Henrietta United Church of Christ
Rev. David Inglis September 18,
2005
Matthew 20:1-16
“Is God Unfair?”
Of all the parables Jesus ever told, this is
one of his hardest. When it came up as
today’s lectionary gospel reading, I was tempted to duck it. But I decided to take it on, because I think
Jesus told this hard parable to help us deal with the hard reality that life
just isn’t fair. And when life isn’t
fair, we start feeling like the God who is supposed to be in charge of everything
must not be fair. I’ll bet God doesn’t
seem very fair to the people from the Gulf coast who find their homes and
livelihoods washed away. God doesn’t
seem fair to the young mother who has always taken care of her health, and
finds herself facing cancer. God
doesn’t seem fair to parents who see so many beautiful and gifted children, but
theirs has major disabilities. God
doesn’t seem fair to the dedicated employee who is let go before he reaches
retirement age.
So Jesus told a story about unfairness. Some day laborers got hired early one
morning to get a day’s pay for a day’s work.
They thought they were getting a fair break, after some hard knocks in
an unfair world. Who were the day
laborers in Jesus’ time? Many were the
sons of peasant farmers who had the bad luck not to be the first born son and
heir to the little family farm, and therefore were pushed out of the nest to
fend for themselves when they came of age.
Most of the rest had lost their small farms when they fell behind in
rent or taxes. Now they had to scrounge
for whatever work they could find and beg for food when they couldn’t find
work. Those who got hired for a full
day’s work considered themselves lucky. The day’s wage, a coin called a
denarius, would give them enough food to last a couple of days anyway.
As the day went on in Jesus’ story, the
landowner needed more and more laborers, and so he kept going back to the
marketplace and rounding up more workers, right up to the eleventh hour of a
twelve hour day. And then the men who
had been laboring for twelve long hours in the hot sun watched with disbelief
as the ones who had worked six hours and three hours and just one hour got just
as much as they did!
“That’s not fair!” you can hear them saying
among themselves . They had worked harder and produced more, so they should get
more. They had seniority! But there was
no grievance committee or union or fair labor laws to appeal to. They were told to take what had been agreed
upon as their fair wage and go on their way. But they couldn’t help feeling
gypped somehow when they thought about the blokes that had only worked an hour.
We can’t function well in a society that
isn’t based on fairness. The long, slow
march of civilization has been a series of struggles to create laws that are
just, and to advance civil rights for everyone, and to fairly compensate
people’s work. We can’t create a
productive, peaceful society unless the rules are fair and equitably enforced.
But sometimes human laws and institutions
fail to protect us from injustice. It’s human nature to look to God to make
things right. The Old Testament is full
of the belief that even though arrogant oppressors lord it over people now, God
will give them their comeuppance in the end.
Psalm 141 reads, “Let the wicked fall into their own nets, while I alone
escape.” Psalm 139 lays it right out
there: “O that you would kill the
wicked, O God!” We want a God who’s going to whup the unjust–and especially
those who have wronged us personally.
The world wouldn’t make sense to us unless
there was some built-in fairness to it, so we expect God to reward us with
blessings when we’re good. That’s only
fair, right? And when things happen to
us that make us suffer, our sense of fairness makes us feel that we must have
done something wrong to deserve it. One
of the most important jobs we give God is to hand out rewards and punishments
according to our behavior. Surely He must do this, right? And if God doesn’t get around to settling
the score in this life, surely He’ll take care of it in an ultimate way in the
next. Otherwise, what’s the use of
having a God? We need God to reinforce the rules in order for life to make
sense for us.
Well, I have a bold proposition. I think Jesus just might have told today’s
hard parable to blow out the circuits of this way of looking at God–because the
way we look at God determines the way we look to God. And if we look to God to rebalance the score
when we’re on the losing end, or to avenge the people who have done wrong, and
if we expect God to reward us when we’re good, and if we believe that we’re
being punished by God when we go through hard times, then we are going to
severely limit what God can do for us.
And we’re going to stay stuck in a prison of our ego, that sees the
world in terms of comparisons and competition, worthy verses unworthy. Why does the ego see the world that
way? Because it’s always trying to
justify itself, to prove itself better
than others, and to avoid feeling ashamed.
Our ego is on God’s side because it figures that’s best the way to get
God on our side. Our ego insists on
things being fair and God reinforcing the rules, because if we know the rules
and play by them, we expect to be able
to win– or at least not lose important things like our job, our health, our
loved ones, or our dreams.
I think Jesus wants to fry the circuits of
his way of thinking so we can be rewired for a higher voltage, to get a higher level of energy flowing between us
and God.
