Kids love stories. Before they can even identify letters or read words, they are able to pick out their favorite books and have them read to them over and over and over again. As they are able to read on their own, they learn to like different characters and authors and get into book series and appreciate hearing how story lines play out over longer periods of time.
It isn’t just kids who love stories. Everyone likes stories – adults included. Whether they’re romance novels, gripping mysteries, tales of vigilante justice, or historical non-fiction, good stories will be appreciated. It’s also true of movies. While special effects and star power carry some weight, movies that have staying power are popular because of the story. Stories are powerful. Stories are moving. Stories can be life-changing. And so, stories and those who tell them will always have a measure of influence in the world.
Jesus knew the power of stories. Sometimes he referenced true stories from Old Testament history; other times he told another kind of story: a parable. In fact, parables were one of Jesus’ most popular teaching methods. Through parables, he used earthly stories to convey spiritual truths. In so doing, he helped his listeners grasp the important points he wanted them to learn – and in a much more powerful way than just bullet points. It would have been one thing for Jesus simply to tell his listeners to forgive. It was another thing to tell the parable of the unmerciful servant and showcase forgiveness (or the lack thereof!) in a memorable way. It was a story that left a powerful impact. Throughout this series of posts, Tell Us a Story, we’ll hear Jesus tell us a number of stories. May they not only capture our attention, but also our hearts, and may their truths be reflected in our lives.
The story Jesus tells in Matthew 20 shows how different God’s idea of fairness is from ours. Our fallen world operates with a flawed sense of fairness. How could we really expect anything different? How could we expect two self-serving sides in any negotiation or arrangement to approach it with anything but a skewed sense of fairness? Each side is most concerned with making sure its own best interests are served. When each side has its own subjective idea of what is fair, achieving fairness will be nothing but a pipe dream. Just consider how many different labor strikes across various industries have happened, are happening right now, or are being threatened. Inevitably, employers and employees disagree as to what is fair.
That’s why the surprise of the workers in Jesus’ parable doesn’t surprise us. We’re not shocked to see their shock when the landowner distributes wages at the end of the day. The reason we’re not not surprised or shocked is because we’d likely respond exactly the same way!
No, the surprise comes not in the workers’ reaction, but in the landowner’s decision to pay everyone equally. The landowner determined that those who barely finished tying up the laces of their work boots were going to make exactly as much as those who put in a grueling day’s work. Ironic, isn’t it, that we scream “inequality!” when in reality he gave everyone exactly the same amount. By definition you can’t get more “fair” than that!
So what was the problem? Not with the payment, but with what the laborers felt they deserved. And that is why our sense of fairness will always be flawed. We simply do not apply the same standards to ourselves as we do others. We look differently at others than we do ourselves.
One explanation for this discrepancy between how we judge ourselves and how we judge others is that we draw our conclusions about others on the basis of their actions, while viewing ourselves on the basis of our intentions. So when someone else lies, we conclude that she is of course a liar. She probably lies all the time and hardly ever tells the truth. But if I lie, well, there’s a good reason behind it or I didn’t mean to lie, and I most often tell the truth.
When someone else cuts me off in traffic, they’re a bad driver and likely drive that way all the time. But when I do it, it was simply a very rare case, and I probably had a very good reason behind it. Do you see how hard it’s going to be to maintain any sense of fairness when we naturally tend to tip the scale in our own favor?
How does that higher view of self on our part factor in to the relationship that matters most – our relationship with God? If we refuse to see how skewed our own sense of fairness is, we will always find it unsettling how a gracious, generous God deals with fallen mankind. Even though by definition, grace is God’s undeserved love for sinners, we nonetheless have our own personal ideas about those who are more deserving of that undeserved love than others. Do you see how nonsensical that is?
It will always be that way to us as long as we insist on viewing man’s relationship with God being based – even the slightest, itty-bittiest bit – on what man is giving instead of entirely on what he is getting. We simply cannot base our relationship with God on what we give to him, even on our best days.
So although we might think that ideal family-man father or the dedicated single mom or the polite, respectable hard-working young adult all have so much going for them that God should take notice and factor that in to his final assessment of who’s in and who’s out, the Bible has plenty to say about thinking we could on our own give anything of worth to God or show ourselves to somehow be more deserving of grace. “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6).
If you want to offer up your dirty, stinky laundry to God in hopes that it’s not as dirty or stinky as the next person’s, you are welcome to try. But at the end of the day, all you’re still offering is dirty, stinky laundry – nothing that would in any way endear God to you anymore, but would actually leave you worse off! So as much as we might try to polish it up or put on a fresh coat of paint or splash some perfume on it, the best we can offer up to God on our own is still nothing but condemning sin.
No, there is no place for our relationship with God being based on what we give. It can only be based on what we get. And in that sense, God’s fairness is faultless, because he treats everyone the same: his undeserved grace is for everyone – no matter when they show up in the work day. So yes, there is grace enough for the death-bed convert. There is grace enough for the death row inmate. There is grace enough for the top-ten list of all-time most wicked, wretched people in history. There is grace enough for your nasty neighbor. There is grace enough for your racist uncle. There is grace enough for the backsliding Christian. There is grace enough for all… so there is grace enough for you.
If God wants all people to be saved – and he does, based on his own words repeated again and again in the Bible – then the only way that can happen is if he refuses to base salvation on what we pretend we can give him and insists on being the One who gives it to us. What he gives us – all of us – is unmerited, unwarranted, unconditional, unlimited grace. That’s the only way it can be fair.
That also explains why God is so persistent and committed to making sure everyone is aware of his grace. Did you count how many times in Jesus’ parable the landowner went out to hire workers for his vineyard? Five times! While the number itself is not significant, the message it sends is clear – God continues to make sure his Word keeps spreading. God continues to make sure the good news reaches every ear. God continues to make sure no one misses out so that no one can say, “No one hired us,” that is, that they didn’t know about Jesus and the radical grace God extends through him.
Let us not forget, we are an important part of that. God gathers his church – believers – and uses us to keep sending out the message that God is hiring. There’s more room in his vineyard, his kingdom. There’s more than enough grace to go around. There is more than enough grace to forgive every sin. There is more work that needs to be done in his kingdom, so let us be about that hiring process and bringing others in so that he can lavish them with the grace he eagerly desires to give out.
Then, let us rejoice – and not resent – when he does. We want to guard against displaying the attitude of the all-day workers in Jesus’ parable, no matter how long we’ve been in the kingdom. When they received their payment, “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’” (Mt. 20:11-12).
If their attitude sounds oddly familiar, it might call to mind the attitude of the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. Just as he resented what he felt was the misdirected forgiveness and compassion of the father to his wayward brother, so those working all day long resented the short-shift workers receiving the same payment as the day-long laborers. If God wants all to experience the full measure of his grace, then let’s throw a celebration every time anyone receives it!
Because there are still far too many who are outside of the vineyard. Some don’t know about the grace God has in store for them. Others are not interested in the grace God has in store for them. Still others are adamantly opposed to the grace God has in store for them or simply don’t think they need it to manage their way into the vineyard. Whatever the reason, there are still far too many on the outside looking in.
Let’s do what is in our power to do to get them into the vineyard. Let’s tell them the greatest story ever – the reality of the Savior they have in Jesus, a story for all people. Then, let us rejoice – not resent – every single victory that God generously grants through his grace.