Bellarmine University
“Is It Too Good To Be True?”
Rev. Ronald Knott
September 21, 2014
He gave everybody a full days pay.
Matthew 20
Of all the parables of Jesus, this is one of my very favorites. A parable is a little made-up story to make a point about God. Jesus came to reveal God and because his audience was made up of simple people, he made up little pointed stories as a way to get his message across, to help them understand something they didn’t know by comparing it to something they did know.
The point that Jesus makes about God here is that God is nuts about us. The hero in this little parable is a vineyard owner. His listeners were familiar with vineyard owners, but the one in Jesus’ story seems a little nuts. You know what he does? He gives all his workers, even those who came in at quitting time, a full days pay no matter how much or how little they work for him.
Jesus wants his audience to know that God is like that, he is nuts about us. He loves everybody 100% regardless of how much or how little we have done for him!
There were two different audiences listening to Jesus and he wants both to hear him. He speaks to the “religious types,” the ones who kept all the rules and the “non-religious types” who couldn’t, wouldn’t or hadn’t kept the rules. This message outraged the “religious types” who thought that God should love them more because of all they had done for God. To them it was bad news. It was unfair. The “non-religious types” were bowled over to hear that God loved them with all his heart, in spite of the fact that they had done so little for God. To them it was good news. It was not about fairness, but generosity.
If Jesus wanted us to know that God loves us no matter how much or little we do for him, that is a pretty mind-blowing message. It sounds unbelievable, too good to be true. Because it sounds too good to be true, many cannot accept it. They say, he must not have meant what he said, so let us help it make sense by adding a list of “yes, buts,” playing down the radical-ness of this mind-blowing “good news,” saying “Yes, God loves you unconditionally, but, if, when, except.”
But what if it is true, no ands, ifs and but about it. What if God did love all of us 100% no matter how much or how little we were able to do for him? We’ll it is true. This is what I believe is the central message brought to us by Jesus, Son of God. He not only said that that is true, he proved it. Before we even repented of our sins, he took our punishment. It was done for us, simply out of love, regardless of whether we loved him back.
The reason why so many religious types are threatened by this parable is their fear that if people start believing this unconditional love stuff, they will do anything damn thing they please. They believe that what people really need is the fear of God. Fear is what will keep them in line. That’s religious slavery! Paul made it clear that we were freed from the slavery of fear. What really happens, is when people finally “get” this incredible message is the opposite. They will want to change their lives. They will “hunger and thirst” for holiness is the broadest sense of the word. This “wanting to change” has been my experience of preaching this “unconditional love message” all these years!
What worries me most about our church is that we are forgetting why we do what we do. Instead of preaching and ritualizing this uplifting message in word and deed, we are overly focused on priest shortages, legal settlements, school merging, sports, picnics, ideological bickering, liturgical intricacies and church politics. We have fallen into worshipping the container and neglecting the treasure that holds it - the great news that all people are loved by an incredibly gracious God! It is this message that will renew the church, not making winners and loser of each other in some kind of jihad for orthodoxy or iconoclastic revolution. All of us in the church need to get a grip and focus on what is essential, what is basic: the incredible compassion of a hugging God.
This message has implications. Once you know that you and every other child of God is loved in this way, you begin to realize that you are part of a family, responsible to, and for, other members of the family of God. You don’t love the family of God to get God to love you, you do it because God loves you. It is a response to God’s love, not a way to earn God’s love. We don’t turn our lives around to get God to love us, our lives turn around when we know God loves us.
How about you? Do you believe the message of this parable? Do you “get it” - that God already loves you? Or do you still think you have to do something to earn that love? Do you understand that you are good enough, right now, the way you are, in God’s eyes? Good enough to be loved, nonetheless? Once you “get” that, once you accept that, once you begin to live out of that knowledge, God will slowly turn your life around. You will respond to that love and work with God to become, fully, your true self! You will begin, maybe for the first time in your life, to love God, your neighbor and yourself with all your heart.
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