Let me tell you about someone who got rewired
that way. David Roche was born with a
huge tumor on the bottom left side of his face. When the surgeons tried to remove it, they removed his lower lip,
and they gave him so much radiation that the lower part of his face stopped
growing, and he was covered with permanent plum-colored burns. He talks through a jumble of teeth, only one
lip, and a too-large tongue, and he speaks with kind of a burr, like a
Scottsman who’s just had a shot of novocaine.
Life treated him very unjustly the moment he was born. He had to go through childhood and
adolescence feeling like a freak and watching people turn away from him in
disgust.
Do you know what he does now as an
adult? He stands in front of crowds of
people and speaks to them. He has
turned his hated, unfair curse into a gift.
This happened when he discovered that God’s love is 100%
unconditional. Nobody is an exception,
and no part of us is an exception. He
knows that even his face is accepted
and loved by God. And when he got this,
it opened him to the truth that everyone carries around the feeling that
part of them, or maybe even all of them, is unlovable. Most people can hide their unlovable part a
lot easier than he can hide his, but it’s there just the same. And so when he talks about unconditional love,
people listen. The kids take to him
right away, because all of them have been teased for something or other. The teenagers dig him like crazy, because
every teenager feels their face is deformed, or their biceps or bust size is
too small, or their thighs are too big.
And the adults let down their guards and let him whisper to their souls
that maybe their baggage and flaws aren’t as vile or unmentionable as they
thought, and that total self acceptance might be a possibility for them
too.
He ends his talks saying, “I’ve been forced
to find my inner beauty. Seeing that
inner beauty has become a window, so I can see the beauty in you, too. I can see the light in your eyes. Your
warmth. So thank you.” And the applause is always thunderous.1 They are applauding David and his courage.
But they are also applauding this truth that they have tasted–that God’s love
knows no limits or boundaries or barriers, even for them.
Was God unfair in letting David Roche be born
with that tumor, and allowing the surgery to mess up his face for the rest of
his life? If David had lived his life
seeing himself through that ego-bound perspective of being treated unfairly or
being unworthy, he never would have found the beauty inside him, and the
message of hope that everyone needs to
hear. God’s unconditional love fried
his circuits and rewired his brain in a whole different way, so that the
super-charged power of love could surge through him to others.
We should always join the struggle to right
wrongs and correct injustices. But
there is no bad fortune, injustice, hardship, or mistreatment that cannot be
transcended when a person’s spiritual circuits are rewired to take God’s
heavy-duty current of love and grace.
Listen to these words that were found on a piece of wrapping paper near
the body of a dead child in Ravensbruck, a Nazi concentration camp where 92,000
women and children died.
O Lord,
remember not only the men and women of
goodwill,
but also those of ill will.
But do not only remember the suffering they have
inflicted on us,
remember the fruits we bought thanks to this
suffering–
our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility,
the courage, the generosity,
the greatness of heart which has grown out of
all this.
And when they come to judgement
let all the fruits that we have borne
be their forgiveness. AMEN AMEN AMEN
Whoever wrote these amazing words didn’t even
need God to be a judge for one of the most grievous atrocities in human
history. Even in a concentration camp,
this person’s circuits were big enough to allow God to be God–not a punitive
judge, but a Source of 100%
unconditional love. This is the God
that Jesus portrayed in the story of the prodigal son. This is the God Jesus embodied as he reached
out to sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and lepers. This is the God that Jesus trusted in when
he cried out from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do.”
“But,” we ask, “if there’s no judgment, how
can there be justice? How can there be
order in the world?”
“This is the judgment,” Jesus said, “that the
light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light
because their deeds were evil. For all
who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds
may not be exposed. But those who do
what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds
have been done in God” (John 3:19-21.)
So maybe God doesn’t have to do the job of
keeping score and judging everybody and passing out rewards and punishments. Maybe we judge ourselves. Those who love the light and who learn to
trust it are drawn closer to God, and the power of God’s 100% unconditional
love rewires them to receive it and make it a part of who they are. And they
find themselves living in the kingdom of heaven, even if they’re deformed or
mistreated or living in a concentration camp.
Those who hate the light remain in the hellish darkness of their own
selfishness and greed. And those who
look to God to avenge their mistreatment, punish their enemies, reward their
goodness, and punish them for their lapses, keep at arm’s length a lavish love
that could liberate them from their fear of shame, from their self
righteousness, and from their resentments.
Each of the workers in Jesus’ story got 100%
of what they needed for that day. God’s
100% unconditional love and perfect light are always available to us. It’s our choice whether or not we receive them and become made new by
them..
So is God fair? I can’t imagine anything more fair and amazing, and
wonderful, than that. Can you?
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