After Pentecost Devotional - Day 34

“Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Why should you be jealous, if I want to be generous?” Matthew 20:15

Grace is an interesting and difficult concept for us. We like it when applying it to benefit ourselves, but when it is applied to others our appreciation tends to suffer. Rather than look at grace as a good thing, we often look at it from the perspective of our greed, jealousy, ambition, and a sense that we are being cheated out of something. That is essentially what Jesus was getting at in this parable about the gracious landowner.

Here we find a landowner needing to employ many day-laborers to harvest his fields. He contracts a first bunch of workers at the early hour of the day for a day's wage. As he goes back for more and more laborers, he tells them he will pay them what is fair. At the end of the day, however, he pays all the workers a day's wage. The pay he gives is the basic pay necessary to care for their needs and that of their families. It is a fair wage in that it meets their needs.

This definition of fairness then becomes the stumbling block for the laborers who had been working all day. They wanted more. They expected more. They believed themselves more worthy than the rest of the workers because they had labored longer. We would most likely believe the same in our marketplace today. We consider that wages are just and fair only with regard to effort and time. For Jesus, fairness follows a completely different metric.

In this parable, he is not concerned with equality of work, effort, expenditure of time, and energy. His concern is that the needs of all are addressed. Equality is here about a shared need. It is about meeting the shared needs of the workers and their families. It is about grace extended to meet people according to their needs, not according to definitions of a comparative worth due to effort, work, or contribution.

Grace does not power our social and economic models of fairness. Grace is generally not part of our equations of how we treat one another. Grace is not the norm of our or most any society in regard to economics, opportunity, justice, fairness, and the valuation we give to individuals.

Our social and cultural models do not leave ample room for grace. It is most often seen as excessive, frivolous, expensive, and a waste of resources. Rather than offering grace, we want to see people rewarded for industry, risk, investment, effort, and greed. We go so far as to reward selfishness because we are selfish. We want to compare the efforts and actions of others to our own, with little regard for assessing one another's needs. It seems too difficult and complicated to care enough to go that far.

Grace, however, takes the time to go that far. It does more than treating others as competitors for meager resources. It assumes there is enough to meet the needs of all. It deals with abundance, generosity, and treating all people as worthy of effective care.

Do your attitudes toward others reflect an abundance of grace? Resolve to allow grace to overcome selfishness in favor of generosity.


"Lord, make your generosity of grace flow freely through me."


—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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