Transcription
We're going to be looking at um some parables. We're going into a section in Matthew where um Jesus is going to teach six parables. And over the next few months, we will go through that material. But what I want you to understand is that these parables are being taught. They're material, core material in this book about Jesus. This is a biography about Jesus. The book of Matthew is a biography about Jesus. And it's teaching us how to follow him. One of the primary verbs throughout the gospels that Jesus asks of people is to follow him. It's also one of the primary verbs used to describe what his people did. And so we use that term a lot here in our church that we want to follow Jesus. We want to be his followers. And one of the things that he taught was that it wasn't just just a personal relationship with him, but he's inviting us to have a per personal relationship in the context of his kingdom. And so, as you go through the book um of Matthew or let me just show you out of Mark after John was arrested and Jesus went into Galilee, he was proclaiming the good news of God. And what he what did he say? He said, "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe. receive the good news. And so Jesus is inviting you where wherever you're at in your spiritual journey. On the table this morning is an open invitation from Jesus to enter into his kingdom through him. He is the gate. You don't get to have the benefits of the kingdom without coming through him. But he says that his kingdom is near. It near enough for you to reach out and respond to it. But he doesn't force you. He He He tells you what it is. And I I think, you know, as we work through the material this morning, you're going to see how he's teaching on the kingdom. But but this is something you have to receive. The invitation that you have to receive. It's nothing that you're going to be forced to do. But it is critical that you understand that the the option, the invitation is there on the table. So these six parables that we're going to see, what they're going to do is they're going to teach us about the kingdom of heaven for us now while we wait for Jesus to return. So the kingdom parables interact in a fascinating way. It's this alien invasion, this outside society that Jesus brings to bear on the earth. It's really his reigning and ruling infecting a group of people who are coming under his dominant control is the is the kingdom. of God. And so what we're going to see in the parables is just some interesting principles about how the kingdom is different and inverts some some structures that are normative within society. Let me read to you um the parable that we're going to study and then we'll work our way through it. This is the question though that I I I do want you to be asking yourself. How does this reshape my choices, my values, and my hope. This this question will come up again as we're going through these six parables over the coming months. How does it reshape my choices, my values, and my hope? Here's the parable. For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the workers, on one daenarius. He sent them into his vineyard for the day. When he went out about 9 in the morning, he saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He said to them, "You also go into my vineyard and I'll give you whatever is right." So off they went. At about noon and about 3, he went out again and he did the same thing. Then about at about 5 in the afternoon, he went And he found others standing around and he said to them,"Wh have you been standing here all day doing nothing?" And they responded, "Because no one has hired us. You also go into my vineyard," he told them. When evening came, the owner of the vineyard told his foremen, "Call the workers and give them their pay, starting with the last and ending with the first." When those who were hired about at about five came, they each received a daenarius. So when the first ones came, they assumed that they would get more, but they also received a daenarius each. When they received it, they began to complain to the landowner. These last men put in one hour, and you made them equal to us, who bore the burden of the day's work and the burning heat. He replied to one of them,"Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Don't you agree with me? Didn't you agree with me on a daenarius? Take what is yours and go? I want to give this last man the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with what is mine? Are you jealous because I am generous?" So, the last will be first. and the first last. Let's pray. Lord, as we look into this text, we um want to have an open heart before you uh to be teachable. Uh because there's some things in here that seem unfair and in the way that we handle work and the way we get paid for doing work, uh this story seems unfair. And so, you're trying to teach your followers something about the kingdom. And and we ask that we would have hearts that are tender to hear what you have to say this morning. So help us as we wrestle with this text. We pray that you would win in our hearts. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Amen. It's a fascinating fascinating parable. There are three parts that um come up here. The first seven verses we have the hiring of five groups of workers to do work uh in the vineyard. So they're hired it five different times. Then you have between verses 8-10 the paying the workers in reverse chronological order. The ones that came at five get paid first. And then in verses 11- 16 we get to the crux of the matter. Jesus is responding to the complaints and the grumblings of those who were the first hires. So let's walk through this. We read through it and Let me just highlight a couple of verses here in our text. In verse two, we see that um after agreeing with this first set of workers, it's on one daenarius and he sends them off to work. So, their day starts around 6:00 a.m. and there is an agreed upon wage. In this culture, a workday is a 12-h hour workday. It starts at 6:00 