“That’s not fair!”  How many times have we heard, have we uttered or thought, those very words. Life isn’t fair, This is nothing new, even when it comes to God’s people.  The Jewish leaders grumbled about Christ’s gracious offer to sinners.  Even the 12 disciples thought they should get more than those who had not left their homes and jobs to follow Jesus.  And can you blame them? 

            Jesus answers the cries of faith toward injustice, the whines, and the accusations with a parable. In the parable, the owner of the vineyard hires workers to work his land.  He hires them up to the 11^th hour, that’s 5 pm when there would have only been about an hour or daylight left to work.  Then he pays the workers.  Notice, he tells the first workers they will get a full days wage, but the others he only says they will get “whatever is right.”  As he starts paying the workers, you can almost feel the anticipation and the excitement that the first ones felt.  If the owner was so gracious to give those who only worked one hour a whole days wage, how much more are they going to get!  But when the owner doesn’t live up to the first workers assumptions, they grumble to the master.  A loose translation might be “they whined like babies.”  It’s not fair, how come they get the same as us who worked longer and harder!

Now, we like to go to this parable for comfort in deathbed confessions of faith, for those who have lived lives without faith but as they approach their death, God’s Word shatters their hardened heart. But is this parable is really about them?  Yes, and no.  It is about God calling people to be His through faith in Christ and that He does so sometimes even right at the end.  But it’s also about you. It’s about you who have been working in the field of this world for a fair amount of time, and the jealously and envy you are tempted with in regards to those who get the same reward of grace as you, without all the work.

We know we ought to be happy that God is gracious to all, but all too often we do our fare share of pharisaical grumbling over others receiving the same reward that we get.  O, the unfairness of it all! Other churches have more people, more resources to do more and bigger things. Their church services seem so alive, the Sunday School and Youth Group more active, the members more devout. It often seems as if that other person has more faith, or less problems, or better spiritual gifts or easier temptations to overcome.  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, it is said. God pays out the same grace to all, and we think we somehow deserve it more, and more of it, than the other person who just isn’t nice or very “good”, or we simply wonder why we don’t get as many earthly blessings as someone else.

In the parable, the workers lament, “you made them equal to us.”  There is the rub; the Lord makes no distinction between His workers. This is what is offensive, even scandalous, about Jesus’ parable, and the kingdom of heaven.  All hands work the vineyard purely because the owner hired them. In the end, all receive the same wage, not based on their work, but based upon the fact that they were hired, and even that isn’t deserved. As the first group stands in line and waits their turn, their gaze falters, leaving the master who hired them and gave them meaningful work and promised a fair wage. They stop looking at the master, and start looking at their fellow workers, and that’s when they get into trouble. And it is where we get into trouble – when we fixate on rewards and comparing ourselves to other disciples instead of focusing upon our Christ crucified and God’s grace of calling us to faith in Him.

We deserve nothing good. We do not deserve Jesus, nor His grace, nor His death for us.  The Gospel is what we need and not deserve.  The Law helps frame this perspective and shows us to be poor miserable sinners.  But it is the Gospel heard in our ears, felt in the splash of baptismal water, and tasted in the bread that is Christ's body and the cup of His blood.  His life is given for the life of the world, yes, but it is given for us men and for our salvation.  How beyond our thoughts and ways are those of God, who loved us wretched sinners so much that He would send Christ to stand in our place, to suffer for our sins, to die the death we earned, and to live to bestow life beyond imagination.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts your thoughts,” says the Lord.  This is the Lord we have, and the Lord we need.  We don’t really want a God who is fair according to my standards, but One who deals fairly with us according to His higher standards, even when we are unfair to Him.  We don’t deserve to have Jesus blood make me righteous in God’s eyes, and yet that is the grace God gives.  We need a Lord who is much more forgiving and gracious and merciful than you or I could ever be because when we look inside ourselves, sin is there crouching at the door. We should thank God everyday that we do not get what we deserve, but instead we get Jesus.

The reign of God is already happening through Jesus, who brings in men and women and children from all over to become workers in the kingdom. There is no room for self-promotion, no need for competition, no basis wherein one disciple can say to another, “I am more important than you are.” On the Last Day, the reign of God in Jesus will come in all its fullness. All who have been called as workers in the vineyard, all disciples of Jesus, without distinction, will receive from the Master what He deems just in accordance with His pledge when they were first called. All comparing must be put aside, for the last will be first and the first last.