Jesus tells a parable about a business owner. He talks about the owner of a vineyard who hires workers for the day. In the early morning he goes out and finds people who will work and agrees to pay them a living wage. They go out to the fields and start to work. Around nine he goes to the square and finds more people, and this time he says “I will pay you what is right”. They go out to the fields too. He does this again at noon, and then at three. And at five he goes out and finds people who haven’t been hired yet, and he hires them and sends them to the fields.
When it comes time for everyone to be paid, he starts with the ones who came at 5pm. And they get a full day’s wages. Now, can you imagine being those folks who were hired at 9am? The people who were hired eight hours later got a full day’s wage. They must have been thinking, “If they got paid for the full day, we are surely going to get even more!”
Except they don’t. They get the full day’s wage that they agreed on earlier in the day. And they grumble about how unfair it is. You get the same pay whether you worked one hour or nine hours. The owner of the vineyard answers, “I did you no wrong. I paid you for the day. Are you angry because I was generous and gave what was mine to give to the others? The last shall be first. And the first shall be last.”
If you’re like me, you read this parable and you feel a little uneasy. It doesn’t seem right that the ones who came at 5pm get paid as much as the ones at 9am. That’s not good business; I would lose my profits for my business if I did this. It’s not what we’re taught our whole lives. It’s not fair. That vineyard owner had it all wrong.
But I was wrong.
The main character, the business owner, represents God. And the workers in the vineyard, whether they came at daybreak or 5pm, really represent us. Jesus is trying to teach us all something about God, and one another. We all like to believe that we will be rewarded, if we just work hard enough. It’s what we have heard since we were in grade school. If we worked hard enough, we could do anything we wanted. And so many of us burn ourselves out, run ourselves into the ground, in order to try to create the future we want.
I don’t fault hard work. I often work long days, and have a hard time disconnecting when I should. I check email when I’m out with friends, I pick up the phone on my day off, I have an inability to shut off. I am a workaholic. I sometimes find that despite my best laid plans, despite my hard work, in the end things don’t always go exactly my way. And sometimes that feels really unfair. Especially when we see someone else get something that we feel like they haven’t earned.
Right?
Still remember that the vineyard owner is God. And remember that none of us gets what we deserve. Instead, we get a whole lot better. That’s not the point of God’s grace. We don’t do what we do as Christians to earn God’s love, you can’t...sorry. We do what we do because we already have God’s grace, and we are so filled with gratitude for that grace that we can’t help but glorify God through our actions.
We don’t donate to the food pantry to get to heaven. We don’t volunteer on the Second Saturday of each month for fear of eternal damnation. We don’t serve as ushers, greeters, production assistants, or in hospitality services because we want to get to heaven. We do all these things not because we were the workers waiting at the vineyard at sunrise. We do these things because we were the ones God went out and found at 5pm, and we were chosen to go into the vineyards anyways. And we were not treated fairly. We were treated better than fairly. We were treated with grace.
When you really feel that grace for the first time, when you really believe it, you are free. You are free to labor in a vineyard where all are paid not according to the work they do, but according to what God does.
You don’t need a resume.
You have already been interviewed.
You’re already fully qualified for the job.
Do you want the job?
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