Readings: Jonah 3:10 - 4: 11 Matthew 20: 1-16
We pray: Gracious and merciful God, we pray that you
would speak your truth into our hearts today, that we would challenged,
encouraged and renewed to your service. Amen.
A sermon of two
parts today – but one message: the grace and mercy of God is abundantly
generous and is for all people.
A statement that
Jonah in our first reading absolutely disagreed with – when asked by God to
deliver a message denouncing their wickedness to the people of Ninevah he ran
in the opposite direction, not so much because he was afraid but because he
suspected that if they listened they might repent and then God would forgive
them. Because he knew his God’s ridiculous capacity for mercy. And Jonah didn’t
think that they deserved any second chance.
Whatever else you
might think about Jonah – he had gumption.
Not a lot of wisdom but a heap of attitude. We know the story of his
flight and God’s relentless pursuit – we all know the story of the his voyage
at sea, his being chucked overboard, his encounter with a whale – and his realisation that it was his own actions
that had led him to this. His prayer to
God when he realised his predicament was deeply contrite for he realised how
foolish he had been – ‘as my life was
ebbing away I remembered the Lord’.
But then the graphic
emotive description of life and death storms and grief that accompanied Jonah on
the sea voyage become somewhat pedestrian when we hear the next part of the
story. He was spewed up onto the land and walked to Ninevah. – he entered the
city, cried out the words, ’40 days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown’. The people heard the truth of his words and
threw themselves on God’s mercy. Jonah was
right about the outcome, he knew that God would respond with compassion and thought
that was wrong – that they should be punished for their evil ways.
Jonah, who himself
had pleaded for forgiveness and with it his life whilst in the belly of the
whale wasn’t prepared to see that same mercy offered to the people of Ninevah!
Seriously double standards here. Hence the
episode outside the city - the sheltering bush being eaten by the worm – lesson
number two for Jonah – that if he valued the shade of a bush he had no other
relationship with, how much more would God be concerned that the 120,000 people
of Ninevah should see the error of their ways and come to a way of right living
again. We don’t know if Jonah needed
more lessons in his life but we would suspect he did.
The teaching for
us from this story – the persistent love of God that pursued both Jonah and the
people of Ninevah for as long as it takes to get them on the right path and
understand the justice and love that is the way of God. Do we recognise that same guidance to shape
our lives in the way of Jesus – that we are forgiven seventy times seven, that God’s
grace and mercy are beyond generous when we stumble and fall and that no amount
of turning our back will remove God from our lives and our living.
And it was lesson
time too in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. Whether this speaks into the relationship of
long-time Jewish Christians with newly arrived Gentile converts or the fact
that some work hard and long hours for the kingdom and want others to prove themselves
before they are fully admitted – Jesus reply is the same: All I have promised you I have given you – I choose
to offer that same to all who come to me!
The complaining
servants remind us that we can be so busy worrying about what it is that we don’t
have or a perceived inequity in our lives that we forget to be grateful for
what we do have
Where we see equal
pay for equal work – Jesus offers a living wage to all. Where we would carefully watch to see that
fairness is upheld – God distributes generous grace so extravagantly that it actually
deeply troubles us – it upsets our sense of right and wrong, our belief that we
earn our way and receive that which we have worked for.
There is a
fundamental difference here: it's actually a place where our culture and our
faith clash quite profoundly. The abundance
of God’s grace and mercy to us is hard for us to replicate to others. We, like Jonah, like the labourers, get angry
if we feel people haven’t paid their dues in some way.
We see it in the
ethic that says people at the bottom of the economic heap don’t deserve decent housing,
medical care, work opportunities.
We see it in the
policies of governments that allow tax avoidance by those with money to burn
when that money would contribute to the good of all.
We see it in the
demeaning walk of shame that those in the welfare system encounter every day.
We see it in a
society that says self comes first and community second.
We see it in the
child poverty, the crisis in mental health, the consumer culture that exploits the
poor and the powerless…. and so the list goes on.
At the time of
writing this I do not know the outcome of the election but I would hope and pray
that our generosity as a nation to those who are still standing waiting to be
picked at the end of the day would be the same as that landowner. That our plenty would be distributed in a way
that values all people despite their marketable skills or lack of them. That would be the Jesus way and so is our way.
And that is for me
the teaching from this story: God’s generosity is a gracious and undeserved
gift to all people. Where we look for
equity, we are surprised by generosity. Where
we talk about deserving, we find love poured upon us without conditions. When we look inwards at the fairness or not
of our own situation, unexpected generosity is happening all around us and we
have missed the celebration.
Our challenge is
to turn our world view upside-down; to stop insisting that the books balance
and instead to see the world through the love and grace and mercy of an insistently
generous God who will not take no for an answer. Amen.
Margaret Garland
