The toughest employer I ever had was Perry Lockett.  During my high school summers I worked on his farm moving miles of irrigation pipe by hand, chopping cotton and driving a tractor.  We’d start the day with nothing more than the first slivers of dawn for light.  After fourteen hours, we’d use a beam of pickup headlight to finish our work.  He paid me weekly.  I vividly remember sitting in his pickup with him penciling out the math on the back of his pay book and then cutting me a check.  Seventy-five and one-fourth or seventy-seven and one-half hours times $1.25.  He watched like a hawk but paid fairly.  I felt like I earned every cent and he never owed me anything he didn’t pay me.  It was clear, simple economics.  I gave him the hours of my day and, as a fair exchange, he paid me the going wage.

In this parable, Jesus turns clear, simple economics on its head.  For years, I thought this story was meant for people who had never accepted God’s grace.  I thought Jesus was saying, “no matter when you come to God he will be more than fair, and pay you grace you didn’t earn.”  There is that element to this parable.

As in all parables, Jesus is telling us about God.  Jesus is saying that God doesn’t grade on the curve.  With grace, if you get it at all, you get it all.  Here, he’s saying that the landowner paid those who came to work late the same as what he paid those who came early.  Jesus is saying that, if we come to God, no matter when we come, we all get the same forgiveness and mercy.  There is what we could call that “evangelistic” edge to this parable, if we restrict our understanding of evangelism to the preaching of the gospel to those who have never accepted Christ as their personal savior.  In that sense, this good news fits every other explanation of grace we know.  And, grace turns simple, moral economics on its ear. 

The wages of sin is death, we’re taught in Romans.  In the moral economic order, if you are separated from God because of sin, you’re only getting what you deserve.  Like the former A&M student who broke into a classmate’s apartment eight years ago, tied her up and shot her in the head.  When they stuck a needle in his arm this week in Huntsville, he was only getting what he deserved.  Right?  A fair wage for the deed done.  The wages of sin is death.  Just one question.  Have any of us ever been personally paid what we’re owed for our sin?  If God paid us at the end of every day a fair moral wage for every moral deed we’ve done that day, would any of us still be breathing?  What does it tell us about grace that we’re even here to hear about it?  It tells us that the wages of sin is death but that God pays on a different scale than one measured in terms of what is fair.

Which is what Jonah, the Old Testament prophet, claims he knew about God.  After the whale coughed up Jonah and Jonah finally coughed up God’s message to Nineveh, whose people were living something like what you can see on late night T.V. in middle America, they repented of their sin and turned to God.  That made Jonah so angry he became depressed and wanted to die.  The God whom he said he knew to be “merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Jonah 4:2),” turned out to be exactly that, merciful, slow to anger and tenaciously loving and Nineveh didn’t get what it deserved.  And, neither have we.  Fair payment for sin is death.  The gift of God is something else.

I’ve known some Jonah’s in my day.  I met one in my first full-time pastorate out of the seminary some twenty years ago.  She’s been working in the vineyard a long time when she called one day and laid into me over the phone.  She was extremely angry, even hostile.  Her specific complaint was that all the preachers of my generation were easy on divorce and just wrote off alcoholism as nothing more than a disease.  I never knew her story well enough to know why those two issues particularly bothered her.  But, I do remember she finally left the church because I wouldn’t help her run the high school football coach out of town, a man who was also a member of our church and who she believed to be an alcoholic.  She believed that if preachers would just be tougher on people about how miserably they’d failed, all would be well.  What the world needed was just a good scolding.

I never figured is it was my responsibility to be any tougher on sin than God has already been.  And, if we want to know how tough God has been on sin, all we have to do is look at the cross where Jesus died.  If we want to know how tough sin has been on us, all we have to do is just look in the mirror.  Sin has done, still does, its death work on us.  We see it every day, don’t we?  In miserable marriages, dysfunctional families, our health, our uncontrollable passions and sick addictions.  Sin has a way of paying advances on its death wage.  Sin does its work, pays its wage.  On the cross, in Christ, God did his grace work and has been paying us out of those wages ever since. 

