To threaten the order of things, pushing against how they’ve always been, is dangerous business. The enlightened ones, not trapped by chronological time or societal expectations, grow beyond the boundaries of how equality has been defined from age to age. Throughout all time, one’s culturally focused fairness lens is largely accepted as gospel. Yet this parable isn’t one about fairness and equity at all. Once again, the young Rabbi turns things on their head.* With blistered hands and sunburned faces, those who worked all day stood bewildered, angry, and understandably confused, when the hour arrived to be paid. Lavish generosity, which is the calling card of the vineyard owner, deeply wounds their sense of what’s right. What are we to make of this foolish employer?
To rearrange the order of things might be the most courageous thing to do. Galileo was punished for uncovering the great mystery of the cosmos that we aren’t the center of everything. We are the ones circling around the sun. An unpopular truth, for those who worship the ego, became a new canvas on which to paint and learn. A new telescope through which to see. In this story, there is no possible way to show up too late to the vineyard. Those who missed the chance to work earlier, received sheer grace anyway, which can never be earned. This rubs rough across our theologically thin skin. Most of us are in a bad marriage with our culture, insisting that everyone earn their own way.
There is a slow unveiling and unfolding of truth here: A delicate process of unlearning the old, emptying out the weathered wineskins of what we believed was true, and from which we’ve been drinking for too long. With a new lens, the first workers, chosen early that morning, might well rejoice that the others were brought into the same great field and fold, no matter how late. This is not a story about work at all. It’s about being given a purpose and possibility. Untamed and overflowing, this bountiful generosity becomes a well of living water that can fill every cup. Let our gift and reward be that all will find their purpose… that everyone live safely within this wild abundance.
*Matthew 20: 1-16 (The Message)
–Jim Marsh, Jr., Bread of Life Church
