Septuagesima – Matthew 20:1-16
Most people believe in the existence of God. And most people who believe in the existence of God, also believe that God usually operates in certain predictable ways.
If the basis for these beliefs is not the Holy Scriptures, however, then what people tend to fall back on – in forming their expectations and assumptions about God – is their own experience in this world. People tend to believe that God thinks the way they do and that he uses his power to do the kind of things they would do if they had such divine power themselves.
If the realm of earthly economic activity would be used as an analogy for how God does things, then it can easily be envisioned that God is, in some ways, like a cosmic boss, or employer; and that people are, in a sense, like employees, who are hired to work for him.
There is actually some truth to this. God is our Lord, and we are his servants. People are supposed to understand themselves to be working for God in this world.
That’s the whole basis for our doctrine of vocation. God calls us, through various methods and in various circumstances, to perform the tasks that he wants done according to our station in life.
He holds us accountable for the faithful performance of these tasks. He is also readily at hand to help us in fulfilling the responsibilities of our vocation.
But, as far as earthly analogies are concerned, we have to make sure we allow God to define the extent to which such comparisons are similar to the ways of his kingdom. And we have to make sure we allow God to show us when his ways are not the same as our ways.
The relationship between an earthly boss and his workers can, in a limited way, serve as an image or illustration of certain truths of God’s kingdom. Certain people in this world – employers, in this case – are sometimes a little bit like God in some of the things they do.
But we should not think that the way people act and relate to one another in this world somehow establishes a categorical and comprehensive standard, in all respects, for what we should expect from God.
Our standards of fairness are not necessarily his standards of fairness. Our standards of righteousness are not necessarily his standards of righteousness.
God is actually less fair than we are, giving undeserving people a second chance over and over again. God is actually more righteous than we are, existing in perfection and demanding perfection from us.
God created man in his image. This is true. But we may not recreate God in man’s image – especially not as man is now, after the fall into sin. Instead, we must always remember what God tells us through the Prophet Isaiah:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
A clear example of this lack of symmetry between God’s ways and man’s ways is the parable that Jesus tells in today’s Gospel from St. Matthew. He speaks here of a vineyard-owner who hired various groups of workers at various points throughout the day.
In the story, the employer made an explicit arrangement with the first group – hired first thing in the morning – to pay them a denarius for a day of work. That was a fair wage back then.
With the other groups, he was not explicit in saying what he would pay them but just promised to pay them what was proper.
At the end of the workday, however, not only did he give the men in that original group – who had worked all day long – the agreed-upon day’s wage; but he also gave a denarius to everyone else, including those who had worked for only an hour.
In this world, a vineyard owner could get away with doing that only once. Word would get around fast.
The day following such an act of economically-foolish generosity, he would likely not be able to find anyone willing to work all day long – if people knew that they would get the same wage for working only one hour! Everyone would wait until an hour before quitting time, and then hire on.
But of course, in such a case, the vineyard owner would not be able to get his grapes pruned or harvested. And a one-hour workday, with an eight-hour wage, would bankrupt him very quickly.
But the parable that Jesus tells is not about how literal bosses and workers on earth might act. It is about how God acts – in a way that is totally different from how men act.
It is about how God rewards those who believe in him, and who bear the fruits of that faith in works of service to others. It is about how God justifies his people, by grace, with the perfect and complete righteousness of his Son.
In the parable, it is the steward or foreman who pays the workers on behalf of the vineyard owner. Jesus is God’s “foreman” – the one mediator between God and man – who will pay all of his Father’s servants the same wage, at the end of their time of labor in this life.
The wage that he delivers to them is his righteousness. And he gives all of it, to all of them.
He gives himself to them: everything he is, and everything he did and allowed to be done for their salvation. All who repent of their sins, and who embrace and confess Christ, are justified in Christ.
It is not possible for a man to believe in only a part of Christ. Either you believe in him according to his complete person and work – divine and human, crucified and risen – or you don’t believe in him at all.
So too, it is not possible for only a part of the righteousness of Christ to be imputed to you and credited to you. It doesn’t work that way.
If you have any of his righteousness, you have all of it. If you are at peace with God and are a member of his family, then that is exactly what you are.
These things don’t come in degrees. Either you have it, or you don’t.
Either you have been transported into his kingdom of light, or you are still in the outer darkness. Either you are a worker in his vineyard, who is paid as all other workers are, or you are still idle, outside of his kingdom.
A self-righteous and boastful person – even an outwardly religious person – whose ideas about God and man are shaped by his own reason and experience, and not by the Scriptures, will not like this. He wants to be rewarded more lavishly for his superior achievements, and for his higher level of religious devotion.
If he, in his own eyes, has been a “good Christian” for his whole life, his pride is offended at the thought that a man who committed heinous crimes may be converted – say, by a prison chaplain, while he was on death row – and be placed into the same standing before God as a man who has always served the Lord.
He refuses to go along with the notion that a murderer, just prior to his execution, is allowed by God to be embraced fully by Christ, and to embrace Christ fully, with all the eternal blessings that flow from this. He is a Pharisee, who would have sneered and scoffed at the man to whom Jesus said from the cross, “today you will be with me in Paradise.”
What brings joy in heaven – the repentance of one sinner – would bring anger and annoyance to such a self-righteous person.
It should be troubling to someone like this, to see himself rejecting what God accepts, and hating what God loves. But it’s not troubling to such a boaster, when he, in his self-deception, continues to persuade himself that God is like him, and that the true God would never do what he would never do.
