Jesus’ Antagonistic Picture of Grace

Some notes on Jesus' parable of the labourers in the vineyard, for a sermon on Sola Gratia.  

Where is grace?  Real grace.  True grace. 

Giving to one another generously and abundantly, without thought of any payback?  Giving not just from a bucket of excess, but from one’s needs?  Giving that causes the giver to suffer?  Giving to those who can never repay?  Giving to those who hate you?  Who have harmed you?

Where is this grace?  It has a foreign object.  We don’t see it.  We don’t understand it.  We don’t do it.  We don’t know how to do it.

And, we don’t like it.

I am likely typical.  I give of my surplus: my surplus money, time, and energy.  And I hope to be noticed, to get appropriate gratitude and applause.  When do I give without wanting anything back?  When do I give to those who hurt me?  Who insult me? 

Grace is pouring out one’s life, without any hope of something being poured back. 

Grace is pouring out our time, talents, resources, physical and mental energy, without looking to see what is left.    

Grace is emptying self, until suffering, even upon those who hate.

Who does this?  We hear rumours of it, but we don’t see it.  It is alien to us.

What is familiar is the pouring out of anger and frustration.  We are harsh with each other.  We take what others have, and pour it into ourselves.

Even in our homes, grace is alien.  We get cross with each other.  Prickly. “I have poured out much.  You have poured out little.  So I will punish you, and coddle me.”

Grace is central to Christianity, and so it is still in the DNA of Western Society.  This means that one important aspect of grace—giving one’s life for the good of others—is still admired.

But true Christian grace has been pummelled.  The German philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) did a lot of the demolition.  He derided the Christian values of humility, kindness, and pity.  These only got in the way of the ideal “superman,” the “magnified man, disciplined and perfected in both mental and physical strength, serene and pitiless, ruthlessly pursuing his path of success and victory and without moral scruples.”  (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1997, p.1154.)  Nietzsche understood grace, and it disgusted him.

Ayn Rand (1905-82) was the same.  In her much-admired novel The Fountainhead, hero Howard Roark is strong and talented.  He takes what wants and lives unashamedly for self: to achieve his great potential and to fulfil his great destiny.  He has nothing for the weak, the disabled, or the frail.  These are hindrances to be thrown off.  Grace has no place in Rand’s system.  By retarding the strong and the talented, Grace just poisons things.

Such attacks on grace have not been unsuccessful.  Our naturally ungracious hearts have lapped it up. 

In short, grace is alien to us. 

In fact it is so alien to humanity, that in order for us to understand grace Jesus had to shock us.  And he does that in his parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard.

He tells a story that will antagonise us, that will perhaps even enrage us.

When builders insert bolts into concrete, they use explosive tools.  Explosive charges force and break the bolt into the hard concrete.

The concrete is our graceless hearts.  The explosive bolt is Jesus’ parable. 

He tells it not to guilt us into grace.  He tells it that we might understand grace, and so be in a position to receive it.  For it is only when we have received grace that we can come to be gracious.

Here is the parable, from Matthew 20:1-16, interspersed with some explanatory notes from the Greek original. 

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard.  He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

The very first word is ὁμοιος, homoios, “like,” “of the same nature as...”   Jesus says, “This is the way the kingdom of heaven operates.”  The “kingdom of heaven,” God’s Kingdom, is a metonym for God himself.  This parable describes God.

The landowner is literally an οἰκοδεσποτης, oikodespotēs, a “house-master.”  He owns and rules his property.  He represents God, who owns and rules all creation.

The master goes out at the break of day, about 6 o’clock, and contracts some labourers.  συμφωνεω, symphōneō, means to “come to an agreement.”  “Work for the day, and I will pay you a denarius.”  A denarius for a day’s pay was fair and expected, a living wage.

About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing.  He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’  So they went.

He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing.  About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’

‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’

The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius.  So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius.  When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner.  ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?  Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you.  Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

Grumble translates γονγγυζω, gongyzō, which, like “murmur” and “groan” is onomatopoeic.  (It sounds like the thing it describes.)  It makes us think of grumbling Israel, who never stopped complaining and distrusting God.  But we can understand their grumbling. 

How does the landowner respond?  First, he calls their spokesman “friend.”  ἑταιρος, hetairos, is unique in the Bible to Matthew’s gospel, and refers to a comrade or companion.  He is not being unkind.  Nor is he being unfair (ἀδικεω, adikeō, means unjust or unrighteous.)  He was honouring the contract he had made at 6 o’clock, a contract the workers had agreed to. 

Above all, he wills to give those who worked only an hour a full denarius.  That’s his right.  It is his money, he can give it away if he wants to.

Then he turns the tables.  He asks, using a well-known idiom for jealousy, “Is your eye evil?”  “Generous” translates ἀγαθος, agathos, an adjective pertaining to a high standard of quality, worth, or merit.  “Why the evil eye?  I’m doing a good thing!”

They should have applauded, and instead they sneered.  Jesus concludes with his well-know punch-line:

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Not every commentator agrees, but the proximate audience seems to be the Pharisees.  Jesus was a Jewish rabbi who taught, surprisingly and incessantly, that God willed to bless non-Jews;  that Gentiles are invited to receive salvation, to be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven.

This upset the Pharisees. 

