Kingdom Order

“Kingdom Order” Matthew 20:11-12

Synopsis:

The parables of Jesus are often a source of confusion and subversion for their readers. One of the more puzzling parables is the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, because it strikes at the heart of the idea that our hard-earned money is deserved by our hard work. Is that what this parable is saying? Is Jesus condoning some sort of political philosophy, or is there something much more to this parable? Perhaps, the focus of this parable has less to do with the labor and the paycheck, and more to do with the workers and the way they order their world.

Sermon Text: Mathew 20:1-15

1“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; 4 and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. 5 When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. 6 And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ 7 They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ 8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ 9 When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. 10 Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. 11 And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12 saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ 13 But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 14 Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

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Order…is important. It is something that’s important to all of us here, and whether it is something that we like, something that we are fond of, it really does not matter because, order is important. Some of us may hate it, but we rely on it to get us to where we are going, to get our work done, to be able to accomplish whatever it may be that we need to accomplish… order is important for that. And for many of us, I would imagine most of us here, order is something that we are not only fond of, but something that we are incredibly dependent upon. We make our to-do lists, grocery lists, and calendars… we make all manner of things to help us live out our life, all of which are entirely dependent upon the concept of order.

And a critical part, a crucial component, a piece so vitally important to order that without it could not exist, is separation. We like to have things in order, and for that to happen there has to be a clear demarcation of separation between the objects or ideas that we are setting in order. For example, look at a grocery store: If any one of us were sent to the grocery to purchase a particular item, we know that we can depend on it to be in an aisle, and not just any aisle but in an aisle with similar objects that can be grouped together, and it won’t just be randomly cast into a shelf within that aisle, but it will be neatly placed alongside other objects that look, taste, and smell just like the object we were sent for; you don’t find juice with the light bulbs, you don’t find broccoli with the beef steaks, and you don’t find deodorant with the fresh produce. In order to be properly ordered, these objects must have their separation.

It’s not something that we like to talk about perhaps, but separation is key to understanding order. With that in mind, I invite you to turn to today’s sermon text. It can be found in the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 20, verses one through fifteen. It reads as follows:

The word of God, for the people of God – Thanks be to God.

What is going on in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is that you have select groups of people. To begin with, you have the landowner, the owner of the vineyard. This is the man who is introduced in the first sentence of the parable, and takes one of the main roles of this parable. Secondly, you have the manager of the vineyard; the right hand person of the owner… but the manager doesn’t play a crucial role in the narrative of the parable. And lastly, you have the workers. You have the first group that came in the early morning, then you have another group that came three hours after that, another that came six hours after the first, another that came nine hours after the first, and finally the group that came in the eleventh hour, with only one hour left to work; you have five, distinct groups of workers.

In the first half of the story Jesus is telling us, we are introduced to nearly all of the characters in what may still be considered a fairly typical scene – a person with considerable wealth, the owner of the vineyard, visits a part of town where he knows he can find people that are willing to work for the day, what we would call day laborers, at his home. Early in the morning, to make sure that whatever he needs to be accomplished can be accomplished, the vineyard owner hires a group of workers. Three hours later, for whatever reason, the vineyard owner again goes into town to hire a more workers, which he does in three hour intervals two more times, finally ceasing his hiring with only one hour of daylight left. Now, we can wonder all we want about why it was that the owner of the vineyard in the parable would do what he did – why did he choose to go out at the start of the day, in the early morning, again in the late morning, and again in the early afternoon, and yet again near daybreak? Why did he decide to hire the few remaining workers who had been there all day long, only to have them work for one hour? In all honesty, I find it pretty confusing. While I have never been in a position to hire groups of workers, I would certainly imagine that a vineyard owner, someone who does this sort of thing on a fairly regular basis, would be able to accurately determine how many workers are needed to complete the day’s work. So, it is something that I don’t understand. In doing my research, there were several theories as to why the landowner would do this, ranging from a desire to employ as many people as he was able to afford to a series of miscalculations on the part of vineyard owner regarding exactly how many workers were needed to accomplish the day’s work. In the end, there is no real way to know and we are reminded by biblical scholar Arland Hultgren that “the story has been composed with its end in view. It has not been composed as the narration of events in real life…,” meaning that in the end, Jesus was a masterful storyteller who was intentionally building towards the parable’s climactic close.

In moving towards that close, we enter the second half of the parable, the payment of the five groups of workers. So the work day comes to a close, likely around sunset, and the vineyard owner has his manager gather all the workers together… this is where things shift from the ordinary to strange, as is typical of Jesus’ parables. The manager is asked to call the workers to receive their payment from the last to work, to the first to work, which was not how things were done. So, when the last workers are given what the first workers were promised, the usual day’s wage, the strangeness is amplified and tension begins to build. After all, if the people that only worked an hour got as much money as those that worked twelve hours normally receive, how much more would the other workers receive? With that in mind, we can imagine the vineyard owner walking down the line, in front of the workers, handing each of them their money, each group thinking “surely he’s going to pay me just a little more than that last group,” only to be disappointed when he gave them their pay. Finally, he arrives at the end of the line, where the people who had been toiling in the sweat and dirt of the day for twelve hours. They hold out their hands, likely expecting that all this tension, all this buildup, was created on their account, to celebrate their dutiful and hard-earned work, and then...they receive the usual day’s wage. That was it. That was the last straw, and one of the worker’s from the first group spoke out saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” The first group’s anger, and most likely the mixture of anger and confusion of all but the 11th hour workers, is focused in this one statement where we see that they are upset about being “made equal to” those that worked less than they did.

So, we reach the end of the parable and we see that although the vineyard owner, the person that actually did the hiring, that went out and found these workers, that actually had the money to give; despite the fact that the person with the top-down view did not see distinction, did not see separation, we see that the group that came in the early morning, and most likely all five groups of workers, saw that distinct separation between them. They did not see unity, they did not see togetherness, they did not see community – they did not see themselves, but rather the space between themselves and when we focus on our own constructs of what divide us, we miss the Kingdom of God; they focused on the separation of their order, and missed the beauty of living into the Kingdom of God.

Separation is not what God has called us to see; it’s not the space, it’s not the order, it’s not the separation that God has called us to see, but it’s the people and the needs of the people that God has called us to see. God has not called us to look between people, but at people. The vineyard owner, it would seem, didn’t see five groups of people… just workers, united in their humanity and human needs, all of whom wanted to work and needed the usual, daily wage.

As much as we rely on order, as much as we love focusing on the separation that creates distinctiveness among us, perhaps what we need to do is to look with the eyes of Chris and live into the reality of the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God, order is thrown out the window; many who are first are made last, and the last made first; it doesn’t matter what you worked, but that we all receive what we need. And God isn’t done, God is still moving amongst and within people, and still giving us opportunities to be a part of the Kingdom… what we need to ask ourselves is… are so caught up in maintaining the separation in our order, that we miss the Kingdom of God?

Amen.