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I’ve been playing a new game on the New York Times site called Connections. There are what look like a bunch of random words on the page. The goal is to figure out which ones are connected to each other in some way. Don’t worry, this isn’t today’s puzzle. It’s from September 22, but I changed one of the categories.
In the spirit of the upside-down nature of the kingdom of God, we’re going to show you the answers, but see if you can guess what the connections are between the words that are the same color.[1]
Blue: Set, as plans
Green: Soda fountain orders
Orange: Words that go with board: ___board
Yellow: Gig jobs
Gig jobs are the most recent way to hire the equivalent of a day laborer.
For as long as I can remember, there have been street corners where people stand waiting to be hired for the day. Day laborers. Many cities now have day labor centers. Some people prefer to hire their day laborers through a temp agency. It seems as long as there are people wanting to work and people wanting to hire them, there will be day laborers.
We see from today’s story from the gospel of Matthew that day laborers have been around for a very long time. The landowner in the story hires day laborers to work in his vineyard and agrees to pay them the standard daily wage.
Have you ever worked as a day laborer? Have you ever hired a day laborer? My husband and I hired day laborers a couple of times to help us move. It seemed like a win-win because we needed help and they needed work. They worked hard, and we didn’t have to bug our friends to come help us. Or maybe we didn’t have any friends left to help us. We moved a lot there for awhile. We were young.
The landowner in today’s scripture has a big hiring day. We aren’t told why, but the landowner keeps hiring workers all day—the first at 9am, and then goes back to the marketplace at noon, and again at 3pm, and then 5pm to hire more. In my somewhat limited observation, most of the hiring happens at the start of the day, so you wouldn’t expect to find many people to hire later in the day, nor employers looking to hire late in the day. But that’s what happens here. It’s kind of like Oprah. “You get a job, and you get a job, and you get a job….everybody gets a job!” What a blessing for the workers who might have been starting to feel the despair of being left out or left behind. Everyone gets an opportunity to join the work party.
If you’ve ever worked as a day laborer you might know that day laborers are in a bit of a vulnerable place. They are at the mercy of whoever is willing to employ them. For the most part, they are outside of the protection of labor laws and injury insurance. A dishonest or dishonorable employer could easily exploit them. Maybe that’s one reason that those who were hired first are quick to grumble when everyone gets paid the same no matter how much of the day they worked.
Obviously, this is not fair, especially if you’re thinking about the hours worked. But the landowner challenges them to look at this differently. He says, “Is it against the law for me to do what I want with my money? Should you be jealous because I am kind to others?” (Matthew 20:15 NLT) Jealousy or envy is one of the seven deadly sins, according to the list first published by the second-century theologian Tertullian.[5] (I wonder what Tertullian would think of the anime series called The Seven Deadly Sins?)[6]
It sounds even worse in a more literal translation: Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things? Or is your eye evil because I am good? (Matt 20:15 NKJV)
Or maybe that’s another way to say, “You’re looking at this the wrong way.”
Those who protest point out their deserving: “Those people worked only one hour, and yet you’ve paid them just as much as you paid us who worked all day in the scorching heat.” (Matthew 20:15)
Their sense of entitlement is affecting how they see this situation. Pride and arrogance, envy and jealousy, do color the way we see things, and make it harder for us to have compassion for one another. These are the pathways to hating one another, aren’t they? Maybe that’s why it’s called the evil eye.
The only thing the parable tells us is different between the groups of workers is that the ones who are complaining about their wages are the ones who arrived first. Our debates about immigration are also about who arrived first.
Some people argue that the United States should restrict immigration because they believe immigrants are undesirable. Some have called immigrants “criminals” and “deviants,” suggesting that immigrants are ruining this country. “Go back to where you came from,” they say. But their attitude is ironic since the United States is a nation of immigrants. Some people just arrived earlier than others. Journalist Jennifer Mendelsohn has taken it upon herself to remind politicians and pundits of their immigrant roots. She traces the ancestry of immigration critics and tweets the results. One prominent commentator who said the United States should welcome only English speakers had a great-grandmother who spoke only Yiddish. A commentator who called for harsher punishments for immigrants who break the law had a Russian great-great-grandfather who was indicted on charges of forging his immigration papers. Mendelsohn knows that most Americans came from someplace else; some of us just got here earlier than others. Despite what we tell ourselves, arriving early is a matter of luck, not personal virtue or merit.[7]
Thankfully God also does not reward us based on what we deserve. We all fall short of God’s glory. When Jesus says, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” he’s telling us that no one is last or least in the kingdom of God. In one sense we’re all last because there are so many generations of people who came before us. That’s the scandal of grace. We are all given God’s grace whether we feel we deserve it or not.
