It Doesn't Matter When You Come to the Party.

Matthew 20:1-16

September 24, 2017

I.

Sometime in the 90’s Somerset County wanted to widen and add sidewalks to the main road through our town.  So they held hearings, some of which I attended.  By the way, if you ever want confirmation of the total depravity of human beings try attending meetings of your local planning board.  Talking about property brings out the worst in people.

Anyway, it quickly became apparent that many in the meeting felt that the longer you lived in Martinsville the greater say you should have in decisions like this.  People (mostly old white men) would preface their remarks by proclaiming, “I’ve lived in this town for over 40 years!” as if that held some special weight.  The same men would castigate others for even having an opinion if they only lived here for a shorter amount of time.  If you were a newcomer, forget it.  There seems to be this automatic assumption that seniority and longevity has some kind of intrinsic authority.

I get that.  I mean, on some level, experience and familiarity should count for something.  The word “presbyterian” literally means that the “elders,” that is, those whose been around the longest, should rule.  But that rule is supposed to be according to God’s will, not for your own personal benefit or satisfaction.  

I’ve been in church meetings where I was informed that the fact that someone’s grandparents sat for decades in a certain pew automatically precluded any thought of sanctuary remodeling.  I have actually heard church members say that a church should not get air conditioning in the sanctuary because, “I’ve been in this church for 63 years and we never had air-conditioning before!”  Why would we introduce such a lavish and extravagant, not to say hedonistic, convenience just for some new people?

This kind of thinking is pervasive today, even to the point of people claiming that recent immigrants are somehow not entitled to certain government benefits, but that citizens whose families came here a few years earlier should be able to take the same benefits for granted.  We were all once newcomers.  If we take this logic to its conclusion we would be letting Native Americans resolve all real estate issues… but of course, that’s not going to happen.  Because this argument from longevity and seniority is really just an excuse for one established class to maintain their power.

Then there’s the equally self-serving argument that if we reward people who don’t show up until the last minute we are only giving them an incentive to live raucous, sinful lives in the meantime.  If they know they can always scoot in under the wire with a deathbed confession, there is no reason for them to change their bad behavior any sooner.  Those who struggled to live upright, moral, religious lives for many years are somehow being cheated if these upstarts get let in.  Why should they get the same eternal reward as those who worked for years to be righteous?

It turns out that those who are part of a privileged establishment of elite insiders howl like they are being horribly oppressed when some other group merely asks for equality.  We think we’ve been working hard to earn a place at the table, and want to exclude or at least regulate those who didn’t work as hard or as long as we like to think we have.    

II.

Jesus sees this attitude in the way the establishment of his time did not want to have to admit the riffraff, sinners, tax collectors, lepers, demoniacs, epileptics, prostitutes, and other losers who associate with him.  This petulant grumpiness extended into the time of the early church, and eventually caused the split between the two religions that emerged in the first century: Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.  It was all about the standards and requirements of receiving new people into the faith.

The Lord rejects this kind of thinking out of hand, as seen in this parable.  The insiders betray a sinful, violent, self-serving reasoning that makes Jesus roll his eyes in frustration.  Because what it reveals about the establishment and the leaders is a basic misunderstanding about the Kingdom of Heaven.  They seem to think of it as a place demanding joyless discipline, hard work, stiff competition, and constant ingratiation of yourself to the boss.  If you do all that you might make it in, if you don’t screw up and if you have a little luck.  They saw the Kingdom of Heaven as their reward after a life of mindless self-inflicted pain and drudgery.  And they didn’t want to let anyone in who hadn’t subjected themselves to the same suffering.

If all you know is your ego-self, your old self, what Paul calls “the flesh,” then this is indeed what it looks like.  It looks like the point is to pay by suffering now to earn the reward at the end.  How many Christians, hearing Jesus talk about taking up your cross and losing your life, assume it has to mean he wants us to punish ourselves mercilessly to be worthy of acceptance into the Kingdom of Heaven after they die?  Worse, how many Christians imposed suffering on others, telling them that this was the way to earn God’s love, while profiting from their suffering?

This breaks Jesus’ heart.  He sees the Kingdom of Heaven in a completely different way.  For Jesus the Kingdom of Heaven is a magnificent banquet where everyone is happy, liberated, and fed, the admission to which is absolutely free, and which starts now in the life of the gospel communities he is founding.  The point of releasing your old, small, sinful, broken, and false self is not self-hatred.  It is not a punitive act of self-flagellation.  

