Worms, Laborers, and Death

In this sermon Fr. Sam Behar preaches on the lectionary passages for the 16th Sunday after Trinity Sunday. The gospel has a way of undermining our assumptions about who deserves the mercy of God. Through Jonah, the laborers in the vineyard, and the life of St. Paul, we discover that the kingdom belongs not to those who have earned their place, but to sinners who receive the astonishingly free grace of God in Jesus Christ—and are then sent to extend that same mercy to others.

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Let us pray. Heavenly Father, as we stop and listen to your word this morning, we pray that our hearts would be attuned to receive the gospel today, afresh and anew. We ask in the name of your Son. Amen. You may be seated. It may be helpful for you today just to keep an eye on the scripture passages. If you have one of the Pew Bibles open to page 774, I will refer to some verses in Matthew 19, which is the context for our gospel reading this morning. I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but the entire story of Jonah is a series of shocking moments. Originally, when I wrote that line, I had something else there, and I'm just deciding that I want to say it anyway, so I'm going to go back and change my manuscript. The entire story of Jonah is kind of ridiculous. It's not just a series of shocking moments, it's just unbelievable in so many ways. If you stop and think about it, Jonah runs from God, that's dangerous. He's eaten by a sea monster, that's surprising. He's vomited out. Imagine the smell. That's disgusting. Then he's angry with God because God shows mercy to Jonah's enemies. And in Jonah 4, he complains to God because, he's complaining to God, he's angry because he says, I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful. Jonah says that he's angry enough to die at the thought of the Nineveh being forgiven. Even with repeated patient encouragement from God, Jonah is unwilling to look at the situation from God's perspective. And to a lesser extent, I think the disciples are also trying to come to grips with what God is doing and the nature of the kingdom of God in our gospel reading in Matthew chapter 20. And chapter 19 gives us context for the parable that we read just a moment ago. In chapter 19, you have the rich young man who comes to Jesus. That's a common and familiar story to many of us. The rich young man has just departed and gone his way, but Jesus, not wanting the disciples to misunderstand what was taking place there, announces to them that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven. The disciples, though I'm assuming not particularly rich in and of themselves, bemoan the impossibility of anyone getting into the kingdom if it's that hard for a rich person to get in. And our Lord doubles down, he backs them up. He says, Jesus says that with man it is impossible for anyone to enter the kingdom of heaven. So in Jonah 4 and in Matthew 19 to 20, there are warnings, a shot across the bow. But the question is, whose bow is it a shot across, and for what purpose? So often when we read the Bible, we are looking for ourselves. It's natural to read stories that way and to try to identify with the characters that we read in the stories. Sometimes we read a story and the main character of the story tugs at our heart. That's us. We're the main character. Other times we feel closely aligned with side characters, the bit players in the story. In these passages of scripture, in Jonah chapter 4 and in Matthew 20, we don't want to be aligned with any of these people. We don't want to be Jonah, we don't want to be the Ninevites, we don't want to be the rich young man, we don't want to be the disciples. Either the people in the passages are so wicked that they don't know their right hand from their left hand, or they are so confused and frustrated by what God is saying to them. All of the characters in these, all of the participants, all of the human beings who really lived in real history, who were scratching their head here at these experiences with God, all of the people with speaking parts in these stories are proving by their words and their deeds that they misunderstand the nature of God's work in the world. They misunderstand the nature of the kingdom of God. And we ought to be thankful, just sort of as a side note, we ought to be thankful for all of these examples in the Bible. They present a picture of people who don't understand what God is doing and can only follow what the Lord wants them to do imperfectly. And I know that I can't speak for everyone in the room when I say this, but I'm grateful that the Bible presents reality like this, that presents the nature of faith like this, that it's not just me that struggles to understand what God is doing in the world. And it's not just me who struggles to obey what God is commanding. So, what is the Lord trying to say to us this morning in our lectionary passages? Now, there are lots of different lessons you could glean from