a.m. and it ends at 6:00 p.m. And a daenarius was an average wage. for a worker at that time. And so what's agreed upon and and in Jesus's story as he's trying to teach something one of the what um he's pre premising this story with a fair work context that you have you have laborers you have work to be done and you have an agreed upon wage that was a standard wage. Um then if we go forward we see that there are um some people that are picked up as uh employees at 9:00 a.m. and some at noon and 300 p.m. And then we're given this last group at about 5. Um and he went and he found these he says standing around. He says, "Why have you been standing here all day doing nothing?" And their reason for it is that um no one had hired them. So they're not necessarily lazy, but they just hadn't picked up a job. And so He sends them off to also go and work. Um, the pieces of this story are are fairly simple. They're easy to relate to. Day laborers doing a job for a standard wage. Once we get to verses 8-10, we come into the material that um begins to parallel um where we've been at. You see, Jesus Jesus isn't just, you know, we have these artificial chapter breaks. So in your Bible, and my Bible, it says chapter 20 and then we have the little one in our Bible. But originally when Matthew wrote this biography of Jesus, it was in a scroll. And what was in chapter 19, he didn't create the chapters. We put those in, you know, thousand years later. What was like the preceding this was Jesus teaching saying that the first will be last and the last will be first. Um, and now we go into chapter 20 and Jesus is illustrating this point. A, and this is a key thing for his followers to to grasp. It's repeated a few times here. He he says it at the end of chapter 19. Then he tells the parable to illustrate it and he ends in verse 16 with it. And we literally see here in the middle of this um, story the order at which he wants these guys to be paid. When the evening came, the owner of the vineyard told his foremen, "Call the workers and give them their pay, starting with the last and ending with the first." And so there is this reverse order that goes on and it sets up. So, so this is there's some parts of the story that are easy to relate to and there's other parts of the story that are unlikely, but it's it's what we call pet pedagogical, right? It's a it's a story that um is unlikely to have been a real scenario because who goes out and hires five waves of workers? It's not all that often, but it's kind of got these nuanced details to bring forward a tension that you and I easily feel, which is that these late workers are going to get paid the same thing as the first workers. It was the wage that the master had agreed upon for the first workers that he is about to pay them. So you see I just want you to see as we put I put in front of you verse 8 that this theme of first and last again is repeated. Verse 9 says when these those who were hired about at about five they each received one daenerius they're receiving a full day's wage a known full day's wage for having worked for one hour and the response comes up. So when the first one came, they assumed they would get more. Which do do you fault them for assuming that? No. No. If it's like, well, we agreed upon a wage and and how many of you have done these kind of jobs? Probably when you're younger, right? Where you do a job and it's kind of like the pay is a little bit fuzzy. You're like, I wonder what this is going to end up like. And then you start to kind of get these data points coming in. And for these guys, the data point was like, oh, these guys got like what we originally talked about you ever done a job where you're like you did extra and you're like oh maybe they're going to pay me more but you don't have a guaranteed like so we can relate to kind of this dynamic and so there's an underlying assumption that they have that they would get more based on what they're seeing kind of playing out but they each receive a daenarius and so we go into this next section and this next section um starts off with grumbling or I think in our version here um we have the word complaining. This is the translation. Um some of you in your Bibles it may say grumbling or murmuring, right? It's like what's going on? There's this complaint that they have a and maybe they're talking to one another. They're complaining to each other about um what they received and um they verbalize this complaint. by saying, "These last men who were hired at five, they only put in one hour, and you have made them equal to us." That's key. You have made them equal to us who bore the burden of the day's work and the burning heat. You see, the the wage that they're receiving communicated more than just a um a a value transfer. It it to them signaled a um uh it had this significance for them of like um this is not fair because these people didn't work as hard as we worked and it's not an equal scenario. And what Jesus is doing here by telling this story story is he's beginning he He's fine with you and I feeling uncomfortable about this because what comes it's it's like the when you go and you refine gold, you heat it up and the dross or the the the yucky stuff, the impurities surface. They come to the top. And so a story like this, Jesus is telling a parable that kind of starts to cook in our heart and it's bringing some stuff up in our hearts about about work and um uh the idea of meritocracy or getting what you worked for and um and systems of pay. It brings all that stuff up to the surface. So what I want to invite you to as a follower of Jesus or one considering the person of Jesus is to let that discomfort come to the surface. I feel frustrated. I feel frustrated with these along with these workers that they are getting the same amount of pay as the people that only worked for an hour. That's that is the the tool the instrument of this parable since they were little but then the person that committed sins after life that starts following they're still he takes them both in and they're equal.
