Have you ever bought something at a store, and a week later, it goes on sale?
It doesn’t seem fair. When you bought it, it seemed like a fair price, but now that it’s on sale, it doesn’t feel right.
Some people will try to return the item for full price and then buy it again on sale.
But when you buy something at full price, do you think that purchase removes the right of the seller to put it on sale?
It doesn’t.
Let’s go to God in prayer.
God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.
Amen.
Today’s readings deal with God’s grace.
In Jonah, the prophet did not want to prophesy in Ninevah, not because he was afraid for his life, but because he was afraid for his vengeance.
At the beginning of the book of Jonah we read
1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
Jonah 1:1-3, NRSVue
And one might just think Jonah didn’t want to go to Ninevah because he was afraid of their wickedness.
But in chapter 4, after Jonah prophesies and the people of Ninevah repent,
He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.
Jonah 4:2, NRSVue
Jonah’s calculation was:
If I prophesy to Ninevah, they might repent.
And if they repent, God won’t punish them.
They are wicked, and they need to be punished.
So he tries to thwart God’s plan by running the other way, as if he has the power to stop God.
If you heard the story about Jonah and the Great Fish, or Jonah and the Whale, in Sunday School, you know this part of the story. Sunday School likes to tell the story of Jonah in the Big Fish, but they usually don’t talk about chapters 3 and 4.
In fact, a colleague of mine preached on today’s text, and a member of the congregation was angry, saying she did not appreciate his adding a new ending to Jonah. He asked her to show him in her Bible where the story ends, and she saw the ending he used.
She had no idea.
The idea of Jonah being in the sea, and being rescued by a fish or whale, is a great story about the power of God.
The idea of Jonah prophesying, the Ninevites repenting, and God relenting, works against our desire for vengeance.
The idea of Jonah being upset for that very reason, and God showing him that even the wicked have value and can be saved, doesn’t work that well when you’re trying to wrangle a bunch of elementary school kids.
We like to believe some people are irredeemable, but God loves us all.
Remember Jesus saying to love our neighbors?
Remember Jesus telling the parable of a Samaritan, from a people who were at odds with the Jews, taking time, energy, and money to save the life of a Jewish man who had been robbed, beaten, and left for dead?
Remember Jesus saying to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you?
Then in our Gospel reading, we have the parable of the vineyard workers. The landowner is hiring laborers at the customary rate of pay for a day’s work. He goes out three hours later and tells additional laborers that he will pay them what is fair. And another three hours later. And another three hours later. And two hours later.
And at the end of the day, he paid them all, starting with the ones who had been hired last, and gave them each a day’s wages, even if they only worked for a small portion of the day.
And the people who started early in the day were upset that those who were hired late in the day were paid the same.
When they were hired, they felt it was fair to be paid a day’s wages for a day’s labor. But when someone else received the same amount for shorter time, now it wasn’t fair.
This, too, is a story about grace: those who have been righteous for a long time are given grace, and those who have only recently repented are given the same grace.
But we apply these ideas in other places in our lives.
I have been a Christian longer than that person.
I have been a member of the church longer that her.
My family has been in this area for five generations.
(That last one is often a big deal in New England, but it happens everywhere.)
We do this with immigration too.
Unless you are 100% indigenous, you are an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants. But we want to believe that having ancestors in this country somehow gives us greater standing.
It doesn’t.
Every time an immigrant commits a violent crime, that information hits the news. But when a citizen commits a violent crime, we don’t mention how many generations their family was here.
And our government is deporting non-violent immigrants, mostly those without legal status, but often those who are in the process of trying to get their status resolved, sometimes even people with legal status, and in a few cases, actual citizens.
People who profess to be good Christians are celebrating these deportations.
Is that more like Jesus and his Pof the Vineyard Workers? Or is that more like what Jonah wanted for Ninevah?
My challenge for us this week is to be alert for times when we thought we got a good deal, but are no upset because we think someone else got a better deal. That includes when people truly repent and avoid the punishment we think they deserve.
These kinds of situations can really tweak our justice bones, but if we already got a fair deal, we’re not going to feel better being angry or jealous of people who we think did better.
Instead, let’s be happy with the denarius we got for our day’s labor.
It’s fair for us.
Amen.
* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue
* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.
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