But as we are instructed by the Scriptures, we know that the true God does do things like this, all the time – with everyone who comes to him, to work in his vineyard.
God’s generosity is poured out equally and fully on all who are baptized into Christ, and who live each day in that baptism by repentance and faith – whether they are seasoned veterans of the Christian pilgrimage on earth, or whether they are just starting out on the roadway of Christian discipleship.
In their justification before God, all who believe in Christ, and who know that their sins are forgiven by Christ, are equally credited with the goodness and the obedience of Christ.
This is not something that offends those who do truly know the Lord. It liberates us.
It sets us free from jealousy and rivalry in the fellowship of the church – in regard to those things that really matter most – because no one in God’s family has more of the righteousness of Jesus, or more of the love of the Father, than anyone else.
Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew, “You have one teacher, and you are all brothers.”
It’s true, of course, that in earthly matters, some people do have more material advantages than others, and some are more prosperous than others. But in God’s kingdom, we are all alive in the Spirit of God, and we are all justified in the Son of God, to the same degree – to the same fullness.
The Colt .45 revolver was often called the “great equalizer” of the Wild West. If you had one, you could do as much deadly damage as anyone else who had one, regardless of your physical stature or personal strength – as long as you were strong enough to pull a trigger.
For Christian believers, the righteousness of Christ, by which we are all completely justified before God, is the great equalizer.
A new Christian is given all of Christ. What more could an old Christian be given, as an extra reward? We all have Christ. We all have him. And Christ has us all. St. Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans that
“Now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, …even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith.”
The supernatural miracle of the Lord’s Supper is a place where we really experience this great equalizing power of the gospel. In the Words of Institution, Jesus says to his disciples, “this is my body; this is the new testament in my blood.”
He did not say to each of the apostles, sitting around that table, “this is the piece of my body that is for you; this is that portion of my blood that is for you.”
Jesus did not apportion himself out, like a butcher divides up various cuts of a side of beef for his customers. This is what critics of our church’s confession have often accused us of believing. But it totally misses the point of the miracle of this sacrament.
In response to some of those critics in the sixteenth century, Luther wrote:
“They would like to…make it look as if we were such mad, senseless, raving people who held that Christ was locally in the sacrament and was eaten up piecemeal as a wolf devours a sheep, and that we were drinking blood as a cow drinks water. They knew…when they called us cannibals and blood-drinkers, at the instigation of the devil, that they were resorting to manifest, impudent lies. …”
“For this is how it was taught…, how we still accept and teach it, and how it was accepted in the true, ancient Christian church of fifteen hundred years ago…: When you receive the bread from the altar, you are not tearing an arm from the body of the Lord or biting off his nose or a finger; rather, you are receiving the entire body of the Lord; the person who comes after you also receives the same entire body, as does the third, and the thousandth after the thousandth one, forever and ever.”
“In the same way when you drink the wine from the chalice, you are not drinking a drop of blood from his finger or foot, but you are drinking his entire blood; so, too, does the one who follows you even to the thousand times thousandth one, as the words of Christ clearly say: “Take, eat; this is my body.” He does not say: ‘Peter, there, devour my finger; Andrew, devour my nose; John, devour my ears,’ etc.; rather, he says, ‘It is my body; take it and eat it,’ etc. Each person receives it whole.”
By the power of his Word, Jesus gave all of his body to all of those original communicants – over and over again, as the blessed bread was passed to each of them. Jesus gave all of them all of his blood to drink, for the forgiveness of their sins.
Jesus has also commanded his church to celebrate and receive this sacrament, for his remembrance, until he comes again. And so, in our observances of this Supper, when I, as your pastor, hold out to each communicant the blessed bread and wine; and when I say, “this is the true body of Christ; this is the true blood of Christ,” that’s exactly what I mean. That’s exactly what Jesus means.
I do not say, as I walk down the communion rail and speak to each of you, “this is a piece of the body of Christ” – maybe a larger and more comforting piece; maybe a smaller and less comforting piece.
I say, “this is the body of Christ” – the whole body of Christ – “given for you.” Given for all of you. Given for each of you. And all of the blood of Jesus is given to you also, for the forgiveness of all your sins, both great and small.
I say this to each communicant, because it’s true for each communicant. It’s true for those of you who have labored in the heat of the sun for many decades of earthly life, as a follower of Christ. It’s true for those of you who are newly confirmed – newly hired as a worker in the Lord’s vineyard.
It’s true for those of you who today needed to repent of relatively innocuous failures, and common sins of human weakness – but nothing particularly shocking. It’s true for those of you who today needed to repent of grievous transgressions, and horrible, evil thoughts.
And so, while God is in some ways like an earthly employer, in other ways he is definitely not. He pays the same generous wage to all his servants, who come to him on the basis of his promise to save those who trust in him.
He pays that wage to those who come at the beginning of the day, and to those who come when the day is almost over. He gives his salvation to those who serve him well, with a strong and robust faith; and to those who continually struggle, with much doubt and weakness.
All of you receive all of Christ: all of his body; all of his blood; all of his forgiveness. At the Lord’s Table, no one has earned a bigger portion than someone else; a better blessing than someone else; or a larger reward than someone else.
The invitation that the Prophet Isaiah offered in God’s name to all the people of Israel, he also offers in God’s name to all of us, here and now:
“Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” Amen.