“Is Your Eye Evil Because I Am Good?”

I’ve written before about how Jesus’ parables sound different at different stages of one’s life. The story of the lost son, for example, is a story that seems to contain almost the whole of human failure and frustration, hope and longing, love, and desire. I have at various points in my life identified with the recklessly destructive younger son, the self-righteous older brother, and the heartsick father. I doubt I’m terribly unique in this. The story sounds different at forty-eight than it did at twenty-two. It’s the kind of story that can keep one company for a lifetime, opening new truths, unlocking new understandings, making sense of some of the terrain covered along the way.

Another of Jesus’ stories that sounds different farther along the journey is the story of the labourers in the vineyard from Matthew 20. It’s a story that I’ve never really liked, truth be told. I don’t imagine I’m terribly original in this either. The labourers who show up at the end of the day and barely put in an hour’s work get the same pay as the ones who toiled through the heat of the day?! It’s quite obviously unfair. Is Jesus baptizing laziness, here? Is he praising inequity? Is this just some kind of arbitrary exercise of power on the part of the landowner, meant to annoy the workers? Is this what we are to imagine God is like?

The punch line of the parable comes at the end when the landowner responds to the complaints of the labourers hired earlier in the day:

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?

It’s a penetrating question. It exposes us in many ways, not least because most of us do feel a twinge of, if not envy then certainly resentment. We struggle with the generosity of God. We struggle with the latecomers getting what we are pleased to think we have earned. We assume the kingdom of God is a meritocracy or at least merit adjacent. We so easily imagine the gifts of God to be a reward for good (or at least passable) performance. We like the idea of grace in theory but squirm a bit when we see where it shows up.

A few weeks ago, I received a request to baptize someone on their death bed in hospital. The proverbial latecomer. There was no exhaustive catechetical process, no church service, no public testimony, no liturgy of welcome into the church. There were a few simple questions, a bit of water poured, a poem, a song, and hugs all around. I don’t know if I would have hesitated at such a request even in my earlier days, but I certainly didn’t think twice at this stage of my journey. God has been wearing me down, you see. You see enough pain and complexity, sorrow, guilt, and shame of a given human life, so much of which mostly stays out of public view. And you get to be ok with God choosing to do what he wants with what belongs to him. You get to mostly resist resenting a generosity that precedes and exceeds your own.

Gretchen Ronnevik recently reflected along similar lines. She told the story of two fathers, hers, and her husband’s. Hers was a miserable, abusive alcoholic while her husband’s was a shining light. She writes about these two lives coming near the end in the same year and about the dissonance this produced in her own heart and mind, about the complexity of these two very different griefs. In the end, she, too, lands with the deep hope of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard:

Can it be that my father, with his shame that oppresses him and his weak prayers for mercy, and my husband’s father with his strength and good works for his neighbor, in their range of faith and works, both enter the kingdom as brothers? If so, what a wonder that grace would be.

Yes, what a wonder. Perhaps part of the journey of spiritual maturity is simply growing less resentful of the generosity of God which extends always and only to sinners who don’t deserve it. And not generic sinners, not theological abstractions, but actual human beings who can be terrible and lazy and entitled and petty and vicious and self-righteous and apathetic and careless and callous and many other things besides. Sinners who do what they ought not to do and leave a trail of destruction in their wake. All of us, in other words.

God’s generosity washes over the whole stinking mess like a cleansing flood, even when we might be tempted to resent it. We hunger for validation, for vindication, for our pain to be acknowledged and understood, for those who have hurt us to get what’s coming to them. We want our efforts acknowledged, our sacrifices rewarded, our virtues praised. We demand an honest reckoning. At least we think we do (we might be surprised at what a God’s eye view would reveal). We praise grace with our lips but in fact we’re quite fond of the meritocracy and struggle mightily to let it go.

And into all of this, God keeps on stubbornly asking, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

I don’t often read the New King James translation, but I was struck by its poetic and wildly different translation of that last part of verse 15: “Or is your eye evil because I am good?” I have little interest in drilling down into the accuracy of this translation. Even if it doesn’t get the Greek precisely right, it sounds too Jesus-y to ignore. I am more interested in avoiding the evil of blinding my eyes to the outrageous goodness of God.

The image above is Rembrandt’s famous 1637 painting on the parable from Matthew 20.