Matthew 20:1-16 [Pentecost 18—CWS A] Pastor Ron Koehler
Grace-Tucson, AZ
October 4, 2020
Jesus Guides His Church with Inconceivable Grace “Inconceivable!” “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Many of you know that those lines come from the movie The Princess Bride, which is, of course, the greatest movie of all time. I mean, to think otherwise would, naturally, be…inconceivable. That one word—inconceivable—has been so embedded into pop culture because of that movie that if you type it into google or search for a gif or a meme with it, the movie’s characters and their quotes pop up immediately. “Inconceivable”—not able to be imagined or mentally grasped, incredible. Inigo Montoya did not agree that the things Vizzini thought were inconceivable, were actually beyond imagining. But today, we have something before us that is truly inconceivable, something that is incredible and unable to be fully grasped. We’re talking about the Inconceivable Grace of God. God’s grace is his undeserved love, which he has extended to sinful people and with which Jesus Guides His Church. We have pretty strong feelings about fairness, right? Walk into the kitchen, take one large piece of cake, one knife, two forks and two kids and you’ll receive a lesson in how we perceive fairness! Accusations of “You got more than I did!” soon follow. If you kick back this afternoon to watch some football and you see a multi-millionaire athlete who gets paid ten times more for one game than you make in a year, that delicate sense of fairness inside you could start to get annoyed! There are all sorts of things that can set off our “fairness sensor.” We struggle with this spiritually too. Jesus’ disciple—even his “lead disciple—Peter felt the struggle. You want to hear his question that prompted Jesus to tell this teaching story? Jesus had been talking about salvation, and the disciples were confused about how anyone can be saved at all, considering God’s expectations of perfection Then their spokesman, Peter, asked “Look, we have left everything and followed you! What then will we have?” Do you see what they were thinking? Jesus followers were thinking about the reward they felt they deserved because they followed Jesus. For those men and for us today who sometimes think that God owes us something for following him, Jesus tells this story of the landowner and the workers in the vineyard. He shows them that what human beings think about “fairness” is irrelevant when it comes to God’s Inconceivable Grace. It is exactly that Grace the Guides His Church.
The setting of the story is not too difficult for us to imagine. Maybe you have even seen day laborers gathered in a parking lot before, hoping that someone will roll up in a truck, offer them work for the day, have them jump in the back of the truck, and then head off for the job. This also happened back in Israel in Jesus’ day—minus the truck. Jesus tells about a landowner who stops by one of these spots to pick up workers for his vineyard. While the hours tick off the clock and the sun travels from sun up to sun down, more workers are needed. The landowner took four trips down to the Home Depot parking lot—or wherever they congregated in the marketplace back then—to pick up workers as the day went along. So far the story makes sense to us, but when we’re told how the landowner instructs the foreman to pay the men, we are surprised by his unusual approach. And we wonder about the landowner’s fairness. Now, we know not to try to press every point of a parable, but to look instead for Jesus’ main point. Jesus steers us in the right direction when he starts: Indeed the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven, the ruling of God in believer’s hearts, to this life situation we can all understand. The landowner clearly represents God. The workers are God’s people. But the actions of the landowner rile up our sense of fairness and we find ourselves questioning God. If he treats people in different ways, is he fair? The “denarius” paid to every laborer, regardless of time spent working, was a fair day’s wage—we heard a bit about that last week also. So in paying this, the landowner proves to be fair, even generous! You noticed how the first ones paid were the last ones to arrive that day in the vineyard. As the workers gathered around the foreman and his bag of coins, every one of them saw that those who worked the shortest amount of time got the same pay as those who had sweated for the foreman all day long! All workers were paid the same! “UNFAIR!” they cried! Well, how would you like it? You kids would say the same, wouldn’t you? If you and your brother or sister or you and your friend were hired by your parents or someone else to go out and paint the fence around the house or dig holes in the yard for some plants and one of you worked for 8 hours and the other one of you showed up at the very end and just worked 1 hour, how would you feel if you both got the same amount of money? You would cry “UNFAIR!” I bet we would all agree. But when it comes to God and his grace—his undeserved love for lost sinners—God plays by different rules. God works not on a system of paying people what they earn from him. No, God works on a system of grace, of showing a love for people that they did not earn or deserve. God can and does give out his love and gifts of his love as he wants to—and he is generous every time he does it.
