What
do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and
work in the vineyard today.’ He
answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the
same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his
father? They said: The first. Jesus said to them: Truly I tell you, the tax
collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. (Matthew
21:28-31)
I find that at least slightly enigmatic? Do you?
Jesus seems to be saying that everyone winds up in the kingdom of God
eventually. It’s just that the tax
collectors and the prostitutes get there earlier and easier than the overly
righteous, those whom Robert Burns called the unco’ guid,[1] who are delayed because
they don’t do what they claim to do, or perhaps because their egos are in the
way. The tax collectors and the
prostitutes make only modest claims about righteousness, but they fulfil the
law in deeper ways. Is that right, and
is that what it means? Or does he mean
that vain self-righteousness is actually worse than anything the tax collectors
and prostitutes are up to…?
At any rate it does have echoes of last week’s
parable, in which the owner of the vineyard pays the same to those who had
worked only one hour, as to those who had worked all day. When they complained, the proprietor asks, Are you envious because I am generous?[2]
“Generous” is the key to it… The usual biblical word is Grace – in Greek
the lovely word χαρις – in the Hebrew scriptures it is chesed, grace – along with love, the closest language gets to the
nature of God. Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
in a sermon in California, put it inimitably:
This family (God’s kingdom) has no outsiders. Everyone is an insider. When Jesus said, "I, if I am lifted up, will draw..." Did
he say, "I will draw some"? "I will draw some, and tough luck
for the others"? He said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all."
All! All! All! – Black, white, yellow; rich, poor; clever, not so clever;
beautiful, not so beautiful. All! All! It is radical. All are to be held in
this incredible embrace. Gay, lesbian, so-called "straight;" all!
All! All are to be held in the
incredible embrace of the love that won’t let us go.
In
our prayer we are present in that generosity, that grace. It is altogether too much, too impossible,
too inequitable, for the church at times to stomach, let alone we ourselves in
our times of guilt and failure, or our times of anger with others. But our place in the queue as it were, in the
order of precedence of God’s kingdom, depends upon none of that. It depends on grace, generosity and love.
[1]
Robert Burns: Address to the Unco Guid or
the Rigidly Righteous.
[2]
Matthew 20:15. The Greek for generous is
agathos (αγαθος) which usually means
simply “good”. This generous, gracious
goodness, overturning human assumptions about worth and deserving, is simply what
God is like.
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