these, but I'm gonna say one key lesson for us this morning is that the gospel undermined the self-righteousness of Jonah and the disciples. The gospel undermined the self-righteousness of Jonah and the disciples. Now, while Jonah's message of repentance is only part of what the gospel says to us, he went to his enemies and he didn't have this hope. But the message that he preached had a hidden hope of forgiveness for their sins. Not just repent because judgment is coming, but in his message of repentance, there's this hidden hope of forgiveness. And Jonah resented that God would send him. Jonah resented that God would have forgiveness on his enemies. And likewise, the disciples evidently thought that salvation was somehow tied to one's personal sacrifice. The example of the most faithful religious people of their day was that a person's wealth made it possible for a person to give more alms, offer more sacrifices, and therefore essentially be holier than everyone else. That if you were rich you could do more and be holier. So when Jesus says to them, if it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, then surely the disciples are thinking it must be super impossible for normal people who can't afford what the rich people can afford to get into the kingdom of heaven. If the rich who can do more than anyone else can't get in, what about the rest of us? And it's very clear that Peter, Saint Peter, thought it was, was thinking about personal sacrifice when he turns and asks Jesus, after hearing that it was impossible with man to enter the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 19, he turns to Jesus and he says, But Lord, we've left everything and followed you. What's our reward gonna be? And Jesus assures him, there is a reward. But then at the end of that, the last verse of chapter 19, Jesus tells them that the first will be last and the last will be first. Talk about head scratching. The thread that is running through all of these passages is that by undermining our self-righteousness, the gospel comes to us and speaks life to those of us who are untimely born. We are recipients of God's free grace, not of, not by any works or deserving of our own, our of our own good deeds or our own nature, but by God's free grace. We don't look to our best efforts or our gifts to prove our worthiness before God. The new life is brought to us in the person of our Savior Jesus Christ. So as we look at the scripture passages this morning, I want us to notice that the gospel comes and speaks life to us while undermining our self-righteousness. Let's look at Jonah a little bit more. In predictable fashion, the Ninevites repented of their sins. He saw it coming. He knew what God was going to do, and he was mad about it. And it's like Jonah is saying, you don't have to be a prophet to know that God doesn't send someone to preach repentance to a people who he plans on destroying anyway. He could have just left them alone and destroyed them justly in his own righteousness. But he sent the preacher. Jonah doesn't have to be a prophet to know what God is up to there. And the book of Jonah doesn't, the book of Jonah doesn't give us the backstory of why Jonah is so mad at the Ninevites. And it doesn't tell us all of the details that surround this. But we can fill in some gaps from other places in the scriptures. Nineveh is not the capital of Assyria at this time, but it's destined to become the capital city of the Assyrian Empire. And a few short years after this event, the Assyrian Empire will sweep through the northern kingdom and carry off all of Jonah's people into captivity and scatter them throughout their empire. That happened in 721 B.C. But 2 Kings chapter 14 mentions that Jonah lived during the time of Jeroboam II, which puts him around 793 to 753 BC. So he is sent to the Assyrians. He's sent to one of the most important cities of a foreign kingdom that will ultimately destroy his people before they come and destroy his people. It would have behooved Jonah to flee somewhere else for the sake of his own people. And apparently the Ninevites are so violent and wicked they could not distinguish between right and wrong. That's the whole thing, they couldn't tell their left hand from their right hand. So, in short, Jonah was sent to Israel's enemy at a time when their destruction would have meant prolonged safety for Israel. Jonah would not have wanted the Ninevehes spared. So why is God sending him to these people? Should I not pity Nineveh? There were a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants and also much cattle who lived ignorant and violent lives. They are a picture of lostness. Does that remind you? Does this picture of God looking at a city with a lot of people in it and just heartbreaking over it? Does that remind you of anything else in the scriptures? It certainly reminds me of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. He told the disciples that he longed to gather the inhabitants of Jerusalem in like a hen shelters her