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abundance, community, economy, equal, fair, fairness, generosity, God, grace, greed, jealous, Jesus, justice, least, outrage, parable, primal, scarcity, Sermon, truth
I have a clergy friend with whom I share a mixed friend group – we’re the only clergy in a mix of administrators, educators, medical professionals, stay-at-home parents, among other vocations. I have watched my clergy friend in this group, and she is genuinely the nicest person I think I have ever met. She is thoughtful and kind, generous and gracious, and generally everything you would hope a clergyperson would be (often leaving me feeling not feeling quite up to snuff, if I’m being fully transparent). That friend is one whom I could imagine being hired by the landowner in our parable from Matthew at 6:00 am and working hard all day. I could imagine her being happy that others get hired at 9:00, Noon, 3:00, and 5:00 – because she knows what standing in marketplace waiting to get hired feels like. And I could also imagine her watching those workers who only were able to fit in one hour of work getting paid a full day’s wage and rejoicing with genuine joy. And I can also imagine her humbly remembering that she agreed to work all day and only get the same compensation as the workers who worked one hour, and not being resentful, but grateful for the generosity of the landowner – because she wants to live in a world of generous landowners. I can imagine her leaving that day, going home to tell her family about how lucky they are to live in a community with such a cool landowner who shows radical grace.
But that is not how the parable of Jesus goes. In the parable, my friend is not the 6:00 am worker. I am. And as this parable unfolds, my heart is not bubbling over with joy. My heart is much less generous. In fact, every time I read this parable, I find myself fidgeting as the day in the parable unfolds. I’m not particularly upset that the landowner is generous – as those in the parable are. I’m more upset that the landowner forces the daylong, exhausted workers to watch as the landowner very unfairly, inequitably distributes wages. It’s like the landowner knows what he’s doing is outrageous, and he wants to rub the early workers’ noses in his obscene generosity.
So where does this kind of outrage come from? Well, there has been quite extensive research about where our sense of justice comes from. There was a famous study with capuchin monkeys. Two monkeys in neighboring cages were trained to hand the researcher a rock and get a piece of cucumber as a reward. The monkeys happily do the task. But then, after 25 times of that same way, the researcher gives one monkey a grape instead of a cucumber. The other monkey, seeing the new reward of that monkey, excitedly gives the researcher a rock, expecting to similarly get a grape. Instead, the monkey is given another cucumber. The monkey loses her mind. She literally throws the cucumber at the researcher, bangs on the cage, tries to get out to grab the grape she believes she is owed.[i] All this is to say, the sense of justice as fairness is primal to us – ingrained deep in our reptilian brains and very difficult to change.
But Jesus does not and has not ever defined justice as fairness. Our measure of fairness is simple. As Barabara Brown Taylor describes, we believe, “…Equal pay for equal work is fair; equal pay for unequal work is not fair. Rewarding those who do the most work is fair; rewarding those who do the least is not fair. Treating everyone the same is fair; treating everyone the same when they are not the same is not fair.”[ii] Taylor argues, “Life is not fair, which is why it seems all that much more important that God should be.” But, “God is not fair. For reasons we may never know, God seems to love us indiscriminately, and seems also to enjoy reversing systems we set up to explain why God should love some of us more than others of us. By starting at the end of our lines with the last and the least, God lets us know that [God’s] ways are not our ways, that if we want to see things [God’s] way we might question our own notions of what is faith, and why we get so upset when our lines do not work.”[iii]
We would define justice as fairness or equitable rewards for equitable work. Unfortunately, that is not how God’s economy works. Professor Lewis Donelson explains that this parable, “…not only supports both justice and grace but insists that they are and will always be in tension with one another. Justice and grace cannot be reconciled with one another. [And], They both are part of the character of God.”[iv] In other words, God’s economy does not work like our economy. And on an intellectual level we love that about God and know that we ultimate benefit from God’s upside-down economy. But on a gut level, in that reptilian side of our brain, that side that gets jealous and greedy and fearful about scarcity, that throws cucumbers when we do not get grapes – on that level, God’s definition of justice makes us uncomfortable. Knowing the “…sheer abundance of God’s grace,” that “God’s love cannot be used up,”[v] makes us, in our heads, humbly overjoyed and, in our guts, justifiably indignant.
That’s why the last part of our parable is so very important. I have never liked how the landowner forces the full-day workers to watch the distribution of wages. That part always feels like a “gotcha” to the hardworking full-day workers. But Stanley Hauerwas clarifies, “If [the owner] had begun paying those hired first they would not have known that all were being paid at the same rate. God’s grace is the grace of truth refusing to hide from us the character of our envy of those whom we think underserving. The parable of the vineyard exemplifies God’s justice – a justice disciplined by the truth.”[vi] In other words, the only way we fully understand the contrast in our sense of justice and God’s sense of justice is to see that justice in action and feel how that justice hits us in our guts.
So, is today’s parable meant to leave us going home today just feeling guilty about how unlike God we are when it comes to justice and grace and our treatment of others? Yes. And no. The parable offers harsh truth we need to face. But what we do with that harsh truth is much more important. For me, that means staying in that friend group with that friend who would have gone home happy for the one-hour laborers and shared the joy with her family (and maybe even been proud to know that such a landowner exists). For you, that may mean digging into your own experience and recalling those days when you were still sitting in the marketplace and received abundant grace you did not deserve. For us, that means looking at how we shape this community to model that vineyard – always looking for ways to model abundant, uncomfortable grace. And for our world, that means becoming so revolutionized toward abundant grace, that we work to replicate that kind of grace in the economic system formed by our elected leaders – whether working within the system or outside the system. Yes, this parable rightly makes us uncomfortable. The challenge this week is what you can do with that discomfort. This community is here to help you get out of your gut and into your head and heart. Amen.
[i] Debie Thomas, “On Fairness,” September 13, 2020, as found at https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/2757-on-fairness on September 18, 2026. Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg, posted April 4, 2013, as found on September 17, 2026.
[ii] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 103.
[iii] Brown Taylor, 104, 106.
[iv] Lewis R. Donelson, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. A, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 97.
[v] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew: Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 176.
[vi] Hauerwas, 177.
The other day, my family and I were driving in the city. We turned the corner, and right before us loomed an enormous billboard. But instead of trying to sell something (or convince me that I needed “that”), it simply said, “Gratitude.” I was stunned. I do not know who put up the sign or why, but what I can tell you is that it stopped me in my tracks. Whether I am bustling around with my family or busy at work, I am rarely meditating on gratitude. I am just not very good at holding gratitude at the center of everything. For me, that sign was a beckoning back: a beckoning back to a spirit of gratitude. So instead of having my mind on wherever we were going that day, suddenly, I looked around the car. There was my beautiful, loving, precious family. We were sitting in a car that works, enjoying leisure time. I was not sick or worried about my housing security. A wave of gratitude swept through that car that left me stunned.
