Envious Eyes

18th Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 20:1-16

I wrote the sermon on Friday – which was Dad’s birthday. It was a rather difficult day all around – one that I had to eventually face. Dad would have been 80 – he so wanted to make it to 80 – none of his forefathers had done that.

Dad was an engineer. Not a railroad engineer – no, he was the kind of engineer that has to be good with numbers. Math came easy to Dad, and he figured that it should come easy to his kiddos. I was always a little slow to understand math, despite a rather good math aptitude - according to standardized tests and all. That made it all the tougher, because Dad knew that I should be better at math than I was.

So, when it came to math, I always kinda thought Dad was against me, and on the side of the teacher. That’s the way kids think, you know. Anyway, it was 9th grade when I finally figured out that Dad was on my side – I had this teacher for Algebra I – Mr. Awaad – I think he was Egyptian. He was a terrible teacher. Even Dad thought so. I did great at Algebra the second time through in Algebra II. Anyway, Mr. Awaad tried to prove to us in class one time that one equals zero, and that whole proposition angered Dad, and he vowed to become my tutor for the remainder of the year, and it actually helped

Matthew was a tax collector. I suspect he had to be pretty good with math as well. Anyway, Will Willimon points out that even though Matthew was a numbers guy, for him, one plus one didn’t always add up to two.[1] For example, in the world of math and sheep, sometimes one was equal to 99. In today’s story, it didn’t really matter what time you showed up for work – you got paid the same wage for that day’s work. Those of us who like to sleep late would have liked to work for this particular landowner.

Truth of the matter is that you and I know that any discussion of today’s parable in light of math is just silliness. This parable is not about fairness – though we’d like to think it is. Rather, this parable is about grace. These days, I have gone to reading my sermons from three years ago and also from 6 years ago. Three years ago on this passage I preached a pretty good sermon. No, I’m not going to preach it again, but I do think I want to repeat an illustration from it. It was the story of the student who had experienced grace. She said, “I left work early so I could have some uninterrupted study time right before the final in my Youth Ministry class at Hannibal-LaGrange College in Missouri. When I got to class, everybody was doing their last minute studying. The teacher came in and said he would review with us for just a little bit before the test. We went through the review, most of it right on the study guide, but there were some things he was reviewing that I had never heard of. When questioned about it, he said that they were in the book, and we were responsible for everything in the book. We couldn’t really argue with that.

Finally it was time to take the test. ‘Leave them face down on the desk until everyone has one and I’ll tell you to start,’ our prof instructed. When we turned them over, every answer on the test was filled in! The bottom of the last page said the following: ‘This is the end of the Final Exam. All the answers on your test are correct. You will receive an ‘A’ on the final exam. The reason you passed the test is because the creator of the test took it for you. All the work you did in preparation for this test did not help you get the ‘A.’ You have just experienced … grace.’”[2]

In my lifetime, I’ve grasped the concept of grace. Unmerited favor. Anything I get from God has absolutely nothing to do with what I have done to deserve it. It has absolutely nothing to do with the works I have performed, the deeds I have committed, even the attitude with which I have served God. What I get from God I receive as an act of God’s grace.

The trouble with this scripture this time around for me is the part of it that I continue to not get. In verse 15, Jesus says that the land owner says to the unhappy servants, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?” Like most of us, I suspect, I have envious eyes. I look around at the manner in which God has chosen to grace others, and my eyes and my heart are envious. Really in three different ways do I experience envy – although I must admit that I am not so bad at one of the ways as I might be.

The first way we experience envious eyes is when we perceive that the other person is less deserving of God’s grace because of sins of commission. We perceive that those persons have been rotten – in fact, they have been considerably more rotten that have we, and we can’t believe that God would let them off the hook or grant them any measure of grace. We expect that God will recognize them for the worthless, rotten servants that they are, and throw the book at them. It’s not so much that they don’t deserve God’s grace. Rather, it is that they have worked overtime at disserving God’s grace. They have sinned – mightily, frequently, lustily, with gusto – and they have been proud of their sin and their rebellion. We can’t imagine that God could forgive such a person, and mete out grace toward them in the same manner that we hope God will grant grace to us.

As I said, I don’t have such a problem with this one anymore. I used to. I used to think of myself as such a good person that I couldn’t conceive that there were many people better than I was. But God had a way of working in my life and teaching me that I ought to take care to be watching out for myself – that I had plenty to keep myself occupied in that vein. As I have aged, I have become less and less impressed with myself as a servant of God in terms of sins of commission. If I had a mentality of math today in this particular problem area, I would think that I would have to do more good than I had done bad. But I gave up on that a long time ago, and I have reconciled myself to the fact that what I might receive from God will be grace that looks beyond my sins of commission. So, in the long view, I am rather tolerant of others as they struggle with the sins of commission. Mostly because I know, in my heart of hearts, that no one is as rotten as I am. Like Paul, I see myself as the “chief of sinners.”