chicks beneath her wings. And there are countless examples in the Old Testament of the Lord sending prophets to Israel, doing the same thing, calling the people to repentance, the same kind of care that the Lord has for his people. He's showing for these Gentile, these foreign people. The Lord's desire is to be merciful is just another way. The Lord's desire to be merciful is just another way to say that he loves his creation and he loves his people. And we see this same heart on display in our Psalm in Psalm 145, verses 13, 14, and 15. The Lord wants to bless all his creation. And Jonah, as a prophet of God, should see that. He should see that God wants to bless his creation, even if he doesn't like it or agree with it. He should be able to see it. But Jonah and Jonah's decision to wait outside the city to me, him like he preaches his message of repentance in chapter 3, and he sees the people are starting to repent, and he's mad about it, and he knows that God's going to forgive these people, and he's just fed up, and he goes outside and he builds a tent and he just waits and sees what's going to happen. And that to me is baffling. I don't know why he doesn't just leave. Maybe God said, sit down, you're not leaving. But but for me, I just, I mean, if I were if I were in Jonah's shoes, I would have gone home. I didn't want to see what God was going to do. But Jonah appears to be unsure. He's maybe holding out a little bit of hope for some fire and brimstone. And so he builds a small tent and shelter. But we have to wonder at his construction skills because he's still suffering from the heat of the day. He doesn't build anything that has enough shelter to cover him during the day. But the Lord, again, has mercy on him and provides a plant for some shade. While Jonah is sitting under his new shade and rejoicing in the mercy of God, he continues to grind his teeth at God's mercy for the Ninevites. Then the Lord appointed a worm to devour the plant. And the shade of that plant, which had grown up quickly, was immensely important to Jonah. And when it was taken away, his head was exposed to the heat again, and Jonah had another outburst of anger directed to the Lord. And you see that Jonah had taken for granted God's mercy for him. But he resented it for the Ninevehes, didn't he? Why would the Lord send a worm to eat away at the comfort of Jonah? And answering a letter from a priest in his diocese, St. Augustine commented on this passage. And he said that the shade represented to Jonah all of those promises to Israel that he enjoyed as an Israelite. He had received assurances that God was going to protect the people, that God was going to keep them in the land, the promised land, that God is going to give them blessing after blessing in a land flowing with milk and honey. And Jonah was taking those promises for granted, sitting under the shadow of that plant. The New Testament calls all of those promises what? A shadow of things to come. He is living under God's shade that protected him from the evils of the world. But the morning worm came and ate away at that plant so that it withered.

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Augustine said that that worm which God had sent that ate away at the plant was Christ. That Christ was that worm, that Christ was the one who came preaching the gospel that would be good news not only to Israel, but also to Gentiles. That Christ is the worm who came undermining Jonah's self-righteous assumption that his descent and his obedience to the commandments entitled him to a special place. The false sense of security, that our family, our wealth, our goodness, our inherent worth, all of those false assumptions are gnawed away by the worm of the gospel. Jesus came preaching the gospel of the kingdom and declaring that the kingdom of God was at hand. The people of his own day rejected him because he said the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Jesus was rejected because he said that God would do more with two pennies than he would with all the resources of the temple. Jesus was rejected because the kingdom he brought welcomed sinners in. So Joan is mad that his shadow has been taken away. And in a similar way, Jesus' parable in Matthew 20 shows the disciples the same thing. And they were considering their own commitment to the ministry of Jesus. They had left everything and followed him. They knew by the grace of God that Jesus was the Son of God. But they were struggling to come to grips with what kind of kingdom Jesus was building. They had to have their assumptions challenged and reformed by Jesus over and over again. And in the parable, Jesus said that a master went out to find laborers for his field. The laborers agreed to a wage and went to work. And however, the master went out four more times after that initial invitation to those laborers. He went out four more times and called more people to his field, to his vineyard. And they went, all of those subsequent workers went without a clear notion of what