Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

January 9, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Things Jesus Never Said:
“You Get What You Deserve”

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 105:1–6, 37–45
Matthew 20:1–16

When our children were little, the church I served in Texas began offering a parenting program called “Love and Logic.” One weekend the founder of the national program, Dr. Jim Fay, came to our church and presented a day’s worth of tips on how to effectively parent. One of the things he offered was how to handle the “It’s not fair” debate. When you are in the middle of a “discussion” with your child and they launch the “it’s not fair” bomb, you are supposed to smile, look your child in the eyes, and say, “I know.”

I remember that tip because that was not how I usually responded. My first tendency was to always respond the way my own parents responded, to respond the way parents have responded for generations. When your child says, “It’s not fair,” we all say in response, “No one said that life is fair.” That is what I heard my parents say. That is what they heard their parents say. “No one said that life is fair.” It rolls so easily off of the tongue, doesn’t it? Almost as easily as the child rolls her eyes when she hears you say it!

But honestly, even though that is our conditioned response, I am not sure we really believe it. I think that whether we admit it or not, we all expect that life will be fair, don’t we? We even have scientific research to back that up. One research experiment with infants shows two puppets who are given unequal numbers of toys. Babies who can’t even walk yet can identify the unfair condition. Another experiment with toddlers has two actors playing with toy blocks. The actors are told that they’ll each get a sticker if they put away their toys. One actor cleans up and one does not. Yet they both get stickers. And the toddlers won’t have it. It’s not OK with them.

The researchers come to these conclusions because children will stare longer at people or events they find surprising or out of the ordinary. It is called the violation of expectancy. Those babies stared longer at the puppet who did not get as many toys as the other one. The toddlers stared longer at the actor who got a sticker even when he did not clean up. For whatever reason, we learn very early in life to expect what we call fairness (“Babies Show Sense of Fairness,” 7 October 2011, washington.edu; “Do Babies Know What’s Good?” greatergood.berkeley.edu).

We expect those who work should be rewarded and those who don’t shouldn’t be. We expect that if we study hard enough, we will get A’s. We expect that if we work hard enough, we will get the bonus or the raise. We expect that if we pray hard enough, God will do exactly what we want. We expect that if we are good people, life will be the way it is supposed to be. And we do not like for our expectations to be violated.

“Now when the early workers first came, they thought they would receive more [than the late workers]; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, the early workers grumbled against the landowner, 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.’”

This sense of right and wrong, of what is fair and what’s not, is why some of us might be disturbed by this parable. More than likely many of us identify with the early workers. We are the ones who got up with the sun, strapped on our work boots, and were ready for the landowner at the first shift. And after working all day long, we, too, are the ones who might have gotten frustrated when we realized that the landowner paid us the exact same amount he paid the workers who only did one hour’s worth of work. “It is not fair,” we might have protested. “You have made them equal to us.”

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them out into his vineyard.”

A new attorney works day and night for a solid month. She averages 80 hours a week. She leaves her home in the mornings before the kids get up. She gets home in the evenings after they have already gone to sleep. She puts in more time than anyone else. Her colleague down the hall, however, does not follow the same schedule. Actually, she ends up only working for around 55 hours a week, just enough to get by.

But the firm has a good month, and the partners decide to award bonuses to all the associates. The new attorneys slyly compare amounts trying to act like they are not comparing. And the exhausted lawyer quickly realizes that everyone received the same exact bonus. Her 55-hour/week colleague was rewarded the same as she was. “It is not fair,” she protests to herself. “You have made her equal to me.”

Everyone in the tenth-grade class was assigned a history project and given two weeks to complete it. One student in the class takes this project very seriously. He wants to be ranked in the top five going into his junior year. He spends all his free time on his laptop in the school library, making sure the environment helps him to focus. He arrives early in the mornings, before school begins, to do a little work. And he stays as late as he can in the afternoons to do a little more. He takes copious notes.

Midway through the project, he discovers that many of his friends are not being as diligent. They are planning on simply copying some stuff off the Internet and turning it in. They had no desire to engage in the kind of work he was doing. The student internally shakes his head. He cannot believe they are not taking it more seriously.

The morning the project is due, the student places his report on the teacher’s desk. He feels good about how much more professional his report looks in comparison to everyone else’s. The teacher gathers them all up and makes an announcement to the class. “I am so proud of all of you for your work. You learned a lot and got it done. I have decided to give all of you an A.” The student is furious! “It is not fair,” he protests. “You have made them equal to me.”

Many of us understand the protests of the first workers, the new attorney, and the student from the tenth-grade history class. In our world of “you get what you deserve,” we work hard to deserve a lot. Equal pay for equal work, not just equal pay period. I mean, can you imagine a world in which a doctor, a lawyer, and a CEO received the same pay as an Uber Eats driver, a fast-food cashier, or those who bag up groceries at Jewel. It is almost unthinkable. As New Testament professor Stan Saunders writes, “We would rather preserve some sense of difference, some privilege so that we can tell ourselves that we are more secure, harder working, and more righteous than others around us” (Stan Saunders and Charles Campbell, The Word on the Street, p. 121).

