God’s Acceptance

    This week’s readings are a double-dose of what could be rather bitter medicine. Matthew is asking us to upend every socio-economic idea we have ever considered reasonable and just. And Jonah’s recalcitrance about sharing God’s mercy with Israel’s sworn enemy is uncomfortably familiar!

    Before our immigration sweeps, it was commonplace to see groups of men standing around early in the morning waiting for a chance at a day laborer job. When I saw them, I prayed that each one of them would find work because without it, they and their families might go hungry or they might despair and find less acceptable ways to get their “daily bread.”

    A catchy phrase has it that Christians should adopt an “attitude of gratitude.” We first-world folks feel so entitled and enabled to receivewhat we consider the necessities of life that our ability to identify with those day-laborers on our street corners is almost nil. Spiritually, that is a dangerous place to be. If we cannot feel compassion for “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40) or, as Amy Carmichael wrote in her book on 1 Corinthians 13, “If I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or the twentieth)…then I know nothing of Calvary love.”

    Matthew’s parable about the last being first (a favorite Kingdom theme) invites a re-interpretation of fairness. Do your kids (or,perhaps, do you?) exclaim, “That’s not fair!” approximately every hour on the hour?  God loves each of us equally, even when it really doesn’t look that way. God’s “fair” is not our “fair” (see Isaiah 55:9). We are not in charge of the scales of balance or justice in the kingdom of God! Jesus didn’t die for you more than he did for me; nor does he have favorites. Humanity, on the other hand, defines fairness in shallow, quid pro quo ways. In our quest for fairness, we should run fast from any definition of fair that hasn’t been baptized by Christ’s grace, love, and mercy. And, by the way, it is not possible to be grateful and jealous at the same time.

    Christ died for all our sins, and Matthew’s passage highlights one in particular…our sinful refusal to accept God’s desire to include everyone equally in his realm. We do not want a God who

has favorites, unless we’re the favorites (Mark 10:37, for example). Additionally, we would like to be in charge of the guest lists for his parties on earth and in heaven, please.  The truth of it is that

none of us is getting what we deserve. (Thanks be to God!)

    Many of us ‘of a certain age’ remember Bill Cosby’s comedy routine about Noah and the ark.  If only he had done a comedic bit on Jonah’s sulking rant after Jonah finally (following a brief time-out in the belly of a whale) delivered God’s word to Nineveh and they actually repented. “I KNEW it!  I have always said you were a merciful God. I just can’t believe you were merciful to them!” Jonah’s nervy complaint that God’s mercy had been wildly mis-directed toward people hell-bent against God’s own chosen ones strikes a familiar chord. God kept asking Jonah if it was right for him to be angry about everything God does. God prodded Jonah (as he prods us if we can hear it) to see Nineveh as God sees Nineveh.  Getting to God’s viewpoint on our “Ninevehs” is not like flipping our camera lens from portrait to panoramic. It takes prayer and a concentrated effort to remember that we are the Ninevites… those people who don’t know their right hand from their left most of the time!

    God gave all of his day laborers work and pay on that day in hisvineyard because, in God’s economy, abundance is the coin of the realm! He rescued the Ninevites for reasons grander than Jonah could grasp. As we learn how to live in God’s kingdom, we must seek the skill of turning justice into mercy even for those who come late to God’s party or barge to the front of his buffet line.

    Both passages this week allow us to overhear the grumblings about generosity that we also often hiss under our own God-bestowed breath. But, because of who God is, we have each won his heart, and we are each one his favorite. God’s heart is set. How about ours?