Two
Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 20, 2026 – 17th Sunday After Pentecost
Scripture Readings: Jonah 3:10-4:11,
Matthew 20:1-16
I have two sisters, which means that growing up, I developed a very strong
sense of fairness. One of my favourite
stories to tell is that my mother would occasionally bring home cinnamon buns as a treat for us to share. Whoever divided the
cinnamon buns got the last pick of her share, so you’d better believe me that
you were very careful to make it fair if you were the one dividing them up. Rulers were usually involved! Each of us would get precisely and
mathematically one third.
And so reading the story that Jesus told today through the lens of fairness,
I’m quick to join the chorus of the workers who had been working out in the sun
all day: “That’s not fair!” And I can almost hear the voice of my father
in the voice of Jesus or the voice of the landowner in the parable, “Well,
life’s not fair.”
If you, like me, have a keen sense of fairness, then this parable of Jesus
probably rubs you the wrong way. Surely
the workers who worked out in the heat of the day for a full 12-hour shift
should receive 12 times the salary as the workers who only came along and
worked for the last hour, as the sun was almost setting.
And when I realize that I’m reading the parable this way, I realize how deeply
a capitalist mindset has me entrapped.
Maybe it is capitalism, and not fairness, that says that hard work is
rewarded, and the workers who were willing to work 12 hours should, of course,
be ahead in life, compared with the workers who only worked a single hour. And the owner of the land who hired the
workers – why he must have worked extra hard to be in the position that he’s in
now.
But that capitalist mindset misses so much of the nuance, and I wonder if maybe
that is what Jesus is trying to point out to us. I rather suspect that the landowner didn’t
work extra hard in order to be able to afford so much land, and in order to be
able to pay so many people to work for him.
I rather suspect that he inherited the land from his father, who
inherited the land from his father, who inherited the land from his father, and
so on.
And what about the question of why some workers still hadn’t been hired at 5pm
while others had been working since sunrise?
Capitalism might tell us that they must be lazy, they must have still
been sleeping while the go-getters were already out in the marketplace looking
for work. But what if those 5pm hires
had been overlooked earlier in the day because they have a disability? Or what if they had been overlooked because
they were immigrants? Or what if they
had been overlooked because they were queer, because they were trans, because their
family led an untraditional lifestyle?
The thing about the salary that was negotiated – a denarius – is that it is
enough to live on – enough to buy your daily bread – but it isn’t enough to be
able to save any for a rainy day. Those
workers who weren’t hired at sunrise, they were probably starting to worry
about what was going to happen if they didn’t work that day. And when they were hired part-way through the
day, they probably assumed that they were going to receive a partial salary and
were trying to figure out how they were going to make the budget work – maybe
pay the rent to keep a roof over their family’s head, but the children were
going to have to go to be hungry again tonight.
But doesn’t every human being deserve the dignity of a roof overhead and food
in their belly? The landowner recognizes
this, and pays every worker, whether they had worked a full day or only the
last hour, enough to keep the wolves at bay for another day. And to me, this is a deeper level of
fairness. This is a fairness that says
“not what you have earned, but what you need.”
Now it could be, as Jesus told this parable, that he was making a commentary on
the economic practices of his time and place… and maybe our time and place too,
where so many people don’t have enough to get from one day to the next. And that is probably part of Jesus's message. But the thing about parables is that they are
never just simple stories. And when
Jesus tells parables, he is usually trying to teach us something about God, and
about God’s kingdom.
One good rule of thumb for interpreting Jesus’s parables is that you can
usually look for the person in the story who has the most power, and with that
person, Jesus is trying to depict God.
And in this parable, the person with the power is the landowner. And Jesus is trying to paint us a picture of
a God who is not fair, but who is generous far beyond fairness. We don’t need to work to earn God’s love, we
don’t have to earn God’s grace – it is given to us freely as we need it.
I think that this connection is made even more clear in the story from Jonah,
and I love how cleverly the lectionary pairs these two stories together. This happens after the famous part of Jonah’s
story. Most people associate Jonah with
the whale, but you might remember that Jonah ended up in the belly of the whale
because he was running away from God, because God had told him that he was to
go to the city of Nineveh and tell the people to change their hearts and lives
and turn back to God. And Jonah was so
convinced of the utter depravity of the people of Nineveh that he was afraid to
go there, so he ran away. After escaping
the whale, he realized that he was going to have to go there after all, and he
reluctantly carried God’s message to the people of Nineveh. And to his surprise, the people listened and
turned back to God. And to his even
greater surprise, God forgave the people of Nineveh for their evil ways. And today, we get the end of Jonah’s story,
where he essentially throws a temper tantrum over God’s generosity, God’s
grace, and God’s love.
The thing about God’s grace is that if we accept that God loves everybody, that
everybody also includes people that we might, in our heart of hearts, wish were
outside of God’s grace. We’re not going
to name names here, but I rather suspect that most of us carry a couple of
names in our heart about whom we think:
“Surely God can’t forgive that person.” But God’s love is for everyone.
If we approach the parable that Jesus tells from the perspective of the workers
hired in the morning, we might start to think that God loves us especially, 12
times as much as those people over there.
But if we approach the parable from the perspective of the workers who
were only hired at the very end of the day, our response is more likely one of
awe at a God who could be so generous and gracious as to love us too.
For God loves you – as I often say, God loves you more deeply than you could
ever know or even imagine.
(At Westfield United Church, at this point in the sermon I went off-script
and added the following.)
Some of you may have seen the post I made in our Westfield United Facebook
group this week, telling you about a church in Hamilton that voted last Sunday
to become Affirming, and the post that they made went viral in all the wrong
ways. They have received literally
thousands of hateful comments. And in my
post, I invited you to go and share some love and encouragement with them, and
I know that some of you did.
I also left them two comments – one under my own account, and one as Two Rivers
Pastoral Charge. And this morning as I
was waiting for the ferry – it was a very long wait this morning – I opened up
Facebook on my phone and saw that my Two Rivers Pastoral Charge comment had
received some replies. I had
written: “Congratulations on taking this
step! God's love is limitless, unconditional, and for EVERYONE!” followed by a
row of rainbow hearts; and someone literally commented underneath: “God’s love is 100% conditional.”
What?!?! That’s not the God that I
know. That’s not what Jesus is telling
us in this parable. God’s love and God’s
grace does not depend on anything that we do or don’t do. We don’t need to earn God’s love.
(Back to the regularly scheduled sermon.)
To quote author Phillip Yancy, “Grace means that nothing could ever make God
love you more; and grace means that nothing could ever make God love you less.”
You don’t need to work 12 hours out in the blazing sun to earn God’s love. God already loves you! You are God’s precious child… and so is
everyone else. Thanks be to God!
Image: The Late-Arriving Workers (JESUS MAFA)
Used with permission.
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