Year A

Matthew 20:1-16

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The God of Reversals

Who here today hasn’t heard the story or seen depicted in art or videos the somewhat humorous story of Jonah and the Whale. It’s one of the favorite children’s bible stories of all times. My daughter watched the Veggie Tales version of it…well, I lost count back then. This lovely story uses a strange prophet, a storm, a boat, a big fish –it was really never called a whale, a worm, a gourd, the burning sun, a bush and a big –sin city all to talk about the grace of God or the free mercy and love of God, and our human hearts. All our lessons today are about God’s generosity and love. Repeated over and over today is that God is a loving and merciful, reversal God who forgives and saves those who come to him in faith.

In the well-known story of Jonah, the word of God comes to him but he is displeased with God’s call to go to Nineveh and preach repentance to his enemies, he decides to run away from God, he then lives through an amazing experience in the belly of a big fish. He rejoices and thanks God for God’s deliverance. He then decides to follow God’s call and finally go to Nineveh to preach repentance and miraculously, that evil nation repents. Our text today begins with the news that because they repented, God relented of the calamity Jonah had preached to them about but his success only led the prophet to anger.

He understood as a part of his tradition growing up that God was gracious “and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and ready to relent from punishing”. He knew the good news from the story of Moses but now, that the same good news of God’s grace applied to the likes of the Assyrians his enemies and that outreach of God’s love angered him. So Jonah announced his death wish and went off to build a booth outside the city to see what would happen. God reached out to the prophet by growing a bush to protect him from the desert sun. When the prophet began to appreciate the bush, God sent a worm to kill it. Jonah’s anger and despair over the death of the bush led God to ask him a question to teach him a lesson that we still search for an answer today when those we consider unworthy are promised God’s forgiveness.

Given the free grace and deliverance that God poured out on Jonah, who incidentally never does repent, why couldn’t he find it in his heart to have mercy toward his fellow sinners? We and Jonah are challenged in this parable today to visit our core beliefs and check our practices. Do we show mercy toward our fellow sinners, those whom we judge to be evil and for whom we just wish God’s judgement? If only God had better judgment about the people he decides to save. Yet, this God is not just by our human ways of accounting. This is a reversal God. It seems that undeserving people receive blessings, sometimes ahead of deserving ones. In God’s kingdom there is enough for everyone, and those who need grace the most are most likely to receive it first.

If the landlord in the gospel parable today of the Laborers in the Vineyard, acted as Jonah would have liked or like most employers act today in hiring laborers in our world, he or she would have hired the strongest and most able-bodied laborers first each time he or she came to the marketplace. The ones left un-hired would have been increasingly feeble in body, mind, and spirit as the day progressed. So perhaps by five o’clock, it was only the lame, the sick, the blind, the homeless, the insane left in the town square and yet it was these last hires the landowner paid the same and before all the others. This parable is certainly not about a fair wage or just recompense for work done. It goes against what we think of fair and just, and yet Jesus tells us, this is what the kingdom of God is like.

Jesus had just told his disciples as they were entering the region of Judea and after he had taught the crowds who came to hear him teach and healed all who needed healing, and after they had encountered the rich young man who went away grieving because Jesus told him he needed to sell his possessions and give his money to the poor, he said, “many that are first will be last, and the last first.” He then tells the parable in our gospel today which elaborates on this theme of reversal. The setting of this parable in a vineyard continues an image that is common in both the Old and New Testaments. In the OT, one of the images of the vineyard is as a place that provides an opportunity for the people of Israel to minister to the needs of the poor.

In the NT the vineyard becomes the setting for several of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of God. This parable today while not about the business of the world, tells about the unjust way that God does business in the kingdom of heaven. All the laborers in God’s vineyard, no matter what time they began their workday, received the same gift: the gospel of God’s grace through Jesus Christ, a grace that is always undeserved. If it were not, it would not be grace or free. God’s coming first to the people at the back of the line in our society and saying, “Here, receive your pay. You are valued. You are worthy. You belong.” It would be life-changing. We are invited us into the generous spirit of the landowner who recognizes and honors all people.

Paul, in his letter to the Philippians urging them to joy in the life of faith stands against the “who gets what-when” human accounting in Jesus’ parable. Paul is writing this thank you letter to the church in Philippi from prison. Hearing of his imprisonment, the Philippians sent one of their members with gifts to minister to Paul. While on this visit the member becomes ill and almost died, and now that he is recovered, Paul is sending him back to Philippi with this letter that Paul and Timothy wrote. Paul assures the Philippians of his spiritual well-being through the trials of imprisonment. Whether he lives or dies, Paul writes, he is content, even joyful, in the spread of the gospel.   

He urges the Philippians to share this joy, even in the face of trials they now face. Faithful followers of Christ should expect struggle and suffering, he writes, but the joy of knowing Christ is supreme. Knowing Christ, he urges them to “live their lives in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” While he and the Christians of Philippi are experiencing suffering, they all live in Christ. Paul lets his firm belief in the next world fuel his living in this one. His hope for the Philippians is that they will do the same. God invites God’s people to enter the vineyard and continue the work of the Lord whether it’s in the morning, afternoon, or twilight of our lives. It’s never too late with the generous, merciful, loving, not fair reversal God. God’s generosity is unbelievable as Jonah experienced, as Jesus and Paul taught. We cannot ask God to operate by our rules, but if God is bending them in the direction of grace, something wonderful always happens.