More righteous. For it is not solely about economics in this parable. It is not just about the fact that the landowner adopted a payment plan that equalized everyone. Rather, an underlying issue is that we often define ourselves by what we think we are worth. We may tell our kids that no one said life was fair, but we tell ourselves that we should get what we deserve. After all, didn’t Jesus say that somewhere? No, he actually didn’t, and yet this kind of a merit system bleeds into our faith, even though we don’t always recognize it.

In our Reformed Presbyterian theological tradition, we speak often of justification by grace and not works. That means it is not what we do or do not do that saves us, that makes us whole, that reconciles us in relationship to God. Rather, all of that happens to and in us only because of God’s immense grace. This theological conviction is why we baptize babies and children, as we did here this morning. They cannot make a proclamation of faith and claim Jesus as their Savior. But we trust baptism is primarily about God’s faithfulness, rather than our own.

And I do think that most of us really do want to believe and embody that salvation is all up to God and God’s grace, rather than on anything we can or cannot do. Yet I have also experienced that when the rubber hits the road, many of us still have a little voice that lives deep in our soul who preaches to us on a regular basis that our believing in God matters just as much as God’s grace, that our works, what we do, may not get us saved, perhaps, but what we do is at least just as important.

If we are saved, if we are set free and made whole by God, then at least a small part of our salvation must be because we’ve earned it. We’ve gotten up early on Sundays, made the kids get in the car or forced them to sit on the couch beside us for worship. We’ve volunteered at Sunday Night Supper, served on a church board, or participated in a small group. We’ve put in our time at the Christian time clock. We know we are not perfect, but we sure try hard. Now for the rest of the bunch, well, those who show up for just one hour’s worth of work will get what they deserve in the end. Didn’t Jesus say something like that?

I don’t think I have told you this story before, but if I have, pretend like it’s new. A friend of mine was visiting with a Pastor Nominating Committee, the group of church members who discerns who God might be calling to serve as a congregation’s pastor. The conversation had been going well, but it suddenly took a turn. One member of the PNC was very concerned that my friend was starting to sound like he might just think that it is a possibility that God will receive all people into eternal life. “Wait just a minute,” the PNC member interrupted. “Do you mean to tell me that you believe God might just take everybody to heaven? Those who have not been baptized? Those who have not professed Jesus as Lord and Savior? Those who do not go to church and who have no intention of ever going to church? Is that what you, a Presbyterian minister, are telling us?”

My friend replied, “Well, I don’t want to tell God what God has to do, but I do believe that in Jesus Christ we have good hope for all people.” The PNC member was very upset by this answer. You could just hear the words in her head: “That is not fair. You are making those people equal to me.” My friend saw those words in her face and decided that at this point, he might as well let it all theologically hang out. “May I ask you a question,” he said to her. She shrugged her shoulders. “How many people will need to be in hell before you will feel safe?” he asked, as gently as he could. Needless to say, my friend did not receive the call to serve that church.

But we do need to ask ourselves a similar question, don’t we? Why is it that that the early workers, the mumblers, cannot handle the incredible kindness, the over-the-top generosity that puts the latecomers on par with them? After all, we assume that it is not that the early workers are really against grace, right? So might it be that they are only against that kind of immense, undeserved grace shown to others and what that could imply? (Walter Brueggemann et. al. Texts for Preaching, Year A).For that kind of overwhelming and undeserved grace could just imply that all our neat categories — of what is fair and unfair, what is right and wrong, who is deserving and who is not — all those neat categories just may not be the way God operates.

Can you imagine? It just may be that the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God’s grace is so utterly unlike the kingdoms of this world, of our world, that all bets and all tidy calculations of merit and means are off (Roger Van Harn, ed., The Lectionary Commentary: The Gospels, p. 112). That’s a shock to the system, isn’t it, especially to all of us early workers! But perhaps one thing Jesus is trying to help us see is that is simply the way God is. Perhaps God operates in a way that is not fair but is generous. Perhaps God operates in a way where all people, all sinners, are equally deserving of God’s goodness and God’s graciousness simply because they are God’s children. Period.

Furthermore, consider this. Consider how it must have felt to be those last workers who were hired that day. They were probably scared stiff. For one reason or another, no one had hired them all day long. But they, like everyone else, had to figure out a way to survive, to eat, to make it another few days. And after they worked only one hour, they fully expected to be paid for only one hour.

So when that landowner gave them an entire day’s wages, they must have been overcome by that generosity and grace. They could barely say “thank you.” Can you imagine what that was like for them? For when you are in that group, frankly, God’s grace is the only thing that keeps you going. God’s grace is the only thing to which you can cling. God’s grace and incredible generosity are your only hopes. And as they counted and recounted their wage, overwhelmed by such gracious generosity, I wonder if a few of them spoke up. “Goodness, this sure is not fair,” they said quietly. “You have made us equal with them. What a tremendous gift.”

“You get what you deserve” — something Jesus never said. Thanks be to God. Amen.