieties of sandwich. Never mind the fillings, do you want white bread, malted bread, a wrap, a panini, or a baguette?
Our reading today is like a sandwich or a wrap. There is a theme that tops and tails it, that wraps the parable. We just don’t see it from the selection of verses the Lectionary gives us. We hear those words at the end,
‘So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’
But we don’t realise that these are the same words used by Jesus in the verse preceding our passage. These are the sandwich words around our reading. This is our malted bread, or our wrap, or whatever we choose. Everything between these words supports this assertion of Jesus:
‘So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’
And by opening the parable with the words, ‘For the kingdom of heaven is like …’, Jesus is clearly talking here about the upside-down nature of God’s kingdom. What does this upside-down kingdom look like?
It has three qualities:
Firstly, justice:
This is how the landowner sees his treatment of those who worked for the whole day. When they complain that they worked through the heat of the whole day but some only worked for the last hour and received the same pay, he replies in verse 13,
I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?
The landowner is fair. These workers received the usual rate for a day’s work. It is what they would have expected when they were recruited. This is justice.
For justice is about far more than ensuring the guilty are punished. It is also about seeing that those who have done right are properly recognised and rewarded. Getting appropriate pay for a day’s labour is just that. It is justice.
Isn’t that the sort of society we want to live in? Where not only wrongdoers are appropriately sanctioned, but the righteous are recognised and rewarded? Millions in our nation – and others – aspire to something like that. Could it be one of those signs that God has set eternity in the hearts of human beings, just as the writer of Ecclesiastes said?
I think that means we need to pay careful attention when we or someone else complains that something isn’t fair. Those words, ‘It’s not fair!’ find us in childhood and never seem to leave us. It’s one thing complaining something isn’t fair when it has happened to someone else, because we can look a little dispassionately at their situation. But when we complain that we are the ones who have not been treated fairly, we might want to ask other people’s opinions, too. Because when it’s all about us, we risk the criticism of the landowner to those first workers that they were being envious (verse 16).
How might we approach a commitment to justice in our society, witnessing to it as a sign of God’s coming kingdom? Recently, I heard one minister say something like this. Pay attention to what is wrong in your community, the things that don’t match up with Christian faith, the needs that you see present, because the reverse of these things will tell you what God’s dream is for your place of how things should be.
And who are the people who should be celebrated? If the first are to be last and the last first, then these might not be the famous, the powerful, and the celebrities. Who are the people who have quietly made a difference for good in the community for year upon year? Compare this with what gets reported when the twice-yearly list of those to receive Honours from the Royal Family are published. Never mind all the actors, politicians, and musicians who hog the media headlines all year round: what about those stories of ordinary, local people who have done something worthwhile? Don’t they seem worth celebrating that bit more than the great and the good?
Now cast those people in a Christian sense. When you look at what people have done from the perspective of Christian values, where are the everyday examples of those who practise the justice of God?
Secondly, mercy:
In verse 14, the landowner says to the moaning workers who have worked for the whole day:
Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you.
‘I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you.’ That’s mercy. The one hired last had not worked for the whole day and had not earned a day’s wages. But that is what the landowner paid him. This worker didn’t receive what he deserved, he received what he needed. That’s mercy. That’s the Gospel.
For in the Gospel, none of us receives what we deserve. If we did, then our sins would leave us all in condemnation. Instead, we receive what we need: the mercy of God in Christ, forgiving us our sins and making us new people.
This is what we rejoice in every Sunday when we gathered. God has forgiven us our sins in Christ, through the Cross. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us, as the Psalmist says.
This is what gives us freedom in the presence of God. This is the greatest revelation of God’s extraordinary love for us.
This is what his kingdom is built upon, for this is the way of entry into his society. Mercy.
And if we are to live in the kingdom of God and show that kingdom to the world, then mercy must continue. We shall need to continue returning to God in confession to know the on-going mercy he offers us.
And we shall need to be a merciful people. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that today’s reading comes the week after the Gospel passage was Matthew 18:21-35, the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant. You may have had a sermon on that theme last Sunday.
For those of us who have received God’s mercy in Christ are called to extend that mercy to others. That’s why it’s more than a tragedy when the church is seen by outsiders to be condemning and judgmental. Yes, of course we must keep clear boundaries between what is right and what is wrong, but always we need to be reaching out with mercy.
So, if we are to be people of this upside-down kingdom, I urge you to remember what was preached last week – that we who have received mercy and forgiveness need to offer it to others. Yes, it is hard, but when it is, we look at the Cross where we found our forgiveness. We remember what Jesus has done for us; then we ask him to help us to be willing to release others from their debt to us.
And that truly is an example of a kingdom that reverses the values of the world. Away with all the talk of things being unforgivable. Away with replacing justice with vengeance. Let the mercy of God characterise us.
Thirdly, generosity:
Here’s the final thing the landowner says to the grumbling workers in verse 15:
Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?
‘Are you envious because I am generous?’ These workers hadn’t witnessed injustice. They had witnessed mercy for others that was an outworking of generosity.
This brings into focus what it means to know God as Father. God the Father is generous in his love and provision for his children. As the Psalmist says, he owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He has need of nothing from us, so vast are his own resources. And he shares them out of his big-hearted love.
I know some people have a problem with calling God ‘Father’, due to their experiences of fatherhood in growing up. I did too, but not from the perspective of having had a cruel father – far from it.
No: I grew up in a family where my parents struggled financially. My sister and I received far less expensive birthday and Christmas presents than our friends. Imprinted on my memory is an incident when I was a small boy. I had gone to bed, but could not sleep, so I came back downstairs. There in the front room I found Mum and Dad divvying up their money into the different sections of the household ditty box, struggling to make things balance. I offered to give up my pocket money to help.
A series of events in my twenties changed my perspective and helped me to see that God the Father was a generous giver, when he provided in amazing ways, not least with the funds that got me to theological college.
Often in the church we say that God provides for our needs and not our wants, and there is truth in that: he certainly doesn’t approve of greed. But we must be careful not to deny the fact that he is generous. He does not ration his love: he ladles it out extravagantly. We may enjoy good things from him – the important thing is to be grateful.
In our wider society there are of course from time-to-time beautiful stories of generosity, too. But there are also opposite stories. Some (please note that word) of the objections to immigrants and asylum-seekers are based on the very opposite of generosity. We decry ‘economic immigrants’ while having no problem with Brits who move to Australia for exactly that reason. We say things like, ‘We don’t want them to have what we have.’
Now I know the immigration debate is complicated, and there are also legitimate reasons to be cautious. We do have to weed out illegal immigrants, including the minority who may want to bring terrorism and violence to our streets. We cannot house everyone. But we can have no part with the masked protestors at Portsmouth, with those intimidating the RNLI, and with those politicians who seek to stoke up fear, and think it’s fine to see opponents beaten up.
In the middle of this, surely a God who loves generously will have compassion for those who have fled their countries in fear, such as the Iranian political refugee one of my previous churches helped, and who then became a Christian as a result of their witness.
I guess it’s part of a wider question: how do we demonstrate God’s generous love to people our society despises?
And there is the upside-down kingdom, where the last are first and the first are last. Justice and mercy make for a generous place.
