I don’t know which offended me more: how flippant he was or how he used the 2nd person. So I sat there with my newest friends and we seethed. With me in the stew were several dozen other priests, pastors, and peddlers of God: the clergy-folk of Baton Rouge. And despite the heat of this past Monday afternoon in southern Louisiana, you could feel the chill creeping. All we wage-earning workers for God wondered: isn’t this Harry just another Johnny-come-lately?

Harry put his red-face on letters we know painfully well: the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There he stood in the sacred splendor of Baton Rouge’s First United Methodist Church. Sanctimonious Harry: FEMA’s embodied embarrassment with floppy hair and thick glasses.

FEMA’s got a big job and they are hard at it. (Yes, yes.) Lord knows they need some grace, especially from a bunch of people who are supposed to be professional in handling the God-stuff. But, between you and me, I thought ol’ Harry was a bit of a weasel. He shows up 10 days after you trucked down (3 times over) to your sister church in Baton Rouge. Ten days after your tons of help went to weary places like Gramercy and Bogalusa, LSU’s Field House and Baton Rouge’s temporary housing. So far, I’d like to say we’ve done our fair share; we’ve borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat (Matt. 20:12). Then Harry and FEMA show up, draw a crowd, and meet the press.

Forgive the callousness of my finding, please, but I don’t care if this is Harry’s 4 billionth time to relieve disaster or his first. He comes last to the field.

If there’s something like the sound of bitterness in my voice, your hearing matches well the taste in my mouth. It is stuck in my throat, I confess: resentment with a dash of disdain; which is about how I take Jesus and his teaching.

Jesus’ story of the workers in the vineyard chokes me up. His teaching throttles all our assumptions about equal pay for equal work. One hour laborers do receive 12 hour pay: picking grapes or putting lives back together. Jesus offers a full taste of something we did not expect when swallowing this gospel: our own resentment and bitterness over who’s getting what we think we alone earn. Why we’re bound to stomach such things when we hear this parable.

This is what Peter must be chewing on. Peter’s just seen his Savior turn away that rich, young man. Jesus had told him 10 minutes ago, You want perfection? Go. Sell your stuff. Give the cash to the poor; you’ll have treasure in heaven. Then you can think about coming along with me. When the young man heard this, he went away grieving (Matt. 19:21-22).

Right then, a lump formed in those disciples’ throats. But Peter had guts enough to gulp: Say, uh, Jesus, you know, we’ve left everything. We’re following you. So, umm, what are we gonna get for this (Matt. 19:27)?

I’m so glad Peter asks. Forgive my shallowness, please, but I’ve wondered the same. Haven’t you? For all of us who were baptized by high school; or confirmed at 12 years; or christened at 12 months; we’re bound to wonder because, mostly, we’re the sunrise to sunset laborers. Peter, head of Judean Union of Apostles local #19, arbitrates with an expectation for remuneration. There is an actual reward, some just desserts, for the sweat on our brow, right Jesus?

He voices what all the others only dare think about: a conventional idea that hard work does pay off. Quid pro quo—a little something something for all our something.

Yet he is not as selfish as it seems. Rather Peter is the first to engage the economics of this gospel he’s breaking his back for. Comparisons are inevitably the human strategy. Peter’s seen a rich guy turned away because he wasn’t sold on the idea of having nothing. Who wouldn’t wonder if nothing is not the right reward?

I was about 8 when those comparisons began. I remember asking my dad what he made as a manager of a Sears store in Birmingham. What are you going to do when you grow up? too easily morphs to how much do you want to make when you grow up? Even posing the question was a bit nerve-racking. Uh, Dad, about how much do you make? Enough. I pressed. Sure, but can I ask why you want to know? I want to know how much more I need to make when I grow up.

Comparisons happen. Comparing our work and wage with others, why that’s human. But resentment: that is a choice we choose to take when comparing. Resenting who gets what wage for whatever work, why that’s sin.

Still I’ve come early to the field. And so have you. Labored long. Did the work. Sprained my back. But have those calluses on my hand spread to my heart?

So all our guards are up as Jesus uses this parable to crash through walls of conventional wisdom: customary values that equate freely given grace with a wage we could actually earn. Jesus uses this parable to reconstitute our failure of imagination. He renews tired old classifications of compensation by teaching the economy of his unfair grace. That the kingdom of heaven announces God’s grace is God’s to give, not ours to barter or to finagle.

As such, in Christ the current wage and eternal reward are not separate checks. They merge and direct life for any takers at any time: this life and the one to come. The death bed conversion and the morning-after repentance are two expressions of an extreme grace and reversals to rejoice, not resent.

The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who calls laborers. With this, Jesus takes the occasion to delve deep into the economics of grace. He sets us up to expect reversals and inversions brought about by a radical grace and a transforming gospel. That the last will be first, and the first will be last (Matt. 20:16). This kingdom turns things right-side up. And this flip side of grace, when we’re expecting to see what’s customary and conventional, is upsetting: right-side-up-setting. This gospel routes turnabouts for life.

The only surprise is that we who should have the eyes to see it don’t. Instead, we resent reversals we wouldn’t have offered or couldn’t have imagined. By this parable, though, Jesus shows the worth of grace; that grace is good precisely because grace does what it’s unbound to do: upset the apple cart and overturn our graceless expectations. 

So forgive my initial disappointment, but that’s how I felt. Because in my view of custom and convention—of work-ethic and wage-earned, I have seen the laborers who’ve come first and those who’ve come last.

Churches rose early and made the coffee, the Red Cross and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship got there about the time we were swigging a 2nd cup; the National Organization for Victim Assistance showed up about lunchtime; then the Salvation Army blew in by school’s dismissal; and FEMA, called to action from standing idly by in the marketplace, has gotten in a good hour before quitting time. 

And here is your first resident who most definitely is last; and I’m the grumbling worker. The very one who’s bent out of shape wondering: you’ve made them equal to us (Matt. 20:12). Do you hear the envy in that? Do you see the gracelessness of that?

In seeing it, I think I see more clearly that God has this disproportionate and lopsided growth. This protrusion into my life—our life—and I find it grotesque and offensive. Instantly, I’m shamed because I don’t know what to do with such a thing as God’s lopsided grace. I’ve never been that generous; never been that obscene with generosity.

So, let me let you in on one more thing. I’ve actually thought of looting God: made loose plans to pilfer God’s freedom—God’s freedom to do what God chooses with what belongs to God. I’m one who’s turned his nose up to what Wendell Berry knows as a miracle. Part time poet and fulltime farmer, Berry, says: to treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it [Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (NY: Counterpoint, 200) 10]. Perhaps not life, but grace: I’ve treated grace as less than a miracle; something I’ve earned. I’d just about given up on it. If it weren’t for this parable…

And Wilshire, this is our fresh start Sunday, isn’t it? A day to attend more fully to God’s presence. That might be why I don’t want this parable which goes to show that I so badly need it. To know in God’s kingdom with God’s laborers there is an eternal moment when generosity is unjust, when equal is unfair. Why that’s grace.

By God in Christ, take what belongs to you and go (Matt. 20:14). Work hard; work well. There’s so much to be done with a wage we can never earn and should gladly accept.

Amen.