One time in a small group Bible study, we were discussing the story of Jesus on the cross with the two men being crucified on crosses beside him. One of them joins the soldiers in mocking Jesus. The other one chastises the mocker:
“Don’t you fear God even when you have been sentenced to die? 41 We deserve to die for our crimes, but this man hasn’t done anything wrong.” 42 Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”
43 And Jesus replied, “I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:40-43)
The criminal receives God’s grace at the very end of his life, like the day laborers who came at the end of the day and got the same wages as those who came at the beginning. One of the Bible study participants got very angry about this crucifixion story. “It’s not fair,” he said. “The man lived as a criminal his whole life. He shouldn’t get to go to paradise.”
But grace isn’t about being fair. That’s the scandalous and glorious reality. Grace welcomes everyone, the first and the last and the greatest and the least. Grace is the landowner going back to the marketplace throughout the day to see if there were any more people who wanted to come work in the vineyard.[9]
There are so many areas of our lives that are like the situation in that vineyard, where we are jealous of new people or envious of those who seem to have gotten more grace than we have. When have you been like the first hired in the parable and scornful about the kindness someone else has received?
I can remember when I was. I had been at my job for five or six years when a new person got hired to be a project manager. I had wanted that job, but I hadn’t applied for it or told anyone I was interested. It required a bachelor’s degree and at that time I didn’t have one, so I guess I thought it was pointless to try. Maybe I thought one of the bosses would be so inspired by my work that they’d just offer it to me out of the blue. But they didn’t. So instead of being friendly and welcoming the new person and helping her get acclimated, I was aloof and critical. I looked on her with what our scripture reading today calls an evil eye.
Have you ever given someone the evil eye? Sometimes it’s hard to spot, but sometimes we can just feel it. Like when someone is smiling at us but the smile doesn’t reach their eyes. Beware the evil eye.
Proverbs 23:6 tells us about this: “Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats.” That’s the King James version. A more contemporary version says: “Don’t accept an invitation to eat a selfish person’s food, no matter how good it is.” (CEV)
It matters how we see each other. God looks on us with the eyes of grace, and we are to do the same. There’s a great example of this on the Great British Baking Show. Now, I know that the director and the editors exercise great control over what we see, but they’re very good at catching the contestants’ reactions to one another. Close up, so you can see what’s in their eyes. When a contestant gets praise from one of the judges, the other contestants are celebrating too. When a contestant has a failure – you know, the cake falls or the bit you’re working on gets dropped on the floor, or you’re making a landmark cake of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but you get mixed up and make the Eiffel Tower instead…yes, this actually happened on one of the earlier episodes[10]…when those bad things happen, the other contestants comfort each other, often giving hugs. They really do seem to rejoice together and mourn together. They look upon each other with eyes of grace.
We get the ability to see that way from God. Hebrews 4:13 says “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” This can sound scary, but it’s not, because God looks at us with eyes of grace.
Thanks, God.
Cover photo by Inge Maria on Unsplash
[1] Adapted from the puzzle described here: https://lifehacker.com/connections-answer-today-september-22-2023-1850860545
[2] Day laborers in Bangladesh By Nayeem KALAM – https://www.flickr.com/photos/nayeem_kalam/16173816320/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39421755
[3] Photo by jose alfonso sierra on Unsplash
[4] Photo by yue su on Unsplash
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins#
[6] You can watch the series on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/80050063
[7] SHAWNTHEA MONROE. Joel B. Green, Thomas G. Long, Luke A. Powery, Cynthia L. Rigby, Carolyn J. Sharp. Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship (p. 747). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition. Quoting data from Jennifer Mendelson at http://www.resistancegenealogy.com/
[8] Photo by Federico Tasin on Unsplash
[9] Ray Speller in Christian Century https://www.christiancentury.org/article/lectionary/september-24-25a-matthew-20-1-16
[10] https://screenrant.com/great-british-baking-show-baking-disasters/
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