(Psalm 51, Micah 6:6-8; Luke 18:9-14)

The great danger for the church is legalism.  I’ve said this more than once, but it bears repeating, often, because it’s a constant temptation.  In fact, we might say that legalism pulls us with the force of gravity—we fly by God’s grace, but if we aren’t constantly seeking to stay in the air, we will crash.

That’s easy to miss.  When we think of legalism, we think of moralism and all sorts of rules about things we can’t do, and an excess of that sort of thing just doesn’t seem to be a major problem in our society just now; but that’s just one form legalism takes.  That’s not what it’s about—that’s not what it is.  Legalism is about self-salvation.  It tells us we can be good and live the good life (however we understand that) while still ruling our own lives, through our own effort, by keeping the rules.  They may be rules we associate with the Bible, they may come from the self-help movement, they may be ones we make up ourselves; they may be about living up to other people’s rules, or about breaking other people’s rules.  That’s just details.  The core is the same:  I choose the rules I follow, I keep them myself, I’m in control of my life, and I get the credit.

That point about getting the credit is important:  part of the appeal of legalism is the fertile ground it offers for spiritual pride.  “Righteousness” isn’t a popular word these days, but whether they use it or not, I think everyone has a concept of righteousness—of how they ought to be living, and what it would look like to live that way—whether they believe in a god outside themselves or not.  God has not left himself without a witness, and one way or another, everyone has to deal with that.  But if you can convince yourself that you know what rules are important and you’re doing a good job of keeping them, then you can tell yourself that you’re doing well—and you can feel superior to all those around you who aren’t keeping them as well as you are.

This is in some ways a base and childish temptation; but it can easily be made to look very spiritual and impressive, if the rules you follow seem to be noble ones.  This was much of the problem with the Pharisees; after all, what rules could possibly be nobler than the law of God?  Of course, as Jesus pointed out more than once, what they were really keeping wasn’t God’s law, but their interpretation of God’s law; even so, they were convinced of their own righteousness, and of their right to look down on the “people of the land,” who didn’t meet their standards.  To them, Jesus told this parable.

The atonement sacrifices for Israel were offered twice a day in the temple, at dawn and 3pm.  (When the text says these men went up to pray, don’t assume private prayer—the same word was used for going to public worship, and that’s pretty clearly the case here.)  At each service, a congregation gathered to worship, to pray during the burning of the incense after the lamb had been sacrificed, and to receive the blessing of the priest.  Among those who went up this day were a Pharisee and a tax collector.  Both stood apart from the congregation.  The tax collector knew himself despised and rejected by the rest as a lawbreaker and a traitor to his people; the Pharisee despised and rejected the rest, and believed touching them would make him unclean.

Though he considered himself superior to the rest of the congregation and wouldn’t stand among them, the Pharisee wasn’t completely separate from them.  You see, Jewish practice was to pray aloud; it seems this Pharisee was taking advantage of that, praying loudly enough so that those closest to him could hear him and profit from his example.  After all, they wouldn’t get many chances to see a truly righteous person, so it was clearly his duty to instruct them.  Thus he prayed aloud, “God, I thank you that I’m not like other people, who are thieves, rogues, and adulterers, like that tax collector over there.  No, I fast twice a week, and I give tithes of everything I own—not just of grain, wine, and oil, but a tenth of everything, even of my spices; I do far more than the Law requires.  God, I’m wonderful, I’m doing a great job of following you, I have every reason to be proud of myself, and I thank you for that.”

The Pharisee is so enmeshed in his sin, he can’t even see it.  As the twelfth-century Arab Christian scholar Ibn al-Ṣalibi commented, “We know that the one who isn’t a thief and adulterer isn’t necessarily a good man.  Furthermore, experience demonstrates that the search for the faults and failures of others does the greatest harm of all to the critic himself, and thus such action must be avoided at all costs.”  Thus, even as the Pharisee holds up the state of his spiritual life for admiration, he’s tearing it to shreds.

In sharp contrast, we have the tax collector, standing well behind the congregation, far from the altar.  To the Pharisee, he’s merely a sinner to be avoided, but that’s not all he is.  Standing in a posture of humility, hands crossed over his chest and head bowed, he begins to beat on his chest in anguish.  This was an expression of extreme emotion, something women might do in public—at a funeral, perhaps—but not men.  The only other place in Scripture where we find men beating on their chests is after the death of Christ on the cross—it would take something that terrible to evoke such a response.  That we see the tax collector doing it shows the depth and power of his anguish at his sin.

