Matthew 20:1-16
2/5/2012
In many ways it seems hard to believe that as of July, I
will have been pastor at Good Shepherd for six years.
It just doesn’t seem like that much time has gone
by.
However I have been reminded recently about this fact
because the kids who were in my first catechesis group at Good Shepherd as
seventh and eighth graders, are now juniors and seniors in high school.
Kids that I have known for the last five and a half
years – with whom I have shared in junior high and high school youth events are
graduating this year or next year.
I have had a chance to get to know them during the
last five and a half years, and so now as I talk with them and see their
Facebook posts, it is very interesting to watch many of them go through the
process of choosing a college to attend.
Very rapidly they have bumped into the fact that it
is one thing to choose and school and get accepted – but it is another thing
altogether to figure out how you are going to pay for it.
And so many of them have been living in that
wonderful world of scholarship applications and financial aid forms.
It’s all a little bit sobering because as I watch
them go through this, I realize that in a mere seven and a half years we will be
going through the same thing with Timothy.
Paying for college is a major concern for parents
and students.
But what would you think if someone just said, “Don’t
worry about it.
Four years of tuition is on us. It’s free”?
That is what has happened in Kalamazoo, MI.
In 2005 the “Kalamazoo Promise” was announced.
Anonymous donors established an endowment -
estimated at that time to be around 250 million dollars – which would provide
graduates of the public high schools of Kalamazoo with a full four year tuition
to any of Michigan’s public universities or community colleges.
Students don’t have to do anything except attend Kalamazoo
schools all the way through and graduate from high school.
Even if you only attend Kalamazoo schools for the
four years of high school, the fund will still pay 65% of tuition.
It’s a remarkable program.
And it was made possible by the best kept secret in
Kalamazoo.
The donors who established the Kalamazoo Promise were
anonymous, and to this day the public does not know who they were.
Most people suspect that they included members of
the Stryker family who have strong ties to the city and are estimated to be
worth 5.8 billion dollars.
Whoever they are, they did it as a way to help the
city of Kalamazoo and the students of that city are receiving it as a free gift
that they did nothing to earn.
In our Gospel lesson this morning, Jesus tells a
parable about workers who are hired at different points in the day.
He tells this parable in order to teach us about
how God works. We are reminded this morning that God gives salvation as a
completely unmerited gift.
And in turn, this gift guides the way we live and
treat others.
Our text this morning ends with the words, “So the
last will be first, and the first last.”
If we look one verse before our text, we find that
it says, “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
The obvious similarity signals that, as so often is
the case in the Gospels, this text is intended to be understood in relation to
what has just happened.
We learn that a rich young man had come to Jesus
and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?”
Jesus’ answer was simple.
He said, “If you would enter life, keep the
commandments.” The young man responded, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall
not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not
bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.” Then the young man said boldly, “All these I have kept.
What do I still lack?”
The young man was confident in his ability to please God
by doing what was right.
But in doing so he had blinded himself in regard to
his real god – the thing that was most important in his life.
So Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go,
sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in
heaven; and come, follow me.” And when the young man heard this he went away
sorrowful, for he had great possessions and he wasn’t willing to live a life
without them.
After this exchange took place, Jesus said to his
disciples, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter
the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” When
the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished.
Like the rest of pious Judaism, they assumed that
wealth was a sign of God’s blessing upon those who were righteous.
And so they asked, “Who then can be saved?” But
Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all
things are possible.”
Our Lord told them that salvation is not in the
hands of man.
It wasn’t possible for us.
But instead, it is possible for God.
The rich young man had been told to sell his possessions.
Jesus had said that with difficulty is a rich
person saved.
This prompted Peter to raise the question: “So what do we
get?”
He asked, “See, we have left everything and followed you.
What then will we have?” Jesus didn’t deny that there would be blessings for the
apostles.
He said, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the
Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also
sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”
And then he went on to add, “And everyone who has
left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for
my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.”
Peter had framed his question in terms of, “What do we
get”?
Our Lord did not deny that there would be blessings that
result from sacrifice for the Gospel.
But then in our text, he immediately comes back
with a parable which makes it very clear that salvation is God’s gift.
It is unmerited because for man salvation is
impossible.
However with God salvation is graciously possible.
