The Injustice of Grace
Over the last couple of weeks, our Gospel readings addressed issues of forgiveness. Last week, as we reflected on the Parable of the Wicked Servant, Jesus underlined the radical, the generous, the shocking nature of forgiveness as the king remitted a totally staggering debt. The problem lay not with that but with the servant’s unwillingness to model that generous forgiveness, as he turned on a fellow servant who owed him but a tiny fraction of the debt that he had been discharged from.
A forgiven people must be a forgiving people. It must be part of who we are, part of our identity as members of the Body of Christ. It is with these thoughts of identity, who we are, what we are, that I want to move on to reflect on our Gospel reading this morning, the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard.
This parable of Jesus is both familiar and troubling in that at the heart of the story there seems to lie a fundamental unfairness, dare I say injustice, as those who spent the day lying in the sun are paid the same as those who worked all through the heat of the day. To rub salt into the wound, when the latter complain they are rebuked. People will rationalise it by saying, ‘Oh, the owner would know that these are family men with families to feed.’ That may be true, but it actually misses the point. At the heart of this story is the injustice of grace.
When I use the expression the injustice of grace, it is to emphasise the point that God’s grace, God’s love for you and for me is not dependent on my own worth or deserving. We acknowledge that in the Prayer of Humble Access in our Service of Holy Communion, ‘We do not presume to come to this your table trusting in our own righteousness but in your manifold and great mercies.’ Grace is by its very nature gift. It actually cuts across all lines of justice to new beginnings, new starts, in our life before God.
This parable takes us into the whole issue of accepting each other before God. It addresses issues of grace – not just in how they apply to us in our own relationship with God but also in our relationship with others before God. The issue that troubled the first workers was not their wages – for those had been agreed. What troubled them was that those who appeared later received the same – they are envious of the generosity shown to others. We have no problem with God’s grace shown to us – the problem comes when we contemplate who else God seems to be showing grace to – people who don’t seem to be measuring up.
It is of course an old story repeated several times in Scripture. Jonah sat on the hill overlooking the ancient city of Nineveh and fumed when God spared the city – in his eyes, they did not deserve God’s mercy. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the older brother thought the father a doting old fool when he welcomed the younger Prodigal son home with open arms – as far as he was concerned he had had his chances and he had blown them. The Pharisee at prayer in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican thanks God that he at least is not like the sinful publican. All these testify to a lingering feeling of merit in our own understanding of our position before God that flies in the face of grace as God’s gift. Yet we continue to say: ‘We do not presume to come to this your table …’
This story with its message of God’s choice of those he chooses to welcome or reward and with it our failure to recognise that grace really is a gift and not a reward for good behaviour, these all raise other issues. There is that very human tendency to pass comment, pass judgement on others who differ from us. We can all be a bit smug, a bit condescending at times on issues that do not lie at the heart of the Gospel. Within a Christian community such as ours there are people with a wide range of experiences, of worship preferences, of theological views, of views on political and lifestyle issues, what I have referred to in the past as the ‘grey areas’ of Christian life. Issues on which it is perfectly possible for Christians to hold sincerely held, differing opinions.
This does not mean we cannot argue, even passionately, about these things. What we cannot do is pass judgement on one another.
To quote the words of that well known woolly headed liberal, Oliver Cromwell, as he argued with some even more hard headed Scots; ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’ None of us has the total picture, we all see through a glass darkly. We each stand before God as ones made in the image of God, each with our own individual strengths and weaknesses, our own insights, our own blind spots, each recipients of his grace. So, whether we have come to labour in the vineyard early or late, let us honour one another in the name of Christ and encourage and build each other up as members of the Body of Christ.