As he beats on his chest, he prays.  “Mercy” is too light a word here—what he says is, “God, make an atonement for me, a sinner.”  The atonement sacrifice has just been offered, and with tears streaming down his cheeks, hammering his chest with his fists, the tax collector begs God that somehow that atonement would count for him, not just for the others, that somehow it would be enough to cover his sins.  “O God,” he cries out, “let it be for me!  Somehow, let it be for me.”  He is utterly broken, knowing his complete unworthiness even to stand in the temple, knowing all the evil he has done, knowing there is absolutely nothing to commend him to anyone, let alone a holy God; and yet he stands there hoping desperately that the mercy of God might just manage to find him, that maybe it might be possible that he could be made right with God.

And what does Jesus say?  “I tell you, it is this man who went down to his home justified, not the other.”  Why?  “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”  The Pharisee exalts himself—he praises himself for his godliness, his closeness to God—and despises those whom he considers less godly; the atonement isn’t available to him, because he doesn’t really think he needs it.  He’s riding for a fall, and God will bring him down.  By contrast, the tax collector humbles himself before God, under no illusions as to his worthiness, only pleading that the sacrifice would somehow atone for his sins, and so it is he who God lifts up; it is he who is made right in the eyes of God.

There’s no room for pride here.  As Paul told the Corinthians, God has chosen the foolish, the weak, the lowly, the despised, and the nobodies so that he might put to shame those who think they’re somebody.  If you think you have it all together, if you think you get the credit for the good things in your life, you need to look to your heart.  If you think you’re righteous enough that you can focus on finding and highlighting everyone else’s faults, you’re not.  If you think you have the right to refuse to forgive those who have done you wrong, you need to repent and be forgiven.  But if you know your sins, if you know you’re not worthy, if you know you need forgiveness and grace, then welcome.  Welcome, because this is for you.  Let’s pray.

(Jeremiah 8:8-13; Luke 18:1-8)

The world is at odds with God, because the Devil is always at work, and he always finds fertile soil for his efforts.  Even when the world seems friendly to God, it’s always working to turn faith in Christ into mere human religion, which is much more useful and congenial to it.  It’s always working to turn the church away from Jesus—it doesn’t even matter what direction; “conservative” and “liberal” both serve the purpose equally well.  The key is simply to divert the gospel.  Those who refuse to be diverted will be marginalized, slandered, or even attacked more directly.

This is a reality the first disciples knew better than we do.  Like Whittaker Chambers when he converted from Communism to Catholicism, they must at times have thought they had left the winning side for the losing side.  It can be hard to keep the faith when all the loudest voices in your society are condemning you as wrong, bad, out of step, and opposed to all that’s good and right.  Jesus doesn’t sugarcoat the situation for them; instead, he tells them a parable to teach them “they should always pray and not give up.”  Actually, it’s even stronger than that, because what we have here is almost a command:  “It is necessary for you to keep praying.”  The New Testament scholar Darrell Bock calls it a “moral imperative.”  Whatever comes, Jesus is telling the disciples, keep praying; don’t tire, don’t lose heart, don’t give up hope, just keep praying.

Jesus begins the parable by setting the scene, in very broad terms:  a crooked city judge, presumably a Jew, but not one of the religious authorities; he’s apparently a secular judge of some sort, because he’s a bad man of a type the priests, scribes, and Pharisees would never have tolerated.  One, he doesn’t fear God, which is to say he’s completely indifferent to God and his demands—including the demand for justice.  Two, he doesn’t feel any shame before other people for anything he does.

Now, we’ve talked about this a bit, that this was an honor-shame culture.  In modern Western culture, we think in terms of abstract concepts of right and wrong—even people who say they don’t believe in right and wrong use that language—which are a matter for each person’s individual conscience.  Whether we hold that good and evil are absolutes to which our consciences alert us, or believe that each of us determines our own right and wrong, the basic idea is the same.  For the Near East and the Middle East, it’s very different:  the community decides what’s good and bad, and what matters is whether your action is honorable or shameful in their eyes.  Well, like the people Jeremiah condemns, this judge does shameful things—such as hurting a poor widow whom it was his job to defend—and feels no shame, no matter what anyone says about it.