they were going to be paid. So at the end of the day, when all the laborers were paid the same amount, it infuriated those first workers. They spent the whole day laboring in the hot sun while those come lately workers worked an hour in the cool dusk and got the same pay. It would only be right to give to those who endured the heat more than those who came late. That's just fair, right? Except that's not what the master of the house says. He says that it's up to him to reward those who are called to the fields at the end of the day. It was up to him to choose how he was going to do that. The worm is eating away at the false assumptions about the kingdom of God all over again. The church fathers, in commenting on the parables, are kind of wild, and I recommend reading any church fathers on the parables. They get them all kinds of weird ways. I love their interpretation of this parable, though. They were in favor of reading all the workers that were hired at the beginning of the day as Adam and the patriarchs. And with those called in the third and the sixth and the ninth hours being other Old Testament figures, and at the end of the day, like those untimely born, are the disciples. They are called to the fields right at the end of the day. And their wage for that day that they did not work was the same as those who had labored all day long, those who had waited for thousands of years to see the fulfillment of all God's promises. And now at the end of the age, we are recipients of the same promises that God made to Abraham. We are grafted into the promises of God and made co-heirs with Jesus Christ. This is what St. Paul is talking about in Philippians. He tells the Philippians that they are blessed to believe in Jesus and share in his sufferings. That mostly Gentile church are members of Christ's body and partakers in the ministry of the apostles to the Gentiles. And Saint Paul, in so many ways, is just like Jonah. Think about the comparison between St. Paul and Jonah. St. Paul, Jonah, both zealous defenders of the faith. They knew who their enemies were and they didn't want to show them any mercy. Like Jonah, St. Paul heard from the Lord what he was supposed to do. They also both had experiences with death and resurrection. However, unlike Jonah, St. Paul received the mercy of God in Christ as a sinner and not with self-righteous indignation. But the difference is not a personality difference. We can't just say, well, St. Paul was obviously just a morose, kind of introspective guy, and Jonah was more politically minded, and so there's kind of different makeups of these two different guys accounts for their difference in response. I don't think so. I think the difference between Jonah and Paul is the encounter that St. Paul had with the risen Jesus. When Ananias came to Paul with the gospel message and the Lord's commission, he didn't come with a shadow of things that were going to come. He came and preached him the gospel. And Saint Paul regained his sights and he was baptized. And what is baptism? If not a burial and a resurrection. He is receiving a new birth. And Saint Paul calls himself later on one untimely born. We then are like Paul, called out of sin and self-righteousness. We are called to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We are called to stand firm in the grace of God and to rest in the life we are born into through the gospel. Our striving for salvation, done. We have what we need in Jesus. Now we are sent out into the world as ambassadors of his grace and peace with the word of the gospel on our lips. We can count it an honor. To bring the gospel to our enemies and the enemies of the gospel, to our enemies and the enemies of the gospel, because we who are once the enemies of God have received mercy through Jesus Christ. When we suffer for his name, we count it all joy because it reminds us of the life and death of the one who purchased our life with his life. And as a parish, let's pray that the gospel worms its way into our lives. That our assumptions about who is worthy of God's mercy would not be determined by net worth or their address or any other worldly metric. Let us pray that God would shape us into being a beacon of the gospel, of beacon of gospel light to all people. And that we would not count the cost too high to welcome anybody who comes to us and anybody we encounter. But that we would welcome them with mercy and truth when they are drawn to the light of the gospel. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, you are a good God to reveal yourself to us. We pray, as those who have received the gospel, that we would trust it, that we would lean on it, that we would not look at our righteousness or our own attempts at righteousness to satisfy you, but that we would rest in Christ, that our lives would then be turned outward toward you and toward others, that we would be full of joy and peace in our hearts because of the forgiveness we've received in Jesus Christ. We ask this in his name. Amen. If you will stand