Which brings us to the more substantial point of this parable.  This parable wasn’t meant as much for those who had never heard of God’s grace as much as it was meant for those who had already been graced and felt entitled to more.  Jesus was saying that God is not obligated to us.  If we got what we deserved, we’d be dead.  What we’re owed and what we’ve been given are two different things.  The most ungracious people in the world are often those who’ve gotten close to grace but believe themselves entitled to more, especially in comparison to others who, in their opinion, deserve grace less. 

In the parable, the owner of the vineyard went to the equivalent of the Texas Employment Commission early one morning to hire day laborers, people who show up daily looking for any kind of work.  He went again four more times throughout the day.  Maybe, like Texas panhandle wheat farmers, he had a narrow window of time to harvest his crop and didn’t want to risk losing it to one bad day of weather.  Whatever the case, it seems that he couldn’t hire enough help.  At the end of the day, he paid those who worked the least the same as those who had worked the most.  That was the moment of proof for those who had worked all day.  They forgot who owned what and believed themselves to be treated unfairly.  They complained to the vintner only to hear him say, “‘Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?  Or are you envious because I am generous?’”

We’re never more in danger of sin than when we forget that God doesn’t owe us anything and that if he’s given us anything at all he’s been more than generous.  And, we’re never more in danger of forgetting God’s generosity than we measure the value of our experience with him in comparison to what he’s done for others.

That sense of entitlement, that we’ve got more coming, cost Adam and Eve their lease on the Garden and set the Prodigal Son on the road to the pigsty.  They had it all, except for just one more thing they thought they had coming.  Satan even tried to lure Jesus with the same bait and switch tactic in the wilderness temptations by convincing him that, despite his own unique relationship with God, there was still more to be had.  A sense of entitlement can cost more than it ever gains.  Don’t you think that sense of entitlement is what got Enron’s executives in trouble?  Long before people commit adultery, for example, they believe they’re entitled to more happiness than they’re finding at home.  If Jesus wasn’t above being tempted, what makes us think we’re invulnerable to the worst sins imaginable? 

In truth, God doesn’t owe us anything, even an answer to our prayers or answers to our questions about why life turns out the way it does.  If God gives us anything, it’s more than was fair.  God even got back in Jonah’s depressed face with questions of his own, “Is it right for you to be angry?  Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals (Jonah 4:4, 11)?”  Jonah knew the grace of God first-hand.  Even after running from God’s call on his life and being rescued from the death he deserved for it, he couldn’t accept that God might be gracious to people who, in his opinion, weren’t as good as he was. 

If we want to know who the central characters in this parable are then all we need do is listen to Jesus’ words, “the last will be first, and the first will be last."  The only ones troubled by what those words mean are those who are still keeping score, who believe that God grades people in comparison to each other’s moral goodness and that, somehow or another, he owed them something for being better.

We tend to define people in terms of their moral failure more than not.  Some people still refer to me as the divorced man this church called as pastor, not as the faithfully married man I am.  Every time that happens now, God only uses it to remind me of how I do the same thing with others.  Listen to the words we use to define people. Divorcee.  Alcoholic.  Thief.  Adulterer.  We’re the ones who keep people boxed in the narrow confines of their worst moment.  Jesus is in the business of un-boxing people.  He wants us to do the same, to let people out the boxes we’ve put them into and define them as he has defined us, only as forgiven.  If you get forgiveness at all, you get it all, no matter when you get it.  Forgiven is forgiven, first, last or in between.

Perry Lockett paid me what I earned for my farm work, to the penny.  Turning simple, moral economics on its ear God has not paid me what I earned for my sin.  Instead, he has paid me for the grace work Jesus did on the cross. 

He’s still cutting checks.  Wouldn’t you like one, too?