This widow is clearly suffering injustice, probably relating to some property which is rightfully hers.  Unfortu­nately, she lacks the resources or the family connections to defend herself, so this judge is her only hope.  She has every right to expect him to protect her—Jewish legal tradition declared that a widow’s suit came only after that of an orphan in importance—but he doesn’t care.  She lacks the social standing to compel him to vindicate her, she has no protector to force him to hear her case, and she can’t afford to bribe him, so he isn’t listening.

She refuses to give up.  She’s powerless in almost every way, but she does have one advantage:  as a woman, she cannot be mistreated in public, which means she can say and do things which would never be tolerated coming from a man.  Kenneth Bailey illustrates this with a story from Beirut in the 1970s.  A young man, a widow’s only son, disappeared.  His extended family went looking for him, but found no trace.  Finally, in desperation, they sent three women to confront the military leader who controlled the section of Beirut where he had been kidnapped.  They shouted their way past his guards and officers, then proceeded to bury him under an avalanche of abuse and complaints.

Dr. Bailey asked one of them, “What would have happened if the men of your family had said such things to this man?”  Her response, eyebrows raised, was, “O, they would have been killed at once.”  As he summed up the story, “In the case of my Palestinian friend, the family had deliberately sent the women because they could express openly their sense of hurt and betrayal in language guaranteed to evoke a response.  The men could not say the same things and stay alive.”

This is the widow’s one advantage:  she can go to the court, day after day, and demand justice at the top of her lungs, and the judge can’t silence her.  Over time, he realizes that he can’t wait her out, because she’ll never stop coming.  He says to himself, “I don’t care what God thinks about me and how I run my court; I don’t care what anyone else thinks about me either; but this woman is giving me a splitting headache, and it’s only going to get worse if I don’t give her the vindication she’s looking for.  I’d better give her what she wants before she wears me out completely.”  And so, though this crooked judge has every advantage but one, it is he who caves and the widow who wins, because she pressed her one advantage so relentlessly and with such determination.

The principle here is the one we saw a few weeks ago, “from the light to the heavy,” which means, “how much more?”  If the widow’s needs are met, how much more will we find our needs met when we pray not to a harsh judge but to a loving God?  The specific need highlighted here is the need for vindication:  that justice would be done for the disciples, and that judgment would come on their enemies; that in the end, those who follow Christ will be proven right, and those who oppress the people of God will be judged.  And so Jesus asks, “If the widow was able to win vindication from this unjust judge, won’t God vindicate the people he has chosen, who cry out to him day and night?”  The answer to that question is a resounding “Yes!  God will grant them justice—quickly.”

And yet—is that what we see?  We have it pretty good in this country, but it’s clear the culture is turning away from the church; and we can think of a lot of places, such as Iran, where those who follow Christ are persecuted and killed.  If Jesus said God would vindicate his chosen ones quickly, why do they suffer?

There’s another question, too; if you were here two weeks ago when we read the parable of the vineyard owner, this talk of demanding vindication from God might be sitting a little uneasily.  The workers who spent the whole day among the vines demanded justice against those who came late, but brought judgment down on their own heads; they demanded to be proved right when they were actually in the wrong.  If God judges those who oppress us, shouldn’t he also judge us?  After all, just because our cause is righteous doesn’t mean we are; the fact that we call out for justice doesn’t necessarily mean we’re justified.  How can we ask for justice without expecting judgment to fall on us?

The answer to these questions is obscured by our English translations.  In the second half of verse 7, the NIV reads, “Will he keep putting them off?”  The Greek word there is makrothumia, and it means “to restrain anger”; it’s consistently used to describe God’s patience with us in withholding his judgment to give us time to repent.  We saw this concept illustrated in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and in the passage we read that day from 2 Samuel where David could have killed Saul but refused to strike.

If we take the word here in its usual sense, we might render this, “He will be slow to anger over them.”  God will bring justice for his chosen people who cry out to him, but he will not send judgment down on us; by his grace, he has taken his anger at our sin and set it aside—indeed, he took it on himself, as Jesus bore it on the cross.  Our prayers for vindication—and for everything else—don’t depend on our own merit, and they don’t require us to be perfect and blameless; they rest only and entirely on the death and re­surrection of Jesus Christ.  In Christ, our vindication has already come, even if the world doesn’t see it yet.  And if God in his grace chooses to hold back his wrath against those who oppress us, giving them time to repent—well, maybe he’ll save them at the eleventh hour.  If not, their judgment will only be that much greater when it comes.

