Thought for the week: Our God desires fullness for everyone
By any standard, the landowner who paid the labourers hired at 5pm the same as those hired at 6am (Matthew 20: 1-16) broke every norm of fair wages.
The complaint of those who had worked 12 hours through the mid-day heat, compared to one hour in the cooling evening, was entirely justified. Except, of course, that they had agreed for the Denarius, the usual daily wage, at the beginning.
And if the landowner chose to pay a living wage to those hired last, whom he had found hanging around at 5pm, men, perhaps, so long unemployed as to be barely employable, but with families to feed, that was his business. Nobody had been wronged.
In Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard, the need for labour suggests that it is harvest time. It also involves a reckoning at the end of the day. Both point to God’s judgment. And God’s judgment is not ours.
Those who had slogged through the 12-hour day may well represent the Pharisees, the most exact and faithful of law-abiding Jews. The late-comers are the tax-collectors and sinners, whom Jesus welcomed into his company and with whom he was happy to eat. Again, the outrage of the law-abiding is understandable.
In another perspective, the late-comers may be Gentiles – us – admitted to God’s Kingdom only on the strength of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus is speaking, here, of the – to us – outrageous nature of God’s grace. God desires fullness of life for everyone. God is as willing to welcome those who come to Him at the last moment as those who have a lifetime’s record of faithfulness. God accepts those whose lives have nothing to recommend them to Him.
Behind the parable, of course, stands Jesus’ cross; His dying at the hands of righteous and sinner alike, deserted even by His friends, so that God’s forgiveness should be available equally to all, and all find a home in God’s love.
The landowner chooses to give to the last the same as to the first. There are no degrees, distinctions or inequalities in eternal life. It is God’s gift to us in Jesus.
The sooner we find it, the end of our striving, the greater our joy in this life. The more deeply we enter it, the greater will be our concern for all who do not enjoy the fullness of this life.
And as we inhabit it, perhaps we learn to see one another with the eyes of grace, as God looks upon all His children, made in His image, rather than with the judgments that are our own.