Sermon transcript:
A lot of people have trouble with this parable. How did it strike you? I think, for a lot of us, this parable offends our sense of fairness. Why should everyone get equal pay for unequal work? It doesn’t make sense. This parable enters our hearts like Buckley’s cough syrup. You know Jesus is right. You know it must be good for you. But that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.1 And it certainly would have been difficult for Jesus’ original audience to swallow.
Anthropologists have estimated that about 90 percent of Jesus’ people came from the peasant classes represented by the workers in this parable. They were landless day labourers whose livelihood depended on the needs and whims of landowners. There was no job security. No guarantee that there would be work tomorrow. So the people listening to Jesus could easily identify with the workers who had spent the whole day under the scorching sun, only to discover at the end of the day they would receive the same pay as those who had worked only a few hours.
I think that’s the part of the story most of us understand. We’re right there with the complaints against the landowner. We’re expecting a story about the rewards of work for those who have earned them. And Jesus completely subverts our expectations.
But there is an important difference between Jesus’ audience and most of us. They also understood what it was like to be hired at the last hour. They knew what it was like to stand around waiting anxiously to be called. They knew what it was like to watch the sun climb overhead and then begin to sink toward the horizon, wondering how their families would eat if they weren’t called soon. They knew the desperation of needing something they could not provide for themselves. And that is important, because I think this is the only way we can really begin to hear this parable as good news: to know need. To know anxiety. To know desperation. And then to experience the immense relief, joy, and gratitude of receiving something you did not earn.
For those of us who live relatively comfortable lives, it can be much harder to hear the good news in this story. We get caught up in the resentment, and I think that’s because comfortable people tend to see this story through the lens of achievement. We understand the world in terms of what people have earned. Work hard, and you deserve the reward. Do more, and you should receive more. Follow the rules, and you should get what you deserve. But Jesus tells a story in which the reward is not a calculation of what people have earned. It is an expression of generosity.
And that takes us to the heart of Jesus’ message about faith. Faith is not about working hard enough to earn something from God. Faith is not a rewards system for people who have done everything right. Faith is surrendering into a relationship of trust with the God we have come to know in the life of Jesus and in the power of the Spirit. And you only really take that step when you recognize your need for it. This parable is a story about the grace of God for people who know they need grace.
You might get to the heart of this story more easily if you live in a tent. If you live with a disability and rely on other people every day. If you have ever known the love and support of family and community after a frightening diagnosis. If you have experienced the kindness of a stranger while escaping an abusive relationship. If you have ever reached a place where you could no longer pretend that you could manage everything on your own.
I don’t want to suggest that suffering—especially unjust suffering—is somehow spiritually redemptive. It isn’t. We should never romanticize suffering, and we should never minimize the real pain people experience. I’m saying something different. Experiencing need—inescapable need—can put us in touch with something that is necessary for faith: our need. And that can be difficult for us because we live in a culture that tells us to avoid need at all costs. Independence. Self-reliance. Self-mastery. The self-made man. The boss girl. The rugged individual. We are constantly being told that the goal of life is to become someone who needs nothing from anyone.
Even our culture’s approach to aging can be an attempt to scrub the reality of need out of our lives. Just as we tell children not to compare themselves with carefully curated images on social media, those of us on the other side of the hill would do well not to compare ourselves with the seniors we see in advertisements. You know the ones. They’re running on beaches. They’re sexually satisfied. They’re financially secure. Their wrinkles are merely lines of dignified wisdom. Sixty is the new forty. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be healthy and active as we age. But when advertising teaches us to see aging primarily as a problem to be solved, it can prevent us from receiving the senior years as something else: a gift that puts us in touch with reality.
Because eventually, you just can’t do everything you used to do. You need help. Some things have to be given up altogether. And of course, that can involve grief and pain—but there can also be a gift. One of the gifts of aging is the possibility of spiritual maturity—the growing recognition that we are interdependent. That we exist in relationship with others. That we are not complete or whole on our own. That our lives are woven into a larger, beautiful wholeness.
There is no shame in need. Coming to terms with our basic neediness is not about giving up or settling for less. It is about accepting life as it actually is—not as we wish it were, and not as advertisers tell us it should be. And perhaps that is part of what Jesus is inviting us into through this strange and unsettling parable. In the life of faith, there is an invitation to rest from our endless striving after perfection. Faith is not a matter of competence. It is not about mastering all the right rules or holding all the right beliefs.
Faith is a matter of trust. A matter of surrender. A willingness to say: I need. And then to discover that needing is not a failure; it is simply part of being human. It is to know our limitations not as a source of anxiety but as an invitation to take the leap of faith. Jesus is right after all. I hope that goes down a little easier.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
Citations:
1 Barbara Brown Taylor, found at http://yardley.cs.calvin.edu/hoezee/2003/matt20.html