Septuagesima (1st of 3 Pre-Lent Sundays)
JESUS’ SERMON ON WAGES AND WORKING
Prayer: Lord God, heavenly Father, through Your holy Word You have called us into Your vineyard: Send, we beseech You, Your Holy Spirit into our hearts, that we may labor faithfully in Your vineyard, shun sin and all offense, obediently keep Your Word and do Your will, and put our whole and only trust in Your grace, which You have bestowed upon us so abundantly through Your Son Jesus Christ, that we might obtain eternal salvation through Him. Amen.
Sermon Text, St. Matthew 20:1-16 (v. 1-4). “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. Now, when he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went.”
Lord, this is Your Word, and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth. Your Word is truth.
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ, who gives us not the wages of our sin but the wages that He has earned for us by His deserving and not ours:
This sermon that Jesus preached is a sermon about wages and working.
Amazingly, He didn’t preach this to the Pharisees, who were fussy about making sure everyone performed each tiny bit of the law, whose teachings would wear a person out with work and worry. Jesus preached this sermon to His disciples. This must be a sermon His disciples – Christians – need.
Jesus had just shown His disciples, through the rich young man who went away sad, how hard it is for a person to leave earthly riches behind and follow Jesus wholeheartedly. Peter said, “We have left all and followed You. Therefore,e what shall we have?” Jesus’ answer to Peter ended with, “Many who are first will be last, and the last first.” Evidently, that left the disciples scratching their heads, so Jesus told this story about wages. Peter was thinking about “wages.” In our world, we think of this as “paycheck.”
This is about the pay for what you earn. It’s a world we’re used to: work and wages. It consumes so much of your life. You go to school for years, partly to get a good job. You wait for each paycheck so you can pay all those bills. You evaluate if you’re wasting time at a job where the wages are too low. We even relate to the first part of the story: with a tough economy, high unemployment, and homelessness around, we know people “standing idle,” not working, they too might say it’s “because no one hired us.”
But we can’t understand why the story ends as it does. What we know with work and wages is the principle of fairness. But this ends so unfairly! The ones who worked only 1 hour get just as much as those who worked a 12-hour shift. What employer would do this? He’d run off his best workers. Where’s the incentive for working hard? Why promote the idea that you can barely work, yet get a rich reward? Who’d stay in business doing this?
Of course, we remember that this is a sermon Jesus’ disciples need. He is making it clear that His kingdom is a kingdom of grace, undeserved love. Jesus is teaching that we don’t receive the reward by earning it.
In fact, the answer to Peter’s question – “Therefore (due to what we’ve done) what will we receive?” – you don’t want the answer to that. Nothing you do ever could be good enough for Him to give you a good reward. The reward we earn is to be condemned to hell, since in order to receive the reward of eternal life, you must be holy, without sin. The Bible says: “Whoever shall keep the whole law yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all” (Jam 2:10).
We encounter this “wages” talk in the book of Romans. St. Paul writes: “Now to the one who works, the wages are not counted as a gift [grace] but as his due” (4:4). He says “wages” are what someone owes you for what you’ve done, so we shouldn’t want our working to determine it. Thus, St. Paul writes later in Romans (6:23), “The wages of sin is death.”
With God you shouldn’t want wages, what you earn. You should want what you don’t earn. Jesus earned it for everyone. He lived a totally sin-free life. He took your sin, and so He took your wages; He died your death. His perfect life counts for you, so you get the wages He earned: His innocence and righteousness, and thus you get eternal life, the reward for His work. That’s what His kingdom is, not lining up to receive wages for your work.
With that in mind, isn’t it strange that Jesus describes life in His kingdom of grace with these words, this picture-story, about wages and working?
Of course He understands fallen human nature. He knows what you do with this, how we turn everything into our work. You think everything depends on what you do or don’t do. You carry a burden. You don’t think you’ve ever done enough, or done it well enough. You’re worn out by worry. Yes, we know God is in control, but it all won’t happen unless I do it.
So Jesus here redefines what wages and working are. He takes all the working that produces salvation completely out of our hands. Our response is to ask: “Then what is there for us to do? Does this mean our works are worthless? Then why should we try?” If He’s done it all, if there’s nothing for us to do for our salvation, if the vineyard is beautiful and fruitful only because of His work and not ours, why wouldn’t we be lazy and let Him do all the work?