So why, then, do we keep praying and not lose heart?  Three reasons.  One, God loves us and cares for us.  Two, out of his love for us, Jesus paid the penalty for our sin on the cross.  God has set aside judgment for our sin, and instead has shown us mercy and grace, giving us open access to him in prayer.  Three, Jesus is coming back, and whatever we might suffer now, whatever might go wrong on this earth, all will be made right when he returns.  The only question is, when he comes, will he find us faithfully praying and watching for him?  When he comes, will he find faith on the earth?

(Psalm 99:1-5; Luke 17:7-10)

If I were to ask you to name the major American leaders during World War II, I can guess what names I’d hear.  FDR, of course, and Eisenhower.  Patton.  MacArthur.  Someone would probably come up with George Marshall and Chester Nimitz; I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else mentioned Bull Halsey or Raymond Spruance, fleet com­manders in the Pacific under Admiral Nimitz, or even Frank Jack Fletcher, who was in tactical command over Rear Admiral Spruance at the Battle of Midway.

I doubt, however, that I would hear anyone mention Ernest J. King, and that would be undeserved.  Admiral King was made Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet in 1940, then promoted to Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet after Pearl Harbor.  A few months later, he was also appointed as the Chief of Naval Operations, making him the only man in American history to be both COMINCH—the senior operational commander for the entire fleet—and CNO—the senior administrative official for the U. S. Navy—at the same time.  He may have had more to do than anybody with how the war was won.  However, he didn’t cooperate with the press; one reporter grumbled that if Admiral King had his way, the U.S. would issue one press release for the entire war, it would come at the very end, “and it would read, quote, We won, unquote.”

King was tough, demanding, abrasive, authoritarian, irascible, and fiery.  FDR famously said, “He shaves every morning with a blowtorch.”  His level of expectations created a certain amount of resentment in the Atlantic Fleet over the course of the war, because it was a lot easier to win medals in the Pacific than the Atlantic.  Admiral Nimitz, I gather, was reasonably willing to award military honors to those who served under him, while the Atlantic Fleet under Admiral Ingersoll appears to have followed Admiral King’s philosophy:  “Don’t expect a medal for doing your job.”

Now, this might seem an odd introduction to a parable of Jesus, but it has everything to do with this one, because King’s dictum is the lesson of this parable in a nutshell.  We don’t tend to think of God as being like Ernie King, and we shouldn’t—this is a man of whom one of his daughters said, “He is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy.  He is always in a rage.”  However, we have the pernicious tendency to go too far the other way; we hear Jesus say, “I no longer call you servants, for the servant doesn’t know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends,” and we start to think of him as being on our level—“buddy Jesus.”  Yes, he calls us friends, but we are still his servants.  We’re still just human, even with his Spirit in our hearts, and he’s still God, vastly greater, more powerful, more glorious, and more good than we are.  Yes, he serves us, but that doesn’t make us masters; it’s by his grace, not because we deserve it.

To get the point of this parable clearly, we need to understand the context.  Most people in that culture had at least one servant—in fact, the master in this story is probably on the poor end of the working class, to use our terms, because he only has one.  Only the poorest of the poor had no servants at all; they would often hire their children out as household servants as a way of making sure they had food to eat.  We might think of the work of the servant as demeaning and unfulfilling, but in a world which was ruled by class and social status, in which mere survival was far harder than it is for us, being a servant was usually a pretty good deal.  Yes, it it meant absolute obedience to one’s master, within the limits of the Law—but it also meant security, a place to live, and food to eat; and for one who served a good master, it gave life a sense of meaning and value.

This master is a good and reasonable one.  The meal here is not dinner but supper, eaten about three in the after­noon.  The servant has done a normal day’s work outside, nothing terribly long; once he makes supper, he’ll have some time for himself.  He isn’t being abused, or treated with disrespect; what’s expected of him is fair, and in return, all his own needs are met.  He has no reason for discontent, and no cause for complaint.

“But wait,” you might be thinking—“this master sounds ungrateful.  He doesn’t thank his servant for serving him?”  That’s the standard English translation, yes, but it isn’t a good one.  What verse 9 actually says is, “He doesn’t have grace for the servant because he did what was commanded, does he?”  When Luke uses the word “grace” in this way, he’s thinking in terms of special favor or credit.  The point isn’t that the master doesn’t thank the servant, it’s that the servant doesn’t earn any extra benefits or bonuses just for doing his regular day’s work.

