We are back with Matthew again this week, after your August with the Old Testament readings. Jesus has been telling his disciples about the kingdom of heaven. "This is not going to be like anything you know," he says. "It’s going to be a real adjustment!" And he reiterates some of the claims he has made earlier. saying, "The last shall be first, and the first last." He suggests that the values in the kingdom will be different, very different, and he adds, "hold on while I give you a preview of coming attractions." It is at that point that he embarks on this parable about the laborers who work in the vineyard harvesting grapes.

At the beginning of the day, this landowner heads into town to the gathering place for local laborers. He invites the number he thinks will be needed for the harvest, and they negotiate a daily wage of one denarius, barely subsistence level for a family. "An honest day’s work for and honest day’s wage," as Henry Ford used to say. And off they go to the job. For whatever reason, perhaps because there weren’t enough men to do the job, or more likely because he was concerned for the many looking for work who hadn’t been called, he went again at noon, in the afternoon, and at five o’clock to get more laborers. This last time he asked those who were still waiting why they were still standing there. "Because no one has hired us," was the answer.

When evening comes and the work day has ended, he calls in all hands to be paid, beginning with the most recent hires. One denarius, the agreed upon wage, was given to each man, regardless of how many hours they had worked. Needless to say, those who had put in a full day’s work expected more, so there was a hue and cry over this. But the landowner reminded them that they had been paid the sum they had agreed upon. And that was that.

Each time I hear this parable it calls me to new insights about the nature of God. Of course, to start with, we have to get beyond the notion that this parable is about the employment situation. Jesus is not telling us that this is the way our economy should be run. Can you imagine the chaos that would happen if someone who was hired on Friday here in the College Park Post Office got the same weekly paycheck as someone who had worked a full week, or if someone was granted a PhD after just one year of college? We’d never hear the end of it! No, this isn’t an example of how we should be doing business in this world. What Jesus is suggesting is so outrageous that hopefully we can forget how things are done in our lives, and think beyond to something vastly different.

Contrary to some, I can’t really think of the landowner as God. My God doesn’t negotiate as he did. What the landowner does is to show us something of the character of God, which leads us in a sense to the character of the kingdom of God’s heaven. One of the things which is obvious is that this landowner is concerned mostly with the working men rather than the vineyard and its crop or his profit. He doesn’t calculate how many men he will need to make this harvest profitable, he is focused instead on the laborers who are still on the corner waiting for work. It is this concern that prompts him to ask them later in the day why they have remained standing around all day, and then invites them, if only for an hour or so, to join his laborers. There is not negotiating here. It is as if God was saying, "I can use you. Come into the vineyard with the others." God wants those whom the world ignores and are left behind.

As Jesus goes on to illustrate the kingdom, we see the vast difference between those who were early hires and those called at the end. Everyone gets a denarius, enough to sustain them for a day. But those who had worked all day griped about the inequity of it all. "It’s unfair, where’s mine" they cried! The landowner simply replied, "Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?" Those who had waited patiently for a job all day, who were desperate and anxious, realized that they were dependant entirely on the good will of a landowner. I can imagine how glad they were to get that call to work, and indeed to get, through absolute grace, wages for a full day of work. Indeed God’s grace is given in equal measure to all of us, and it is not a question of negotiation, of striking bargains with God. The wealth of the kingdom is for all.

At the end of the parable, the landowner asks those complaining, "Are you envious because I am generous?" A more literal translation of this question is, "is your eye evil because I am good?" What a jab this is at human nature, our evil eye, the inclination we all have to be jealous or envious, the poverty of our own spirit! The kingdom has no place for such responses. In the kingdom of heaven there is no counting the hours, looking over our shoulders at what others get. In God’s eyes it doesn’t matter.

This parable underlines for me one of the most difficult messages of the Gospel, the Good News that we are saved by grace, not by works. I am often inclined to look at my own works and wonder if they’re "good enough," not remembering that God has given me incredible grace. When we let God love us, we begin to live in that grace. We stop griping like those jealous laborers, bemoaning our fate. We stop looking at our works as good, or not good enough. We stop counting the hours and discover that the vineyard is the best place to be. In fact it seems that we are more like those five o’clock workers, latecomers, than like the folk who work all day, receiving as we do such incredible love, aware that our blessings come to us apart from our efforts. God’s love is far greater than we deserve or imagine. I guess from God’s vantage point we all show up at five o’clock, needy, and waiting.

I love the story William Willoman tells about the northerner who was traveling through the South. One morning he stopped for breakfast in a small country restaurant. He ordered coffee, eggs, sausage, toast, and juice. When his plate arrived he noticed a pile of white stuff in the corner of the plate. Confused he called the waitress over and asked, "What is that stuff?"

"Why sir, she answered, "Them’s grits."

"But I didn’t order them" he informed her.

With a big smile, the waitress reassured him, "Sir, you don’t order grits. They just come."

That’s the Good News of the Gospel. We don’t order God’s radical grace, the outrageousness of the kingdom, it just comes. And with it comes God’s mercy which opens our hearts and hands to others.