The second way that we struggle with this envy of the eye is when it comes to those who have committed sins of omission. I’m sad to report that I don’t do as well on this one. Most of us keep a ledger – at least in our minds. We look around at what the others around us are doing to serve God, and we feel pretty good about ourselves. In my particular case, I am a pastor, I’ve been a Christian for 39 years now, I serve other people – basically, even though I’m paid to be good, I do a lot of good anyway. I am attending a conference this week in Missouri, and will spend some time with my friend Steve Graham. Steve used to be Tracy’s pastor, and he’s been up in Missouri for several years now. When he plays golf, if things work out right and it’s a couple of preachers playing with a couple of deacons, Steve is fond of naming the teams “Paid to be Good” and “Good for Nothing.” Now, aren’t you glad we don’t have deacons?? I’m paid to be good, but I’d like to think that even if I weren’t, that I’d try to do a lot of good things for other people. You know, as hard as I try, I’m not making much headway on this kind of “envious eye” syndrome. I know that it isn’t the good things that I do that make me worthy in God’s eyes. But something in my psyche, or in my experience, keeps telling me that I have to work harder to please God. And the competition side of my nature says that I have to work harder than the folks around me that “God will be comparing me to someday.” That’s the lie part. God isn’t going to compare me or you to anyone else – except maybe to Jesus, and in that case we’re all going to come up way short. Still, for a lot of us, there’s something in our minds and hearts that tells us that if we do more than most of the others out there, that we’ll be okay as far as God is concerned.

That’s where this parable really gets my goat this time around. Maybe for a lot of us. We’ve been at this service business a long time, some of us. We’ve been serving God for a lot of years, and we’re starting to see some young bucks come up in the ranks, and, well, we’re not so sure that they’re as deserving of God’s grace as we are. But that’s the point – none of us deserve God’s grace. Grace is grace, and it’s always something that is given to us – not something that we’ve earned.

We have to kind of turn things around in this parable to see the third way we might experience “envious eye” syndrome. We might envy the grace given toward those who have more to work with than we do. You know, there are some people I read, and I’m more than a little jealous of their minds – the way they think. And I think to myself, “If I only had what they had, I could really be quite a servant.” The unspoken part of that kind of thinking is “and if I had what they had, and I were quite a servant, I wouldn’t really need God’s grace so much.” All of that kind of thinking is fruitless, and really rather vain. We could do an exercise in this room this morning. We could have each of us stand, one at a time, until we had gone all the way around the room. And as each one of us stood, the rest of us might list off the things that we are truly envious about in that person – you know, things or attitudes or knowledge or other innate possessions they have that we perceive make them better servants than we are. And each of us, as we stood there and received these “envious complements” from the rest of the crowd would turn around and say, “That’s just silly – I really don’t have that much of _______, and besides, what I do have doesn’t begin to compare with the way that God has gifted you.” I’d bet a week of Parker Stambaugh’s allowance that would be the case. We would discover that this kind of “envy” is really misplaced and inconsequential. But we still do it, don’t we. We still look at our brother or our sister, and we say to God, “If you’d only made me as smart, or as good, or as talented, or as wealthy as he/she is, then I’d really be something.” We think that way, don’t we?

To wrap it up, Jesus threw out a little math axiom for us – the last shall be first. I challenge you to go through the New Testament this week and see how many times Jesus preaches some variation on that axiom. The last shall be first, the poor shall be rich, the weak shall be strong – you know how the formula goes. It was his favorite sermon – in which He tried to tell us "No matter what you think, things in the Kingdom of Heaven aren’t always as they seem. It’s not a math thing – it’s a grace thing."

So, preacher – how should we then live? Good question. Paul had the answer for us this morning.

“For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Not a bad way to live.

Richard W. Dunn, PhD.

[1] Will Willimon, Pulpit Resource, “The New Math,” vol. 33. no. 3, p. 51.
[2] I would like to be able to tell you where I got this story, but I have absolutely no idea. Will you please grant me the grace of undocumentation. Update - one of my church members found the following in a Google search - Submitted by Denise Banderman, Hannibal, Missouri. Grace, Salvation, Works. Ain't grace wonderful. Evidently, it helps to post the sermon before you preach it!!