No Equitable Salaries in the Kingdom
a sermon based on Matthew 20:1-16
by Rev. Thomas Hall

 It’s quarter to six and most everyone is still hitting the snooze alarm as the farmer hits the dusty road in his old Ford. A few are already milling around as the farmer pulls up to the unemployment office.

“You wanna come and work for me today?” the farmer yells to a man from his pickup.
“What kind of work?”
“Hard work. Grunt work.”
“No thanks, I’ve got my resume out in some pretty big agencies; I’m really waiting for a call from them.”
“I pay a hundred fifty bucks per day.”

The response is lost in a swirl of dust as fifteen workers pile into the back of the truck.

By six am they’re walking through row upon row of a soybean field that stretches out over a mile long, plucking out stray cornstalks leftover from last season. During the early hours of the day, mosquitoes dive at their exposed flesh like vampires. At the nine o’clock coffee break, they notice that the old farmer has returned with a fresh crew. They stretch and mill around then finally start down one of the long rows of soybeans. By noon, as the workers break for lunch, the farmer arrives with another bunch of workers. The farmer has given them the same line-“I’ll pay you top dollar if you work in my field.” The earliest arrivals hardly hear the farmer; the dust has mingled with their sweat leaving every crevice filled with greasy black soot. They are dog tired. Been in the field for nearly six hours. But, money is money. “I can do this for hundred and fifty bucks,” they remind themselves.

At three o’clock the farmer drops off yet another load of workers. And unbelievably, with barely an hour left on the clock, the old farmer heads back to the unemployment office to scour anyone who might still be loitering. What a crazy farmer, the workers think. Anyone still unemployed has got to be trouble. The riff raff would be the only ones left. Sure enough, the unemployment center now looks more like a homeless shelter than an office. Twenty ne’er do wells are still there shooting craps, drinking liquor, ogling at centerfolds in worn magazines.

Undeterred, the old farmer scoops them up with the same line, “get in the truck and I’ll pay you top dollar.” So at five pm the old farmer is unloading this unsavory crowd of workers. They stagger down the soybean rows grabbing the cornstalks to steady their balance. Well, maybe the old farmer can get $12.50 out of them-enough for a case of beer and a night of happiness.

By actual count, a worker who had arrived with the first group, has uprooted 1,231 cornstalks from the soybean field. All of the original group have hands that are swollen from papercuts made by the corn leaves. But at last the whistle blows and the entire group of workers head for the farmer’s pickup. Payback time.

The old farmer whispers something in the ear of his purser and the purser starts writing out checks to the guys who have just stumbled in. You can imagine the surprise when the first ne’er do well reads the amount through his window pane, “One hundred and Fifty Dollars and no cents.” The guy picks up his walkman and never looks back; he needs some distance before the old farmer realizes his mistake. But when the next group receives their wages, they too are surprised-they had expected a bonus because after all, they had outworked these Johnny-come-latelys. But they too are cut a check for the same amount. And so goes the scene-everyone gets the same wage as the Johnny-come-lately workers.

No sooner has the last worker torn his envelope open than grumbling breaks out in the ranks. “What gives, Farmer Bob?” says a self-appointed spokesperson from the original group. “Why did you pay these five o’clock riff raffs and the other groups the same as us. Our group outworked, out plucked, got out-bitten, out scratched and out-dirtied than all the others. So why are you treating them the same as us?

‘Hold it, friend,” the old farmer says. “Do you recall the conversation that we had at quarter to six this morning? Didn’t you agree to work for me for a hundred and fifty bucks?”

“Well, that’s different. That was before . . .”

“What’s the matter then,” the old farmer asked. “Are you angry because I want to be generous to these others? What difference does it make to you if I treat everyone the same? In my soybean field there are no early insiders nor late outsiders. Here, in my field, everyone gets treated equally.”

So what do you make of this strange story? Just this week at a study of the parables a person said, “the hardest parable for me to understand is the story about equal pay for unequal amount of labor. Just isn’t fair.” I agree. Wouldn’t your nose be bent if you had worked eleven hours in a tough grunt job only to get paid the same as someone who swaggers in to work but a single hour? Funny how my grace isn’t quite so amazing when standing next to yours. Curious how this story is grace to some but judgment to others.

What do we learn about God in this parable and what do we learn about ourselves this morning? Well, in the God category, we discover that God is not a very good bookkeeper. The old farmer says to us, “Is our eye evil because I am good?” It is this “evil eye,” this ophthalmos poneros that always focuses on the ledger line. Always keeps counting, always keeps score. Always views life as the good outweighing the bad. That’s what apparently has Jesus peeved with the people who first heard this story. Bookkeeping is a sin. There is no minimum below which the grace of God ceases to forgive. There is no debt so high but God’s grace can’t cancel it. God’s grace says that we’re all living in the red. That none of us-no matter how neat and orderly and Christian we are, are living in the black. We are debtors, transgressors and in need of that five letter word-g-r-a-c-e. If scorekeeping really secured our salvation, then God would only have need to send Moses. But a thousand years of Law only proved what Paul discovered that “no one is righteous, not even one.” So hear the Good News of the Gospel this morning-God, in Jesus, gave up his job as accountant, closed the books and gathered all of our IOUs and nailed them on a cross.

To the elder brother-that terrific score-keeper who refuses to go into the party when the riff raff kid-brother returns-the father says, “Son, all I have is already yours. Come on, get that evil out of your eye and come on in and celebrate.” If you or I are ever going to make it, then guaranteed, it will not be because we have worked our way up the ladder. We will make it because we have been invited and have simply accepted God’s invitation.

So you see, Jesus seems to say, it really doesn’t matter whether the invitation comes at six, or nine, or noon, or three, or five o’clock in our life. To be invited to God’s field-to God’s party place, to God’s Kingdom-is to experience God’s extravagant, free-wheeling grace. And do you know where that old farmer is this very minute? Why, he’s got the Ford back at the marketplace, looking to see if there is anyone else who has not yet heard the invitation, not yet had the chance to respond. That, good friends, is a very strange, but amazing grace. Amen.