It’s Not About Fair

Exodus 16:2-15, Matthew 20:1-16

September 21, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Omers and dinarii: the wandering Hebrews were given an omer of the bread called “manna,” and the workers in the vineyard in Matthew’s gospel were paid a denarius for their work. What’s an omer? Context tells us it’s some kind of measurement, and verse 36 of Exodus chapter 16 helpfully tells us that an omer is a tenth of an ephah. Our translation of Matthew in the New Revised Standard version actually eliminates the word “denarius” and just tells you that the landowner paid the workers each “the usual daily wage.” The denarius was considered to be what a worker, in that time usually a man, had to earn in order to be able to feed his family for a day. It was a minimum wage that, unlike minimum wage in Connecticut, was set to be a realistic wage in order to keep people from starving, but it would not make anyone wealthy.

So what do omers and dinarii have in common? Each wandering Israelite was told by God to gather an omer of the miraculous bread called “manna,” with the guarantee that this would be enough to fill their bellies for the day. Whether you were a toddler or an elder, whether you were pregnant or a strapping teenager, somehow that omer would stretch to be enough for you. God guaranteed to them that they didn’t need to gather more than an omer, for each day the manna would appear, for forty years, and each day they would have just enough. Those who tried to hoard more found that it rotted in their tents and got wormy and inedible. The daily manna was what each of them needed.

So, too, was the denarius. The landowner, and remember, we’re talking about God here, chose to make sure that each of the workers, no matter how long they worked, had just what they needed to feed themselves and their family for a day. Although those who had worked longer felt the landowner was being unfair, that they should have gotten more, perhaps, or that the ones who had only worked a couple of hours should have gotten less, the concern of the landowner was that each worker had what they needed.

Now, especially considering the rather precarious state of our economy at this moment, I might talk with you about how many of us would advocate that the economics behind this have some merit, that every person in our society should get enough to make sure they can eat for a day, but that people shouldn’t hoard so much wealth or see riches as an end in themselves rather than as a means to support life. I might discuss the condition of migrant workers in this country, day laborers who are often abused by less than generous employers. I might discuss how odd it is that CEO’s making millions are now being bailed out by the government and how those workers on the lowest rung of our economy will bear the burden of this in future higher taxes and cuts in services. I might discuss all this, but in the context of Jesus’ teaching, this is not really about a human economic system. This is about our relationship with God and with other people, about our expectations of the grace of God and about how we judge other people’s relationships to God.

This story about the landowner follows a series of conversations Jesus had with the Pharisees and with a wealthy young man. Many of the Pharisees conversations with Jesus had to do with who God loves more and who should be considered rejected by God and God’s children on earth. Time and again, Jesus tries to tell them that God does not work on a system of competition for love and grace, that God’s capacity to love is not finite, nor is God’s desire to love us controlled by what we do or who we are. Instead of always crying out “I want God to love me best!” or “Why does God love that person who isn’t doing what God wants; I should get more grace?” Jesus calls us to simply cry out, “What wondrous love is this, the love that God gives me!” But that seems so hard for us to do.

From childhood in this society, we are taught that the way to get to the top with parents, with teachers, with bosses, with neighbors, with friends is to earn our way there: to work hard, or at least to appear to work hard, to do what we are asked, to be nice to people. Nothing wrong with any of those things, but when we are led to believe that the only reason for doing them is for a reward on the other end that becomes our default position, our default understanding of how the world works, and then how God works. “What’s in it for me?” “What am I gonna get out of it?” or the great question Han Solo asked before helping Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and the rebellion against the evil empire, “Where’s my reward?” Not to do something because it’s right or good, but for what we will get out of it. In fact, just before Jesus told this story, the disciples had asked Jesus what they were going to get since they had left everything to follow him, since they’d just been told that you couldn’t buy your way into God’s favor.

So when we live in a world where this is the default understanding of why we work or even why we do good, it’s hard to wrap our heads around another system. Jesus tells the disciples here two critical things to understand as we relate to God. First, God loves us each just as much as we need loving, and if we expect to see signs of God’s love, we will receive them. Second, God loves everyone else that way, too.

Now, why would anyone argue with either one of those statements? Well, there are those among us who do not see God’s love in their lives, who have been beaten down by the world or are caught up in their own sense of unworthiness and cannot believe that God would love them and cannot see any signs that God does. Yet, their omer of manna is waiting for them. Remember that the people who ate that manna were the same ones who had complained about the fact that God and Moses had liberated them from slavery, had just six weeks before saved them from certain death at the hands of Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea, complained that they didn’t have enough to eat and blamed God and God’s servants for their very understandable fear for their future. God did not get all exasperated and say, “Why you ungrateful children, just go feed yourselves if that’s the way you feel!” God gave each of them, the complainers, the slackers, the hard-workers, the faithful and the doubting an omer of manna.

Do you know what the word “manna” means? In Hebrew, it comes from the words that mean “What is it?” Remember the people looked at the stuff on the ground and had no idea what it was, certainly no idea it was food until Moses told them it was. All around them that morning were signs of God’s love and grace, deep blessings, but without Moses, they would have missed them and gone on complaining, feeling certain and with great evidence that there was no God who loved them.

The vineyard workers who had been hired first did miss the blessing they had received. The landowner had hired them when they might not have been hired that day, and paid them what they needed. But so angry were they that others got blessings just like they did, others that they felt did not deserve blessings because they hadn’t worked as hard for them, so angry were those first workers that they did not experience what they were given as blessing at all. Just like the elder brother in the story of the Prodigal Son, these workers complained that they’d worked all day and then these people who stood around most of the day get a fatted calf?

Remember what the father told that elder brother? “Son, you are always with me and all that I have is yours.” That elder brother had never been hungry a day in his life, nor would he be. But instead of rejoicing in the blessing of the stability and certainty of grace in his life, he got angry that someone else got something he felt they didn’t deserve.

Friends, have you ever gotten something good that you didn’t deserve? When I tell my faith story, I often say that one reason I am a Christian is that I came to a church for the first time as a teenager, obnoxious and arrogant I was, and these people who had not even known me in my younger, cute stage loved me into maturity. I know who God is because I experienced that kind of undeserved love. Have you ever received forgiveness you didn’t deserve, or help in life from someone who didn’t have to help you? Have you ever said, “There but for the grace of God go I?” It’s not that this other person doesn’t have access to the grace of God; it’s that you were able to recognize it in your life and respond to it by taking the omer, the denarius that God offered you. What you needed, when you needed it.

God loves us just as much as we need loving, and if we look for signs of that love, we will see it, and God loves everyone else that way, too. If that’s true, two responses seem like no-brainers to me. First, if God loves me as much as I need, even when I don’t deserve it, I need to fall to my knees in gratitude and humility and sing for joy in praise of one who could love like that. Second, I need to get up off my knees and go out to see if there is someone out there standing in a field of manna who does not know that they are surrounded by God’s gift of what they need. Then I need to show them how to gather grace. Amen.