This is how the Catholics accused the first Lutherans. They said that if you are saved by grace alone, if good works have nothing to do with salvation, it would produce people who don’t do good works, who think that since everything’s forgiven they can live however they want.
But actually it’s the opposite. The teaching of grace alone is the only one that can produce the right kind of working. Apart from faith, a person will do his so-called “good works” to avoid being punished, out of a slavish sense of duty, to be noticed, to get credit, to make up for sins or what you forgot to do.
Truthfully, you do think this way often due to your sinful nature. There are times when you don’t produce fruits – works – in keeping with repentance, when you repent and are forgiven but don’t make much effort to do better. We don’t always have the right motives for good works.
But by faith, through Jesus’ blood, when you repent, all that you’ve done is purified, with all the sin removed. Christ made it His work to live a sinless life, have a perfect faith, fully overcome sin, all to count for you. When He was done, He strapped Himself to a cross and said: “It is finished!”
You look as good to God as you possibly can, because He does not look at your work; He looks at Jesus who did it perfectly, to count for you. There’s nothing you can do to add to or even improve what He did for you.
But far from making your working worthless, what this does is to make it worth more! Grace, His undeserved love, takes away all the burden and all the pressure. It takes away the slavish sense of duty. It gives you a higher motive than just to avoid being punished. It defeats the desire to be noticed for what you do. You don’t do these things because you have to. Now, by faith, with Jesus’ love as the source of your love, you do these works because you want to, because He gives you a new will, conforms your will to His will.
This is beautiful to God. He doesn’t throw out your working. He wants it. The Bible says Christians’ “works do follow them” into eternity. Your acts of love, proceeding from faith, done out of love for Christ, follow you to heaven, cleansed of all sin.
Your unselfish loving, turning the other cheek, forgiving the hurts and wrongs done to you, hiding your eyes and covering your ears from evil, your willingness to be scorned for choosing what’s right, refusing to compromise your faith, taking delight in God’s gifts, these contribute nothing to your salvation, but they don’t vanish; they follow you to heaven. This applies also to working together in the church. It’s a sacrifice of time to help at church, often there’s no “thank you,” but the church isn’t a collection of individuals; it’s to be a family not scattered and isolated in homes, but coming together. Whether in our daily callings or in the church, these works are beautiful to God, they adorn the hidden person of the heart, it’s all work that He wants.
This doesn’t just happen. In the epistle for today St. Paul pictures life in the church on earth as being an athlete in training, punishing the body, never taking a break. The Bible says, be “diligent to enter His rest” (He 4:11), and “be more diligent to make your salvation sure” (2Pe 1:10). This is working in the vineyard. It’s in struggling with your flesh that you grow in faith. But it isn’t something you do or earn. The Bible says it’s “His workmanship … It is God who works in you to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Eph 2, Phi 2).
Jesus’ parable actually says how this happens. The going-out at different hours to call workers into the vineyard isn’t just referring to how God calls some early in life, others later, some on their deathbed – but also this is how He calls you and me, not once but all the time. There are many times you and I have strayed from Him, sometimes in little ways almost unnoticeable to us, other times in bigger ways. At times we’ve become idle, not taken care of our faith, followed the world – but like the landowner in the story never tires out or calls it a day even at the 11th hour, that’s what God is like. Tirelessly He continues to call us back. Aren’t you thankful He pictures this to us?
This explains the business about the first and the last. As we struggle with our flesh, and don’t do everything like we want to or like we should, we learn that we can’t go in front of Him and be “first” by our own doing. Then your sins will condemn you and you’ll be “last,” condemned by them.
But look at Jesus, He isn’t only the steward who passes out the wages but truly He is the “first” who became “last,” condemned and cast out. If you join Him as the “last,” keep close to Him and follow where He leads – to His cross – if you’ll think not that you’ve arrived but only want to stay close to Him, you’ll find you are the “first” – uncondemned, and being given the “reward” not for what you do but for what He’s done for you. Everyone in His kingdom is “first” – we are “co-heirs with Christ.” Amen!