That's right. So Mike
almost analogy of the story.
That's right. So, Mike, if you can't hear Mike in the back, he's saying it's similar to people who some people become followers of Jesus when they're little kids. And then there's others who have deathbed conversions and they're all they're all led into the kingdom. That's good. I'm going to I'm going to get to something similar to that in just a minute. What I want you to remember as we're looking at this is that Jesus all throughout Matthew Especially those of you that have been with us for the last year, year and a half, like we've been going through this material for a while. And one of the things that we continue to see with in Matthew and in Jesus's teaching is that he cares about our hearts. And the grumbling complaints of these workers is coming from their processing through a moment in their hearts. And and and Jesus is really wanting to work in our lives not at a behavioral level like he cares about us getting the work done in the vineyard, but he also cares about our hearts as we are engaged in life. He's he's he's looking for us to live a life that flows from a transformed heart. So when he changes us, he doesn't just change our behavior, but he changes the character of our heart, the value system. Remember at the beginning I said when we look at the par parables. I I want you to consider how does this parable change us in terms of our values and the things that we care about. And so we know how Jesus works, right? We've been looking at this at his teaching for a while. And here is an a parable that that really goes in and kind of begins to mess with our our hearts. Notice the structural flow. They received exactly what they agreed upon. Yet the moment they witnessed generosity, others turn they witness generosity that it turns toward from a contentment is turned to a complaint. They agreed on this wage at the beginning of the day. They were content to do the work for a arius. But the moment in which they see this generosity of the master towards the people who only worked for an hour, they begin to complain. Again, this is a heart heart issue. Go from contentment to complaining. And what's the master doing? He's being generous. This reveals three things about our parts. The first is what we would call an entitlement trap. You you know, especially in Baltimore City, the idea of entitlements, right? Entitlements are like the check you get every month, something you're entitled to. Social Security benefits or um food stamps, SNAP benefits, right? You got these entitlements. Well, there's a trap. There's an entitlement trap that goes on in our hearts where we feel entitled to something. It is my right to this. And in these workers, they move from a place of gratitude for what was an agreed upon wage to feeling entitled to more based on a comparison. This person over here gets this much. How come I don't get that much? There's a famous preacher named Charles Spurgeon who says, "As soon as the penny was in their hands, A murmur was in their mouth. The problem wasn't the payment. It was their expectation of preferential treatment. I worked for 12 hours, so I should get preferential treatment. They don't have a they don't have a um clause for generosity within this setting. They're thinking purely in terms of work and wages. Here's how many hours I worked. Here's what I deserve. And then all of a sudden it gets blown up as they're looking at what these late workers receive. So you have the entitlement trap. The second aspect of this that's their fallen nature is a scarcity mindset. Their complaint assumes that the master's generosity towards others somehow diminishes what they received. But nothing is taken from them. It reveals how envy poisons even legitimate blessing. Envy poison. So here's this master being generous to these late workers and this scarcity mindset it it poisons their ability to appreciate what the master is doing. The third aspect of the fallen nature here is it merit-based heart. Uh having a merit-based heart where you calculate worth based on the hours worked and the heat endured. But Jesus shows that in God's economy, it operates on grace, not on merit. The early workers represent all of us who struggle when God's generosity doesn't match our scorekeeping. You see, in the kingdom of God, we are not working to earn the grace of God. We work now like all of the concept of work and behavior and um yeah our behavior is now offered up as a
as a blessing. Yeah. But in a as a um outflow of our redeemed nature. The the idea of working to earn something goes away and instead we are the recipients of grace. So our relationship with work changes and we are no longer trying to earn or merit the grace of God. So Jesus kind of throws a bomb into the room through this parable that upsets the this meritbased system. He he's not he's not accusing he he's not diminishing a system of working and receiving wages. In fact, Paul tells the church in Thessalonica, you need to work and provide for yourselves. He says it to the Ephesian church as well, work so that you can be generous with others. You don't steal from other people. So, so the kingdom of heaven is not against work and being paid for work that you do. But when it comes to receiving the generosity, the grace of God, you you need to understand that that working