Beloved
in Christ, God made us in His image. And for millennia now we have been
returning the favor and trying to make God in our own image.
I
don’t mean that as a compliment. When God created us in His image, He was
bestowing upon us good gifts. He was endowing us with reason, so that we would
not have to live purely by instinct. More importantly, He gave us holiness and
righteousness, so that all our actions would be noble and praiseworthy and so
that we would live a life of trust in Him. But what did we do? We threw away
that gift. Instead of holiness we pursued sin. Rather than being governed by
reason, we often follow our basest desires and do so unthinkingly. But to top
it all off, we started trying to create God in our own image. We pretended that
He was exactly like one of us—more powerful than us, to be sure—but otherwise
indistinguishable from you and me.
We
cut God down to our size by calling Him “the Man Upstairs,” as if He were a
slightly older human being, but with all our foibles and quirks. We assume that
He is as fickle as we are, and that He has basically the same moral outlook we
do. Indeed, whatever we happen to think about a particular subject, we assume
that it is His view as well, for we are smart, reasonable beings and God must
certainly be like us if He is worthy of the name God.
But
then we are confronted with those words from today’s Old Testament reading: “My
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD.”
We may try to get God to conform to our expectations and our way of doing
things, but we won’t succeed. God will remain God, not a creation of our
imagination.
Therefore,
when we come to the Scriptures, we shouldn’t expect to see the LORD God
confirming our preconceptions about Him. We are selfish people; the LORD God
isn’t. We are tainted by sin; the LORD God is holy. We are limited in our
understanding; the LORD God knows all things. Therefore, we should actually be
expected to be surprised when we read the Scriptures and learn more about the
LORD. This is especially true if we haven’t been Christians all that long or if
we have read very little of the Scriptures or if we have read the Bible very
superficially. We should expect that the LORD will surprise us when He tells us
exactly what He is like.
And
so we should expect that God will demand something greater of us in the way of
morality than we would. After all, we are looking for the easiest way out. We
are looking for ways to justify our selfish behavior. But if the LORD God is
holy and wants us to be holy too, He will have to ask for more out of us. You
see, we take the saying “no harm, no foul” and recraft it as “no blood, no
sin,” as if you have to harm someone badly enough that they end up in the
hospital before it counts as a sin. And since we haven’t done anything that
horrible, or done so only very occasionally, we look pretty good.
But
God tells us to get a deeper morality than that. Sure, He forbids us to murder
others, but He also tells us not to be angry with them or call them names.
Sure, He forbids us to commit adultery, but He also orders us not to look at
others with lust in our eyes. Our words and our thoughts are as much subject to
His scrutiny as the crassest of our deeds, and they must pass inspection no
less than our actions.
But
God’s thoughts are about more than mere morality. That is one of the ways that
His thoughts are so much higher than ours. The best we can think to come up
with is a mediocre morality. But God wants to establish a relationship with us
that is based on something even better than morality: His love, mercy, and
forgiveness.
We
see that in today’s Gospel. There we see a man who hires a crew of workers at
the beginning of the day and promises to pay them a denarius, which was more
than fair pay for a day’s work. Three hours into the workday he realizes that
he will need more workers and so he hires some more. He does so again at the
sixth hour and the ninth hour. Finally, at the eleventh hour, one hour before
quitting time, he hires a final batch of workers. He then pays everyone a
denarius. The people who were hired first don’t like it. I suppose that neither
would several federal agencies today. Sure, we would allow him to pay the last
group of workers a denarius, but only if he upped the pay for the first group
of workers to twelve denarii.
Why
do we instinctively have a problem with what the man in the parable? It is
because we do not understand grace, that is, when God gives us something that
we don’t deserve and couldn’t in fact earn. We look at God as if He were our
boss, and anything we get from Him as our wages. If we work hard, we expect to
be highly compensated. If we are good people, living upright lives, we expect
God to give us high-paying jobs, prestige in society, a great family, and a pleasant
life. And if we or someone else messes up and violates one of God’s
commandments in a serious way, we expect some misfortune to strike. When it
comes to our salvation, we do things the old-fashioned way: we earn it.
And
so we are scandalized by the idea that God would forgive sins, that He would
give people something better than what they deserve. We ignore the fact that, if
God truly paid people the wages they deserved, everyone would be condemned to
hell, for all people have sinned against Him. But let’s say that we were able
to live a perfect life and received as our due wages eternal fellowship with
God in heavenly bliss. Now imagine that God gives the same gift of eternal life
to someone who hasn’t been perfect. We would consider it grossly unfair,
especially if that person wasn’t even close to our level of perfection. We
would complain that we were being cheated somehow.
But
the man in the parable asks some pertinent questions. He told the workers who
worked all day, “Did you not agree with me for a denarius?”
Whatever the man gave the other workers, he had not violated his agreement with
them. By the same token, God promises that all who are perfectly obedient to
Him will receive the rewards of heaven. That agreement is not violated simply
because God decides to show mercy to sinners. The man in the parable goes on to
ask, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do
you begrudge my generosity?” And that is what it boils down to: We have
no right to begrudge God’s generosity. If He wants to show mercy, we have no
right to complain, as if we were being robbed somehow or another.
Far
from being cheated, we ought to realize exactly how generous God is, for even
the best of us are more like the workers hired near the end of the day than
those hired at the very beginning. We will enter heaven not based on our works,
but as a free gift received from the LORD God, paid at the great cost of
Christ’s suffering and death.
Now
this parable usually leads people to ask the question: If we all can get the
same free gift of salvation regardless of whether we trusted in Christ early in
life or late in life, then why should we become a Christian early in life and
take the faith seriously and strive to live a godly life, when we could turn to
God on our deathbed and equally be saved? There are two answers. First of all,
you might not have the chance to lie on your deathbed and mull over your life
and consider returning to the LORD God. You might die quite suddenly, when you
least expect it, without a chance to repent. That is why the Scriptures state
repeatedly: “Today is the day of salvation.” There may not be a
tomorrow. But there is another reason: we don’t want to miss out on fellowship
with God. You see, we embrace the Christian faith not as something laborious
but as a gift from God. Or more accurately: where God Himself is the gift.
It
is not a burden to hear the invitation, “Seek the LORD while He may be
found; call upon Him while He is near.” It is not a burden because we
know that “He [will] have compassion on” us and “will
abundantly pardon.” Therefore, beloved in the Lord, let us rejoice that
God’s thoughts are higher than ours, and let us ponder what He has revealed
about Himself. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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