Word of Salvation – Vol.11 No.24 – June 1965

 

The Poor Suckers In The Marketplace Of This World

 

Sermon by Rev. G. De Ruiter on Mat.20:1-16

Scripture Reading: Mat.19:13 – 20:16

Psalter Hymnal: 40; 287:1 (Law); 447; 438; 172:1,4,5,6

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,

The people and the things which appear in this parable are pretty familiar.  The scene which the parable presents to us is very worldly, and the settings are taken from everyday life.

It tells us nothing that is religious or beyond this world – at first sight.  On the contrary.  It speaks about a labour-market.  Here are workers, the unemployed, an employer; and the talk is of hourly wages, labour contracts, rates of pay.

So far, everything is clear.

But highly unclear are the rules of the game in this workmen’s story.  I should like to hear the hullabaloo “The Mirror” or “The Sun” would make, if an employer should introduce such practices in our day, if we were to give to those who did a little job an hour before closing exactly the same as those who had slaved all day long.  Very definitely, there would be some beating of the drums in the Unions, with a few strikes to teach this employer a lesson.  And if this peculiar employer, who is even given a certain paternalistic character, by the term “householder” that is given to him, were to continue to be obstinate, he would certainly learn from experience in the following week.

For most decidedly no man would be so stupid as to come to work at dawn if he could get a full pay envelope so much easier by coming late.  The workers would undoubtedly prefer to work only for a little while at the close of the day.  Nobody is going to be so brainless as to do ten times the work for the same money.

In short, this man is a fool; he is turning the whole economy upside down.  This is your first reaction, reading this story.  But let us have a closer look at its original, historical setting, especially to make clear the labourer’s situation.

In Palestine, the grape harvest ripens towards the end of September, and then close on its heels the rains come.  If the harvest is not ingathered before the rains break, then it is ruined.  And so to get the harvest in is a frantic race against time.  Any worker is welcome, even if he can only give an hour to the work.  Further the men, standing in the market-place, were not street corner idlers, lazing away their time.  In Palestine the market place was the equivalent of our labour-exchange.  A man came there first thing in the morning, carrying his tools, and he waited there until someone came and hired him.  The men who stood there were not gossiping idlers, but housefathers waiting for work, to make a living and the fact that some of them stood there even until 5 o’clock in the evening proves how desperately they wanted and needed a job.

For what was their situation?  They were the hired labourers, i.e. the lowest class of workers, and life for them was always desperately precarious.  Slaves and servants were regarded as being at least to some extent attached to the family; they were within the group, part of a society; their fortunes would vary with the fortunes of the family, but they would never be in any imminent danger of starvation in normal times.

It was very different with the hired day-labourers.  They were not attached to any group.  They were entirely at the mercy of chance employment.  They were always living on the bread line.  The pay was a nine-pence a day, i.e. exactly the living for one day.  If they were unemployed for one day, the children would have to go hungry at home and hungry to bed, for no man ever saved much out of a nine-pence a day for the next day.

So with them to be unemployed for a day was a disaster.

So that is the first element in this parable to notice carefully: these men standing there, waiting for an employer, are poor suckers without rights, living on the lowest social level, without any professional skill, just good enough to pick grapes, always living at the brink of hunger and poverty.  Getting a job, even a one-day job, was a great thing.  And as such they lived completely at the mercy of others.

Well, and that is exactly how we stand on the market place of this world: as poor suckers.  You, with all your flair and claims and achievements, in the eyes of God on the market place of God’s world, a poor sucker, desperately in need of somebody who accepts and engages you.

So this is just another parable to deprive us of all thoughts of rights and claims and prestige, as far as God is concerned, and His care and love.

We are standing there, in spiritual sense, shabby and poor and deplorable, without any means to support ourselves, not able to keep ourselves alive, for this time, for eternity.  And when God is willing to pick us up and take us to His place, it is just a matter of grace.  Grace it is and grace it remains.

So this is just another lesson to keep us humble.  One of the essential aspects of the Kingdom of heaven is the absolute authority, the sovereignty of its King, consisting in the right of dominion and rule in an absolute way.  And this sovereignty the King exercises with wisdom and might.  And there is no wisdom, nor understanding, nor counsel can stand against Him.

None can say “what doest Thou?”  So being called and being accepted by God, being taken home by Jesus Christ is a reason for life long, for eternal gratitude.  Oh yes, maybe you have known all this for a long time already but try to imagine the situation of such a man, standing in that market-place – a few hungry kids at home, his wife becoming thinner all the time, more and more tired and weary, and he, husband and father, not able to support: them, and when night falls this poor fellow has to go home again, without his nine-pence, i.e. without bread for his wife and children, another night with the cries of his hungry children, the sobs and sighs of his exhausted wife.

That would be our eternal misery… if God, the great householder, had not for Christ’s sake picked us up and taken us home.  Isn’t it great – God’s generosity!?

Now food, and life, for ever, in Jesus Christ our Lord.

And therefore this story also is the story about the infinite compassion of God.  God was not obliged to engage you and me, to pick us up from the market-place of this world, giving us new chances, a new possibility of an eternal living.  He did not have

1. Not at all. On the contrary.  Why should God?

In His compassion, by grace, God has given us life again, in Jesus Christ who died for us, on that terrible market-place of this cruel world.