for God's blessing and favor, it just doesn't factor into the the economy of the kingdom. His grace exposes here our performancebased hearts. The early workers are angry. Their anger reveals the deep human tendency towards a merit-based righteousness where I'm going to earn my righteous standing before God. The parable exposes that even faithful service can become a form of self-justification. The early workers weren't upset about being cheated. They received exactly what they were agreed upon. Their anger came from witnessing the unmmerited general generosity towards others. In our modern context, we are all prone to spiritual scorekeeping. Whether in our careers, our relationships or faith, we are good scorekeepers. The parable reveals that performance-based living ultimately will breed in our hearts a resentment. Even when we're doing good things, the early workers complaint is, "You have made them equal to us." It exposes the pride that lurks beneath our religious duty. The pride that lurks under our religious duty. One um author, I think it was Tim Keller, he says, "Religion and irreligion both avoid grace. You see grace is this economy where the idea of grace is God's ability given to us, God's power given to us and it is not deserved. And both the religious and the irreligious avoid the idea of grace. The religious person who is doing their religious um system trying to earn the favor of God, they avoid grace because they want to earn it. They want to say, "Look at how good I am." The irreligious person avoids grace because they don't want to change. They don't want grace to go to work in their life. So grace is this offensive kingdom concept because we want to work for it or we want to avoid it alto together. But the story isn't over. We go to verse um 13. He says he replied to one of them, "Friend, I'm doing you no wrong. Didn't you agree with me on a daenarius? The parable doesn't just pit justice against mercy, but it shows how God's character transcends our limited understanding of fairness. The vineyard owner operates with perfect contractual justice while extending radical generosity. So Jesus or or the the master is fair to these workers on the agreed upon amount and he is also radically generous. It isn't an arbitrary unfairness. It's an abundant grace flowing from divine character. Jesus is the first when we talk about the last. Right?
Jesus deserves deserves to be the first. He was the first born. He was the firstborn of all creation. It says this parable anticipates the cross. Jesus who deserved the ultimate first place chose to become last so that we could receive the full inheritance of sunship. The equal pay payment in the parable foreshadows the equal standing that all of us have in Christ. Not because we've earned it be but because of the substitutionary grace. Both progressive in a political sense and conservative approaches to fairness fall short of God's radical generosity that maintains justice while extending mercy beyond human calculation. I'll comment on that a little bit more, but let me read the the a few more verses. Take what is yours and go, Jesus says to them, I want to give this last man the same as I gave to you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with what is mine? Are you jealous because I am generous? This parable points toward kingdom community that operates very differently from worldly systems. The early workers grumble. Grumbling represents a scarcity mentality that assumes someone else's blessing diminishes theirs because they got paid what I got paid, but I did more work. it diminishes my work. But in God's economy, it operates from a position of abundance rather than scarcity. Jesus is creating a new kind of family that is ordered in a Jesus style, redefining power. When we truly understand that we're all recipients of unmmerited favor, it transforms how we view others success, blessings or spiritual growth. You see, in our life, there are going to be Christians around us in our spiritual community where those people, they're just going to be like free of from the hardship that you're facing. There'll be people that that are doing really well. And the temptation is to think, man, what did they do to deserve that? Why is God letting that be their story? And the and And we see that across culture, right? Just this pervading jealousy. In fact, there's been over the last couple of decades a move to like reorient society, to give those that are diverse uh more opportunity. Let's re-engineer so society to try to to favor those who who may be different. But Jesus's kingdom is able to rejoice with those who receive unmmerited favor. We're able to appreciate the grace and the generosity that others receive practically. I think I have this on a slide here. Gospel- centered communities celebrate rather than resenting others blessing. When we see other people receiving just this tremendous blessing. We don't compete with them. No, the kingdom should take out of us our competitiveness and it should give us instead a sense of rejoicing in others blessing. It's because they understand that God's generosity, it isn't a zero- sum game. Whether someone comes to faith at an age of 80 or eight or 80, whether they serve for decades or months, we all are late. in receiving more than we deserve. You see, we're all the late workers.