That leads us into verse 10, which has been something of a problem for a long time.  The word the NIV translates “unworthy” literally means “without need”; from “unneeded” it came to mean “worthless” or “miserable” in common Greek usage.  How­ever, as Kenneth Bailey tells us, the literal translation makes perfect sense for that culture, and was often used when this passage was translated back into a Semitic language like Syriac or Arabic.  If someone did something for you and you wanted to ask if you owed them anything, you would say, “Is there any need?”  Often, the response would be, “There is no need”—i.e., “You don’t owe me anything.”  This was common idiom.

Dr. Bailey suggests, and I think he’s right, that this is what’s in view here.  Jesus is telling his disciples, “When you’ve done all that you were told to do, don’t expect a medal for doing your job.  Instead, say, ‘We’re your servants—you don’t need to pay us extra just for doing what we were supposed to do.’”  And who is their master?  Who is it who commands?  God, in the person of Jesus Christ the Son.  He calls us his friends because he involves us in what he’s doing, but it’s still about what he’s doing.  We may not be the Light Brigade—ours not to wonder why, ours but to do or die—we may be free to ask questions, but in the last analysis, it is still ours to obey as we have been commanded.  Any faith which doesn’t regard Christ with the awe and submission he deserves as King of creation is false at the core; at its heart is not love for God but spiritual pride.

This is the religion of much of contemporary America, including much that calls itself evangelical:  a too-small faith in a too-small God.  If we lose our awe at the greatness and holiness of God and the glory and power of Christ our King, then we fail to understand how great is the distance between us and God, and how great was the sacrifice necessary to bridge that distance.  Our sense of our own sin and God’s holiness shrinks, and with it shrinks our gospel.  That works well enough through the pains and struggles of everyday life, as we tell ourselves we aren’t that bad and it’s really not that big a deal.  When we hit something we know is a big deal, when we do something we cannot excuse or defend even to ourselves, we’re in trouble, because we’ve lost the belief that God can forgive and heal what is too big for us to bear.

If we nurture an awareness of the greatness and goodness and holiness of Christ and understand that he’s truly our Lord, not merely our friend, then we recognize that our salvation is a gift, not a reward for services rendered.  On the one hand, our service places no claims on God, for it’s his by right; he is the maker and master of all that is, and everything is his by right.  On the other, our salvation isn’t dependent on us being good enough and never falling short.  God saves us by his grace because he freely chooses to do so out of his love for us, as a gift, no strings attached.  He doesn’t give us what we deserve; he gives us far, far more, and far, far better, than we could ever ask or think or imagine.

(Lamentations 3:19-33; Matthew 20:1-16)

The kingdom of heaven is like this.  There was a man who owned a vine­yard.  One year, as the harvest was beginning, he decided to go himself to hire temporary workers rather than giving that job to his steward.  He rose early and went at 6am to the corner of the village market where the unemployed gathered, looking for work as day laborers.  He chose some, hired them for the standard wage, and sent them to work in his vineyard.

A few hours later, he went back to see how the rest were faring, and found many men still there.  Some, who were beginning to lose heart, were sitting on the ground, but there were many others who were still standing, eager and hopeful and ready to put themselves forward if an opportunity came.  The owner didn’t really need more men, but he hired several more anyway, sending them off to his vineyard with the promise that he would treat them fairly.  By mid-day, he figured the rest had either gotten jobs or gone home, but he decided to check on them anyway; when he found a crowd of men still waiting, out of compassion, he sent a few more out to the vineyard with the assurance that he would do right by them.  He did the same again three hours later, perhaps to honor the determination of those who were still there.

An hour before sundown, the master went back to the market, thinking surely all the men would be gone; it was really quite unusual that any had remained there past noon.  Amazingly, he found a few diehards, depressed and humiliated but just not willing to give up.  Surprised, the owner asks, “Why are you still standing here?”  They respond, “We want to work!  As long as there’s light to see, we won’t leave unless someone hires us.”  In his compassion, he tells them, “You go work in my vineyard too.”  He promises them nothing, and they can’t hope for much, but it’s the best they have, and so they go.

When night falls, the owner calls his steward—who’s been wondering what the master’s been on about all day, why he keeps going to the market and sending back extra workers—and the master says, “Call the men and pay them the wage.”  The steward is taken aback by this; he says, “Master, you want to pay them all the full wage?  They didn’t all—”  The master says, “Yes, I know.  Isn’t it my money?  Just do it.”