The “denarius”, the pay, is NOT simply the equivalent of salvation in this story. It represents anything we receive from God, or anything Jesus, by his grace, gives to us. So do we view things like the disciples or the all-day workers in the story? In both cases there was the thought that because they worked longer, they deserved better or more. Could a long-time member of Grace think they deserve a certain position of service over someone who is a new Christian, simply because they’ve been here longer? Could any of us get the idea that we deserve better in this life because we have followed Jesus for some time? Better health? Less drama in our lives? Could any of us think that because we have contributed more offerings or spent more time serving than others that God owes us a bigger voice in his church? And could the thought ever creep into our heads that because we do go to church, and give offerings to God, and find a way or two to serve, that God will reward us with the gift of heaven? We have this worldly sense of fairness because we are sinfully selfish at our core. We do NOT think like the God of all grace does! We know God, yet still have those thoughts. It shows us just how unworthy we are of Christ and his forgiveness and salvation. How sick we feel when we realize that Jesus lived for us and died for us and yet, in some ways, we try to take the credit for deserving his love and blessings. He did all the work for our salvation, but we slip into thinking that somehow the things we do actually count in some measure to make us deserving of God’s love and blessings. Foolish and forgetful sinners, aren’t we? How fortunate we are to have a God who has a love we could never even conceive of! How blessed we are to have a forgiving Savior! Though Jesus could have, he didn’t yell at the disciples for their foolish thinking and foolish questions. Instead he told them a story. The story of a generous landowner. They learned, like we do this morning, that those workers didn’t fill out an application to serve, didn’t offer a resume of their useful and desirable qualities, didn’t even have the right to approach the landowner. Instead, the landowner, went to people to whom he owed nothing. He offered for them to come into his vineyard and serve. Then, according to his generous nature, blessed each of them in the way he wanted to. He had the right to do that. He did not go back on any promises. He simply showed his generosity. Remember, this parable teaches about the kingdom of heaven, which is God’s Church—the place where his Inconceivable Grace rules.
You see how God kind of turns things upside-down? The words of Jesus after the story drive the point home that God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. Jesus says “In the same way, the last will be first, and the first, last.” What a serious warning this is! We find it truly Inconceivable—we cannot fully grasp God’s Grace! So don’t insist on trying to make God fit into your way of thinking. This is the truth—no matter how good a person is or how hard they have worked for God or how long they have trusted in God—if that person thinks that they deserve more from God because of it, they may find themselves last. A person who relies on what they have done—instead of God’s grace in Jesus—will find out on their last day that “last” means “lost” for eternity. The story connects with us doesn’t it? We know that because of sin not one person is owed anything by the Holy God. We are grateful that the Lord came to us, took us in, and has given us his gifts. Grateful Christians sit in awe of the Inconceivable Grace of God. Christians who listen to Jesus rejoice that his grace is not confined to the limitations of peoples’ “rules” and values, but that his grace has been freely given to us and others. The workers needed to look at things from the Landowner’s perspective—he could do whatever he wanted with the other workers; he had been more than fair with those first called. The disciples needed to look at things from Jesus’ perspective—that they were no more deserving of God’s gifts than anyone else. And we need to look at things from God’s perspective—that instead of being jealous of God’s blessings to others or relying on our good lives to earn God’s love—we ought to marvel that God loved us first…and that he loved us at all! This is a story that focuses not on us, but on our loving God. It has the power to humble us and to set our hearts straight. It reminds us of our unworthiness, and we realize that we don’t want straight justice from God. If that was God’s approach, his grace would not rule. He would not have sent his Son, but simply punished all people for their sin. Then no one would have been called into his vineyard! But God’s requirement for justice was fulfilled when the perfect Jesus was sacrificed for a world of imperfect people. The price for sin was paid. And because of that, this incredible, Inconceivable Grace rules and Guides His Church now and it will for eternity. This good news gives us great comfort and leads us to praise the God of inconceivable grace! Amen. Now the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.