How dull, how perfectly meaningless your life would be if you were not called to work and live in God’s vineyard.  Without Gods gracious act of coming to you and calling you into the vineyard of His Kingdom (as He did so by means of His very own Son), life would be dreadfully empty, it would be frightening senselessness, an animal existence ending up in a ruinous grave.

But now there is God’s generosity, that undeserved surprise, that miracle of divine goodness of an eternal lifelong living for us, unemployed suckers in Gods great market-place of this world.

That is what some religious people do not always understand.  Just as those men from our parable, who had worked from early in the morning did not.  The men, hired at 6 o’clock in the morning had never noticed their employer’s generosity.  They’d never seen his goodness.  As a matter of fact they were not interested in that side of the affair.  They had forgotten that this boss could have left them alone at the market-place.

And now they felt entitled to wages – justly and fairly – they thought they had a claim on the manager.  And that is exactly what the Lord wants to have us unlearn, our way of thinking about rights and claims.  He wants us to accept His way of thinking, that divine way of thinking about mercy and grace, about employment as a matter of divine compassion and generosity, about living in the Lord’s service as a matter of undeserved salvation, delivered as we are, saved by the King’s Very own Son, saved from an idle, joyless, hopeless unemployment.

This whole parable gains meaning on only one condition.  And that is that we let it tell us that this is work which takes place in the vineyard of the Lord, and that therefore it should be service for the Lord, and for this very same reason cannot be viewed as something earned or merited.  On the contrary, it says that this work is itself a gift and carries its reward in itself; for it brings us, the workers without employment and rights, near to our fatherly Lord and His care.

We shall understand this parable only if we see that Jesus is here speaking against legalistic religion, against all religion of the kind that dwells in our hearts by nature.

It is a good thing to realise very clearly how men have toiled, and still toil, in the sphere of religion to earn heaven.  They pile high the altars with sacrifices, they count their beads, using their rosary, they do good works, they even go to such lengths as those strangest of all saints, who spent their whole life sitting on high pillars, enduring the wind and the weather, growing old and grey in the process, solely in order to gain merits for heaven.  And this is what lives in our hearts: a longing to please God to serve something, to be able to enter God’s world with claims and rights because of our religiousness, our piety, our achievements.

But in this way our religious life is a matter of fear, all this coming not so much from the heart but much more à means of making ourselves worthy of heaven.  And of course, then it would in fact be shamefully unjust if the person who entered the Lord’s service at the evening of life were to receive the same as did all those who had toiled and sweated a life time and come home at evening with all their bones aching, sore and painful as anything.  But now we know: Mother Mary and the murderer at Jesus’ side upon Golgotha get the same place in heaven; we know: a faithful elder, working hard for years spending time and money in the church, a pious woman always active in a congregation, well known by every-body, and that woman of the last row, noticed by nobody, that man with his bad past and his conversion of the eleventh hour, all of them the same reward, coming home at night.

All God gives is grace.

We cannot earn what God gives us.  We cannot deserve it.  We cannot put God in our debt.

What God gives to us, is given out of the goodness of His heart, out of His grace.  What God gives a man entering heaven is not pay but a gift.  What God gives a woman passing the gate of death is not a reward but grace.  And on the other side it is not the length of the period you have lived in Gods Kingdom, not the total amount of money and time you have spent in church life that counts, but the spirit in which you have done your work.  And maybe some of those who start at the eleventh hour work in a better spirit than many of those who were born in church and died in church.

That is why some of the first will be last, and some of the last will be first.  It does not matter how much you have done in the church, it does not matter how long you have been working for God of decisive importance only is the very fact of your working, the fact of your faith in the Lord, the very fact of your being called and accepted and employed by the divine Householder, God the Father himself.  And when you have realised and understood the wonder of this being employed by God, this great, undeserved privilege, then deep, warm gratitude will fill your heart, then a daily prayer will raise to the divine Householder, your heavenly Employer: “Teach me, lord, how to serve You in the right way, in the right spirit”, – and you will work, not for gain, for payment, for reward, but only and exclusively because you love Him so much, only and exclusively because you are so grateful for the job itself.  Yes, do consider the service of God itself a reward, a joy, a thrill.

And then, when all your work in this world is done, and the burning sun of time has set, then you will stand, together with God in the coolness of the evening of time.  And you will stand there with empty hands.  Or should I not rather say, you will stand there with all your shortcomings, your sins, your failures in the service of God?

Yet, you need not be afraid.  For a surprising miracle will happen!  Although you have not been much of a worker in the vineyard, God will say to you: “Well done, you faithful servant!  Your work in the vineyard was great.  Oh no, not because it was great in itself, but because you have loved Me.  And now, you may come in, into the joy of everlasting life and perfect service!”

That is what God will say, to you, then, at that great day, if you live and work here and now in the right spirit.  And when you raise your eyes then and there you will discover that God is smiling at you, and that the vineyard has turned into a paradise, a paradise with your God.

Amen.