None of us have worked, whether you got saved when you're a little kid or you're 80 years old when you become a follower of Jesus, we're all deserving grace and the generosity of heaven that none of us deserved.
We are all the late workers in this story. The parable ultimately calls us to move from comparisons to celebration, from mer based thinking to gracebased living, creating communities that reflect God's generous character rather than human systems or earned rewards. Let me kind of make this really practical for us for a minute. We a lot of us do life together. Some of you live in close proximity, live in the same apartment with others, and you know the dirty little secrets about one another. That person is out partying. That person is like an addict over here. This person is doing this crazy deal over here, right? You know each other. Then you come to church and those things are hidden. from me and you're thinking in your heart, man, if the pastor knew what I know about that person, he certainly wouldn't let them at church. And then we leave here and we go and your grocery carts get filled up with food over there at the center and and you're like, "Man, if they knew what I knew about that person, they would never let them in this building." Right? That's how we think. That's how We think we make comparisons in our heart rather than just letting God be good.
Letting God be good. We we start thinking, man, that person, they didn't merit that. They didn't deserve that good thing. And here's Jesus like saying, what are you going to you going to get in my face for being generous? Like, aren't you just happy that you're receiving the goodness yourself? It's an insidious part of our hearts that we start making these comparisons. We start looking at other people's food baskets. Do you really need all that food?
Wonder how many kids they have. Do they have grandkids like me?
And who are who are they to get all that food? Do they really need all those frozen pizzas?
Come on. They even have a fridge freezer big enough to hold all that food. What are they going to do with all that food? Right? You've been there, right? You've been there. You know what I'm talking about. Those of you that haven't been to the center. You don't know what I'm talking about.
But it's easy. It's easy to judge and criticize one another as we're getting the food after church, right? To start like to resent the blessing as if you don't know how big the stinking warehouse is at Amazon. Do you know how much food is over there?
Yeah, we got tornadoes that come through and still it ends up over here.
Listen. Yeah. Yeah. That's what Jesus is talking about. He's addressing again our hearts. Our hearts res we feel like well it starts with that desire like I earned this like and and once we start feeling like I earned the grace of God then our hearts get all messed up and we can't enjoy the blessings that other people around us are receiving. The parable ultimately calls us to move from comparison to celebration from meritbased is thinking to gracebased living, creating communities that reflect God's generous character rather than human systems of earned rewards. The parable suggests that both the DEI movement and now we have a mo a swing culturally, politically towards meritocracy In other words, earning your position. They both miss something radical. Pure meritocracy assumes a level playing field that has never existed. While identity based systems can perpetuate the very divisions that they seek to heal. The vineyard owner's approach offers a different model. First of all, he maintains standards. Work has to be done. He's not just giving the guys at 5:00 in the afternoon a free Daenarius. He's like, "No, come and work." Second, he addresses real need. The unemployment unemployed workers genuinely needed an income. Third, he operates from an abundance rather than scarcity. His generosity doesn't diminish others. And fourth, he refuses to let comparison poison the community. He says this, he asked this question. Don't I have the right to be generous?
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm not saying generosity towards the land owner.
Okay.