The steward starts to walk away, muttering under his breath, “OK, we’ll start with the guys who’ve been here all day, and work our way down the list—”  The master calls him back and says, “No.  Begin with the last ones hired, and work up the list.”  The steward can’t believe his ears.  “Master, you know what’ll happen if you do it that way—”  The master says, “Yes, I do.”  “They’re going to be pretty angry—”  “I imagine some of them will.”  “But—”  “Not another word.  You heard what I said.  Go do it.”

The first group is called, and everyone is stunned into silence when those who worked just one hour are given a full day’s wage.  That group, of course, goes off rejoicing; those first hired, meanwhile, start calculating how much extra they’re likely to get.  But then the next group is called, and they too are given a full day’s wage, and so is the next, and the tension in the first group begins to rise.  When those who worked nine hours also receive one denarius each, the tension reaches the boiling point.  It explodes into anger when those who worked the whole day are called forward and paid—exactly what they were promised, exactly what they agreed to.

Now, those workers have every reason to keep their mouths shut.  They were paid on time and in full, so they haven’t really been cheated.  More than that, they’ve been hoping for more than just one day’s work—hoping the master would keep them on for a second day, or all the way through the harvest, or maybe even longer; if they make him mad, all hope of that is gone.  But they feel cheated, and some of them are too angry to keep quiet.  One man bursts out, voicing their common complaint:  “It isn’t fair!  We worked all day, we did all the hard work, we deserve more than them!  You’ve made them equal to us—how dare you!”  Are they angry because they were treated unjustly?  No:  they’re angry because someone else was shown grace.

The master reads them the riot act.  “Mister,” he says, “I promised you a just wage, and that’s what I paid you.  That’s what you earned, and it’s all you earned—take your money and get out.  You’re free to do what you like with it, and I’m free to do what I like with my money.  If I chose to use it to pay these other men a living wage so that they can feed their families, too, what gives you the right to complain?”

How do the angry workers respond?  We don’t know—the story stops.  Once again, the final response is left in our lap.  It’s interesting that the master doesn’t respond gently and graciously, as the father does in Luke 15 or Abraham initially does to the rich man.  I’m not sure why that is, but I wonder if it might be a matter of context:  this is right on the verge of the Triumphal Entry, in the last days before the crucifixion.  Time is shorter here, things are more urgent, and the division within Israel is continuing to widen and harden.  There comes a point when grace ends, not because God stops being God but because time simply runs out; here in Matthew 20, that point is perilously close for Jesus’ opponents.  They have rejected gracious words; if they don’t hear the hard words, then soon there will be no more words for them at all.

That said, I suspect most of us would have to admit we understand the anger of those full-day workers.  I know I’ve been there.  Some of you have heard this story before, but at the church I served in Colorado, there were some deep divisions in the community and the congregation, and thus unfortunately in the Session.  There were several other issues that compounded the problem in the Session, and at one point I was absolutely furious with a couple of the elders.  I was stalking back and forth in the sanctuary—as usual, nobody else was around—praying at the top of my lungs, just venting at God, when I heard his voice in the back of my mind:  “Show them grace.”  Well, I knew that was God because it absolutely wasn’t me, and I didn’t want to hear it; I snapped back, “They don’t deserve it.”  He replied, “I know.  That’s why it’s called grace.”

I don’t mind telling you, that put me flat on the floor.  It has continued to resonate with me for a number of reasons, and not least for the lesson that sometimes God’s grace is infuriating.  When is that?  It’s when I start to let myself believe, in my natural pride, that I actually do deserve God’s favor—that for me it isn’t really grace, at least not to the same degree.  “They don’t deserve it”—and I do?  Really?  Maybe I’m closer to deserving it than that person out there that I don’t like very much, but maybe an amoeba’s bigger than a diatom, too—I still can’t see either one without a microscope.

Grace infuriates us because we want to believe we earn the good things we want.  We want to believe that we don’t need grace, that we deserve success and the satisfaction of our desires, and that justice is on our side.  The workers confused justice and grace; they objected to the grace given to others, demanding grace for themselves and calling it justice.  They got justice, not according to their own self-righteous perspective, but by the master’s definition:  he gave them no less than they had earned, but not one bit more.  They got one day’s pay and expulsion from his presence, with no hope of any future employment, or any future relationship.  Whenever we’re tempted to demand justice, we do well to remember the proverb:  “Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it.”