Our Lord began by saying, “For the kingdom of heaven is
like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for
his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent
them into his vineyard.”
The master of the house would have been, by
Palestinian standards, a large land owner.
These landowners would hire men to work on their
land – men who had either no land of their own and or who owned very little, and
who eked out an existence working for others. They agreed upon a denarius – a
common day’s wage.
Jesus then says that the master went out several more
times during the day – he went out at 9:00 in the morning, 12:00 noon and 3:00
in the afternoon.
Each time he found men standing around in the
marketplace of the city.
The available information indicates that
unemployment was a real problem in Palestine during the first century A.D.
The scene Jesus paints would have been common to
his hearers.
Able bodied men went to the marketplace looking for
someone to hire them.
And there would be many who went there and did not
find any work.
The master hired these men and said to them, “You
go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.”
Finally, the master did this at the eleventh hour – at
5:00 p.m. – just one hour before the end of the work day.
When the end of the day arrived he ordered his
foreman to pay the men in reverse order – those hired last were paid first and
they each received a denarius.
All the workers received a day’s pay even though
they had worked less than a day – in some cases,
much less than a day.
When those hired at the beginning of the day were paid,
they thought that now they would receive more than a denarius.
However, they grumbled when they received only the
denarius they had been promised. And so the master responded to them, “Friend, I
am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what
belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am
I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my
generosity?”
And then Jesus concluded the parable by saying, “So the
last will be first, and the first last.”
In the parable, our Lord teaches us that salvation is not
something that is possible for us based on our actions.
Instead it is based on God who graciously does the
impossible.
He does it all by grace.
He gives it as a free gift to those who haven’t
done anything to earn it.
Now we give gifts to people who are our family and
friends.
But that’s not the way God does things.
Instead, he gives this gift to people who by nature
are utterly opposed to him.
He gives this gift to people who are spiritually
blind, dead and enemies of God.
He gives this gift and in doing so he regenerates
them – he causes them to be born again as people who can now see; who are now
alive; who are now his children.
Now we know that when it comes to this world, there is no
such thing as a free lunch.
We might get something for free, but somehow,
somewhere, someone is paying for it.
In the Kalamazoo Promise, students can receive a
free four year education.
Of course, the education isn’t actually free.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars and that cost
must be paid.
There was a price paid – it was paid by the hundreds of
millions of dollars that were donated in order to set up the endowment that
funds the scholarship program.
Our salvation is a free gift of God.
But that doesn’t mean it had no cost.
In the very
next verses after our text we hear, “And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem,
he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them, ‘See, we are
going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief
priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to
the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on
the third day.’”
This is in fact the third time that Jesus predicts his
passion in Matthew’s Gospel.
However, it is the first time he indicates that
crucifixion is the way he will die.
Jesus Christ goes to the cross to pay the ultimate
price for our sins.
He pays the greatest possible price for our
salvation.
He goes to the cross, not simply to die a humiliating and
excruciating death.
He goes to bear our sin.
As St. Paul tells us, he goes
to become sin in our place.
He goes to receive the ultimate consequence of sin
that we deserved – to be forsaken by God.
For it is on the cross, as he bears our sins and
dies that Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me.” He is
forsaken by God so that we never will be. And then on third day he rose from the
dead as the victorious Savior who had completed his mission and defeated death.
Salvation is God’s free gift to us.
But it was not free.
And because we have freely received this costly
gift, the Gospel now leads us to live in new ways – sometimes even in costly
ways.
God has freely given forgiveness to us.
And this means that now we share this forgiveness
with others.
It means that husbands and wives forgive each other – even
when the words or action were dumb and thoughtless.
It means that brothers and sisters forgive each
other – even when the action was intended to annoy a sibling and get a rise out
of him or her.
The free gift of forgiveness must be freely shared
with others, or else we can’t hang on to it.
That’s what Jesus was saying when he taught us to
pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
And just in case we missed this point, immediately
after finishing the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says, “For if you forgive others their
trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not
forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your
trespasses.”
Forgiveness is at the center of Christian marriage
and family life, because Jesus Christ is at the center.
And where Christ and his free forgiveness is
present, forgiveness is feely passed on – especially to those who are closest to
us.