A landowner heads into the city early in the morning to hire labourers to work in his vineyard. He finds some men in the marketplace doing nothing. They agree to the wage he offers and head off for a day’s work. Three hours later, the landowner goes back out to the street and brings in more labourers. “I will pay you whatever is right,” he says. Three hours after that, and again three hours after that, the landowner repeats the same process. Finally, 11 hours after the original labourers were hired, the landowner returns to the corner where the men are still standing around, and he hires a final group of workers. These men will work only one hour at the end of the day.
After the workday is done, the foreman hands out the pay to all of the labourers, beginning with those hired last and finishing with those who had been toiling in the hot sun for all 12 hours of the day. Much to their surprise, all of the workers receive the same wage. Naturally, the men who had been working all day are shocked and angered by the injustice. There is no mention of the other workers complaining.
Jesus uses this story to describe his kingdom. At face value this seems odd and extremely arbitrary. Is His kingdom really this unfair? Grace is commonly defined as undeserved favour, God’s gifts given to people who have not earned them. But why then is his favour given to one person and withheld from another?
There is nothing in Jesus’s parable to suggest that the men the landowner chose at the first hour of the day were superior to those he hired later. They didn’t necessarily show more initiative or have more experience or possess more strength. Yet, for some reason, they were chosen. When Jesus walked through crowds of people, why did he settle on one particular beggar or leper and offer them healing, and not the blind man on the next block? Why does one woman sitting in church rejoice at her miraculous healing from cancer, while sitting next to a young widow who has just lost her husband to the same disease? Does one woman have greater faith? Did she pray more earnestly? Does God simply like her better?
In the past few years I have stopped believing in the word “deserve.” I have disavowed the concept. A single mother in my community struggled with severe depression throughout her life, and finally committed suicide leaving her 10-year-old daughter. Another little girl has spent her whole childhood caring for her mother who is slowly dying of AIDS. The idea that people somehow earn their lot in life, or that we have a right to that which we have attained, seems ludicrous to me. I do not believe that the rich somehow deserve their wealth, any more than the poor deserve their lack of prosperity.
I was born with white skin, in the wealthy western world, with full mental and physical capacities. I have a family and a support system that has built my confidence and self-worth, as well as nurtured in me certain aptitudes and skills. I have been given a start in life that relatively few can boast of. It is not because I work so hard, or because I have a great attitude that I have a job I love and am given opportunity after opportunity. I do not deserve my wealth and luxury any more than the child labourer deserves to work seven days a week in order to provide the cocoa for my chocolate bars. Children born today in Iraq have done nothing to deserve the challenge of trying to grow up in a war zone any more than Paris Hilton deserved to be born heiress to a vast hotel fortune. As the writer of Ecclesiastes would probably put it, “It is all meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
So what is the end of the matter?
When the landowner in Jesus’s story hired his workers, he said, “I will pay you whatever is right.” At the end of the day, this is exactly what he did. It did not seem fair, but it was right. When I hear statements like, “How he deserved that promotion!” or “They deserve to have a child after trying for so long,” or “They have been so mean, I hope they finally get what they deserve!” it gives me pause. People work all over the world for exploitive wages and never receive a promotion; people lose children everyday, and deserve the loss no more than someone else deserves to have a child of their own; mean spirited and evil people get away with wrong doing every day, but still, even they receive God’s generosity.
It is not fair, and it is impossible to live with, as long as you believe in the word deserve. However, once you remove deserve from the equation, what is left, is favour. God is a God of justice. But he is also a God of grace. I hope I never get what I deserve. I hope none of us do. God gives us good gifts out of his generosity—all of us, good and bad, rich and poor, every last undeserving one of us.
Grace.