“We can trace our ancestry 1,800 years back to Abraham.  We were slaves in Egypt for 400 years.  We fought under the Judges for 400 years.  We struggled to expand the kingdom under David and Solomon.  We endured the divided Kingdom.  We endured the destruction of the north in 722 BC.  We lived through the great siege of 586 BC.  We saw Jerusalem razed.  We endured exile.  We fought tooth and nail to re-establish the Temple and the Nation.  We resisted brutal Persian, Greek, and Roman invasions.” 

“Are you saying that these Gentiles, who played no part in this except to persecute us, can simply turn up now and receive the Kingdom of Heaven?!  We are the first, and so we should be paid first.  We should receive the first and best of God’s blessings!  We deserve it!”

All this history seems to lie behind Jesus’ story. 

Those who were hired at the start of the day are the Jews who had suffered and toiled for two millennia.  Those hired at the end of the day are the Gentiles.  They are “Johnny-come-lately.”  They have—according to this mindset—endured and suffered nothing.  The sun is setting, there’s a cool breeze, and all the hard work has been done.  Yet they can receive exactly the same as the Jews!

Jesus’ parable resets the perspective.

God, the landowner, is fair to some, and he is lavishly generous with others.  There’s nothing unjust about that.  The Kingdom of Heaven is his.  This is the one grand point of the parable.  God can give it to whomever he likes. 

And when we take this one point, and set it in the broader context of human rebellion, we see God’s generosity shining out even more brilliantly.

For, unlike the parable, no one deserves any good from God.  There are no workers who have done all that God has required, and who deserve payment from him.  “There is no one righteous, not even one.” “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:10, 23). 

And so when God gives the Kingdom of Heaven, it is always—allow me the tautology—an undeserved gift. 

Every good thing from God comes by grace.  Everything is freely given, undeserved, and unearned. 

What is it that antagonises us about Jesus’ story?

We put ourselves in the place of the landowner.  “I would never have done that.  I would either have paid the late-comers one-twelfth of what those who started at six got; or I would have paid the first-comers twelve denarii.  I would have made sure everyone got the same.

Or we put ourselves in the shoes of the 6 o’clock workers.  We feel offended on their behalf.

The landowner’s willingness to give to some and not to others antagonises us.  And notice this:  it is his grace that antagonises.

We have not received much human grace.  We are not gracious ourselves.  It is a foreign object, something strange, bewildering, and confronting.

And when we extrapolate the story to God, pride gets in the way.  The parable implies that we deserve nothing from God, that the Kingdom of Heaven only comes by his gift.  It shames us.

And there is something that make the parable’s lesson of God’s grace even more striking.  Immediately after the parable we read this:

Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them,  “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!”  (Matthew 20:17-19.) 

Before time, God determined to save a people.  And the Son agreed that he would come, that he would take on flesh, that he would bear the sins of his people, that he would give his body to be tortured and crucified for them.

The gift of the Kingdom of Heaven is free for recipient, but costly for the giver.  God purchased the Kingdom of Heaven for us with the blood of his Son (1Pe 1:18-19).

Love it or despise it, this is grace.  This is the beating heart of the Bible.  God is a gracious God.  He gives the Kingdom of Heaven.  He gives it to the undeserving.  He gives it at the cost of his Son’s blood.  Salvation comes only be grace.

This is the one of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation: Sola Gratia, Grace Alone.  Salvation cannot be earned by ritual-keeping, by devotion to prayer and fasting.  A thousand masses cannot earn a postage-stamped piece of the Kingdom of Heaven.

No wonder the peddling of Indulgences enraged Luther: the church’s sale of certificates to shorten one’s time in heaven.  This was the antithesis of grace.      

God gave.  God poured himself out.  He poured himself out to bless others.  He expected nothing in return.  His gift cost him untold suffering. 

Have you received God’s grace? 

God opens wide his arms to you here and now.  He says “Come!  I have a gift for you!”  “Come and receive the gift of forgiveness, a new heart, reconciliation, and adoption.”

You have only just walked into his vineyard, and he holds out to you a whole denarius—the Kingdom of Heaven.  He says, “Take it!  It’s mine, and I have the right to give it to you.  It’s yours!”

And when we do take it, life is forever changed .

When I know that I am forgiven, then I cannot help but forgive.  God has smiled upon me, despite everything, so how can I not smile at others?  God has washed away my list of wrongs with the blood of his Son, how can I not forgive others?  God is gentle and kind with me, how will I not be kind to others?

Imagine if even one person truly got this.  Imagine just one person who loves others by pouring out their time, energy, gifts, and resources, and who suffers because of this. 

In this person we would see Christ. 

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35). 

It must start in our homes.  We fathers are far too selfish.  And the selfishness manifests in grumpiness.  “My desires are frustrated, and everyone must know about this.”  The husband and father who has received grace, and who is gracious in return, cannot be frustrated.  A person who entirely gives simply cannot be frustrated. 

Picture a grace-filled Church.  Her people have received grace, have been transformed by grace, and have become gracious.  They pour out their lives for the good of their brothers and sisters.  Until it hurts.  This is the first church:

Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.  Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,  praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved (Acts 2:45-47).

That last sentence is not just descriptive.  It is also promissory.  Let our churches be ever-poured-out vessels of grace, and people will convert.

Grace is rare.  God has poured it out on us.  Receive it, and then pour it out on others.