How many people came the next day to work for 12 hours to one of them?
None of them probably came because generosity should have been the one people that worked the 12 hours. He kept saying, "I'm generous. I'm generous. I'm generous." But he kept smacking him in the mouth. I've given them nothing they deserve.
That's exactly how Jesus wants you to feel. He wants you to feel like this is not fair because you're used to a merit-based system.
Did so.
That's right. That's that is the discomfort. That's the discomfort he wants you to feel. He wants you to feel like this is not fair because He wants you to know, hey, when you come into my kingdom, some stuff changes. Now, in a couple of weeks, we're going to see that Jesus has this tells a story of the parables where he entrusts a certain amount to some guys and then he expects a return on his investment, teaching a totally another set of principles. The key, the key here is to receive that sense of like, oh, this is not fair and to understand that Jesus's economy of grace of blessing and generosity is not framed up in the same way that a work work and wages system is framed up. Okay.
What you got back?
I know. So, you got to sit. So, this is this is the thing. Remember I I I tell you when we're studying the Bible, we read the Bible. Sometimes when we're reading it, we feel the speed bump that we go over.
Yeah. Exactly. This is one of those where you're like, "That's not fair." And that's that's not like you're a bad Christian for feeling that speed bump as you're reading the Bible. No, that's that's where the Holy Spirit intersects with us. And it's like, okay, I want he wants to teach us in that place. He
blessing means just that blessing
and and this is and part of it is that it's because what does Jesus demonstrate, right? What does he demonstrate? That he goes from being the des he If anybody deserved and merited to be the favored one, it was him. But he stepped out of heaven, made himself like a servant so that we in our rebellion against God could be redeemed and elevated as sons of God and be with him, enriched by him. So, it's a good thing that the system of the kingdom doesn't work like our here. Oh. this is what you um worked for. This is what you earn. Because if we're getting what we deserve, what does Romans 3:23 say?
The wages of sin is death. Or is that 6:23? That's 6:20. That's 623. Yeah.
So the w if we get what we worked for, we would get death because of our sin. But instead in the kingdom, we don't get what we worked for. What we get is this abundant grace. we get this like, hey, you only you were only in the you were only in the the vineyard for an hour and you're still going to get grace.
I I'm humbled as I as I look at like as we were getting all this food coming in this week off this truck and just looking at like this is like thousands and thousands of dollars worth of su food coming from Amazon and and the question I'm looking at this and I'm just like I'm wrestling with it because I'm like what what do what do we do, you know? We we didn't do anything to deserve this. I can't look at our story. There's no secret. I have done nothing. Nothing. I didn't come to Baltimore and think, "Hey, this would be a good idea. Let me try to do this." I didn't I didn't even have this idea. Like, we fell into this. The the whole food thing with Amazon, like, I didn't even call Amazon. Some random volunteer that was only volunteering in the compassion center for like three weeks, she's just made the phone call on her own. and then told me like, "Hey, if you go over there, they'll give you a bunch of food."
And that turned into millions of dollars worth of food. Like, there's nothing in that scenario where we can look at it and go like, "Wow, we really did a good job. We just get to participate in it." Like, we just all we get to do is like show up with a truck, be like, "Load us up." Now, there's work that goes on. But the mistake is if we ever take and we start saying like, "Look at the great thing we did." Like, if anything, our boast is like, "Can you believe what God is doing. That's crazy,
right? Yeah. Yeah. There's really no boast in it. And then and then you see and and I know like not every church gets to do that. And how humbling is that that we get to be like a part that God lets us like who are we? Like I know you guys. Nothing special here. Like including me. There's nothing. You thought that was funny, Marian, didn't you? All right. Well, we're over time. Let's let's pray. Lord, thank you for um your generosity towards us and uh we're really really grateful. We we we there's nothing that we've done to deserve your kindness. There's nothing that we've done to to to receive your grace. As we come to the table and receive communion, Lord, we um just ask for that humility of heart, just a deep humility and a trust in you. you. We just demonstrate a deep gratitude for the work of the cross. I ask this in Jesus name. Amen.