'When God saw what the people of Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 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 God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the LORD said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
The LORD God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”'
--Jonah 3: 10-4: 11
'Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”'
--Matthew 20: 1-16
One of the greatest lessons I learned from The Princess Bride, one of the defining films of my generation, is that life isn’t fair, and anyone who says differently is selling something. I also learned to never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line, and that tv used to be called books. Despite that lesson, I can’t help but notice that we tend to try to make society fair, to make it so that people get what they deserve, what they’ve earned, at least by our standards.
As you wish.
The Scriptures, however, often remind us that while we reap, we sow, we take, and we serve, nobody gets what they deserve, to borrow a line from my favorite songwriter. The stories of our faith are often of folks who are outcasts and on the margins, rejected and labeled as underserving of divine love. They remind us regularly that God’s ways so often are not our ways, and our stories from both the Book of Jonah and Gospel of Matthew illustrate this point.
We find the reluctant prophet Jonah at the very end of his story. Though he fought tooth and nail, he finally accepted God’s call to preach hellfire and damnation to the people of Ninevah, who were a sinful and deplorable lot. due in no small part to Nineveh being the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the folks who had just recently invaded Israel and taken the people into exile.
Any of you – or your kids – watched the VeggieTales Jonah movie? It describes the people of Nineveh being so bad that they slapped people with fishes! Yet after Jonah’s prophesy, in which he stated that God would destroy them in 40 days, something happens. God’s mind is changed when the people genuinely repent of their sins, and God decides to spare them. Now they’re likely to kill Jonah for being a false prophet. He’s terrified and curses God. Ninevah deserved to be destroyed, they only repented at the very end. It doesn’t seem fair.
Fast forward to the Gospel and Jesus, once again, using a parable to try and explain what the kingdom of God is like. He compares it to a vineyard and God to the vineyard’s owner. Needing folks to tend to the vineyard—to grow the kingdom—the landowner—God—enlists laborers early in the morning. Then later in the day at noon, and 3:00, the landowner enlists more help, and then finally does so again late in the evening before dark. When it comes time for payment those who only worked an hour get paid first, followed by the ones who worked half of the day, and finally the ones who worked the whole day, all the same amount. But didn’t the ones who worked the whole day deserve more? Weren’t they more faithful, more dedicated? The landowner’s response is that everyone gets the same amount, everyone is rewarded, even those who didn’t work as long, because the landowner says so. Is that fair?
A priest I knew years ago started a sermon on these readings by saying, “Thank God that God’s not fair!” And it’s true. God isn’t fair, at least not by our standards. We operate out of a mindset that people get what they deserve, that those who work harder and suffer longer should receive more. That seems fair. We are taught about such fairness from an early age, but are we taught grace? Fairness has little to do with the Kingdom Jesus talks about, a Kingdom that welcomes all, even those we think don’t deserve it, even those who didn’t “earn” it. That’s grace.
Fairness is something I suspect we all want to believe it, but in the pursuit of what’s fair we too often are cruel when perhaps we should be generous. Churches at times treat those who have been members the longest with the highest regard, bestowing on them positions on vestries and as ministry chairs, but when someone new feels a call to leadership, the refrain is so often, “You haven’t been here long enough, and it’s not fair to those who’ve put in their time.”
A very real concern for people of my generation and younger is student loan forgiveness. The debate fails because of the thinking that it is isn’t fair for someone who worked hard to pay off their loans to be asked to help someone else who can’t – nevermind that the average cost of even a public four-year degree has nearly doubled since the turn of the millennium, according to EducationData.org. So much of how we relate to one another, it seems, is predicated on our standards for what’s fair, what we believe someone deserves.
These standards are based on a meritocracy, the idea that a person’s position in a society is due to their abilities and talents; if you’re rich it’s because you earned it, you deserve it. What then does that say about being poor, especially when the wealthiest among us commonly didn’t earn it but were privileged with being born into wealth?
The Kingdom of heaven is not a meritocracy. It is based on grace. One doesn’t earn the Kingdom. It simply is given because of God’s love. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what grace is. It’s the free gift God gives in saving the horrible people of Nineveh, and it’s the same standard wage that the landowner in the parable gives even to the ones who worked for just one hour. There’s no judging who is more deserving of grace. As theologian Amy-Jill Levine writes in Short Stories by Jesus, even well-meaning church folk will often ask questions of those in need to determine if they deserve it, questions like, “Do you have a job?” or “Are you saved?” but Jesus tends to ask things like, “Do you have shelter and enough food for you and your children?”
We’ve all heard the phrase, “earn a living,” but I see in these readings from Scripture today the utter absurdity of that saying. Living is not to be earned, but so many of us spend our whole lives trying to do so because we were taught that that’s how the world works. Well, that ain’t how God works! And church folk are the ones called to model God’s radical love and abundant hospitality to the rest of the world. Are we freely giving to those who we may otherwise feel don’t deserve it? Are we welcoming the folks who’ve been here three weeks the same as we would those who’ve been here for 30 years? Rather than worrying what others are getting or what they deserve, or the unfairness of a God that blesses all and calls us to do the same, what if we had eyes to see the good gifts God has already bestowed and used them to care for our fellow laborers in the field, no questions asked?
Seeing the world with Kingdom Eyes changes literally everything. It changes our relationship to money, to other people, to God, and to our own sense of self-worth. It changes our concepts of fairness and the idea that we get what we deserve, what we’ve earned. Another lesson from The Princess Bride is that true love doesn’t happen everyday. Well, it does in the Kingdom. It does when it’s God’s love, rooted in grace and freely given. It does when we live more into God’s Kingdom than the one of our own making. It’s not always “fair.” And thank God for that!