Rather, Jesus insists that the letting go of our ego-self is what allows our true Self, the Image of God within us, our essence, the true humanity we share with Jesus, to emerge.  This is happens not just after we die; and not just at the end of time when Jesus returns; but it begins now.  It begins in the life of repentance, of gaining a new way of thinking and acting, in community together.

III.

So it doesn’t matter when you come to the party!  Everyone is welcomed when they do come.  Knowing the joy of the banquet, how can we possibly resent those who stayed crippled in their addictions and pain for longer than they had to?  

If you’re in a 12-step group like AA I don’t imagine that you have this anger toward people who remained mired in corrosive, self-destructive behavior for longer than others.  Many only show up at all after they hit bottom.  At most there might be a feeling of grief and sorrow over those who waited too long to come in.  They wasted years of their lives, but thank God they finally got to a meeting!  Thank God they finally got to a place of healing and acceptance!  

Indeed, if we feel resentful about those who continued to devote years of their life to profligate debauchery before finally coming to the gospel community, that is a sure indication that we do not ourselves know the Kingdom at all.  If we’re envious of people in the process of ruining their lives and the world, then we really don’t get what the Kingdom of Heaven is about.  And we are most certainly not in it, but in some counterfeit, fake version that just calls itself the church, but really knows Jesus not at all. 

Because to work in this vineyard, the vineyard of the living God of love, is a labor of love, joy, and peace.  There is nothing not to like!  It is the work of delight and wonder.  It is the labor of freedom, fulfillment, and ecstasy.  God’s vineyard is the kind of place where if you have been working in it since 7:30 in the morning you still have nothing but happiness and welcome for someone showing up at 4:30, and you are completely satisfied and delighted that they get the same reward as you.  Because just to work in this garden is a reward in itself.  Which is to say, just to be a part of the community of disciples, the church, sharing in God’s life, represented in God’s body and blood, is more than enough. 

For the Kingdom of Heaven is a revelation of God’s infinite abundance and generosity.  It is not the rare commodity we try to turn it into so we can stick a high price on it and restrict access to it.  It is emphatically not dependent on our work or our time.  And it is even less a place of drudgery and exhaustion, pain and penitence.  Working in the garden of God is itself a privilege and pleasure.

A vineyard is often a metaphor in the Bible for Israel or even the whole creation.  So on one level, Jesus is talking about our life together in the community of disciples in which we practice the values of healing and blessing and acceptance and forgiveness that Jesus embodies and teaches.  The church is sort of an outpost of God’s Kingdom in alien territory where we live by Jesus’ rules of love, even while all around us different rules apply.

At the same time, the values and practices of Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven are supposed to shine and flow outward into our larger neighborhoods and towns and regions.  We are to witness to others concerning this abundance of God.  God has given us enough for all if we get the distribution right.  That goes for things we need like food, water, shelter, and health care.  It also goes for love, peace, joy, and forgiveness.

IV.

Jesus’ concluding message, that the last will be first and the first will be last, is a restatement of his theme of reversal.  He has come to turn the world upside down.  In a sense the Kingdom of Heaven is a kind of “oppositeland,” where the haves become have-nots, and the have-nots become haves.  Those who are privileged and powerful in the old order, must lose everything to participate in God’s realm.  Those with nothing in the old order, experience the reign of God as a veritable flood of benefits.

Jesus is about redistribution.  He is about reparations.  He is about reversal.  How else do you understand, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last”?  And if we are angry and resentful about that, then we have treated our work in the vineyard, not like a joy and a privilege to participate in God’s world, but like some limited commodity we worked hard to acquire to which no one else should imagine they have access.  And that means we are very far from the Kingdom of Heaven, and very far from Jesus.

If we have an ounce of sympathy for those who worked all day, we have missed the point of whose vineyard it is and what a delight it is to work in it.  To begrudge the generosity of God is to not know God at all.

The point is to love the Lord and to love people so much that not only are you overjoyed that newcomers get the same pay as you, but that you are willing to donate your pay to them as well.  If we really knew the transcendent joy of the Kingdom of Heaven, if we really knew the abundance and beauty of this vineyard and how healing and fulfilling it is to work in it, we wouldn’t even care about the pay.  We would work in it for free.  We would in fact sell all we have for the privilege.

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