Matthew 20:1-16

Chapter 75

Prayer

Almighty God, we bless thee for all special days and sacred memories: they come to stimulate and encourage us in all holy things. We have seen the blackness of one day, its great cross and all its appalling solemnity, and now we stand in the brightness of a cloudless sky, rejoicing that the Lord is not in the tomb, but that be is risen and is our Priest for evermore. We bless thee for seeing an open grave the tomb has been the great mystery of our experience, and the great pain and wonder of our forecast of life. We knew not what it was, but thou hast opened it and delivered the captive and set him on high and crowned him with immortality and infinite glory, and they that are Christ's shall be brought with him at the last: thou wilt leave no grave unsearched, and thy jewels shall be gathered together. All thy buried ones shall awake and arise and come forth out of the dust, and them that sleep in Jesus thou wilt bring with him.

For all such hope we bless thee. This is a sure confidence and a source of exceeding strength. So now we can say, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" It was but a moment's victory, to be overcome with everlasting conquest, for death is swallowed up and the grave for ever forgotten. Help us to believe these sacred truths, to treasure them in our hearts, to draw from them inspiration in the time of weakness and fear and desolation, so that we may have songs in the night time and know not the pain and loneliness of orphanage. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort us; thou holdest a great light over the valley of the shadow of death; thou dost deliver with mighty deliverances all who put their whole trust in thy power and wisdom. This is our joy, our song, our unutterable delight, our ineffable peace. Lord, root us and ground us in these truths, and no stone shall fall upon us but to do us good; and the coming of death shall be the coming of our deliverer.

Do thou give us to know the joy of resurrection in the heart. Raise again every buried hope, revive every tender affection, give life again to all our noblest resolutions and purest ambitions. May we, now bending before thine altar, remember the words of love and loyalty which we uttered to thee in the days now far gone; and, recalling every one of these, with tender recollection and fondest gratitude, may we now rise into newness of life and be clothed with ever-enlarged affection towards thyself; may our service be stimulated by all that is noble in our own recollection, as well as all that is gracious in thy tender love.

Grant blessings unto the homes which we now represent. Come to every life that is here and to every spirit that is present, and reveal thyself in tender glory. Thou wilt not dazzle us with intolerable light: thou wilt shine upon us with subdued splendour, so that we may be able to bear the revelation and enjoy it, and feel in its warmth the prophecy of a still broader and warmer summer. Deliver us from all evil, we humbly pray thee, in the name and strength of him who today rose again from the dead. May his power be in our hearts, may his grace rule our spirits, may his love be the secret of our devotion and the defence of our character may we in all things seek to glorify Christ, and to have no other purpose or ambition in the world.

For all thy tender care our life long we bless thee. Our first breath was thine, our last thou wilt take unto thyself; and all the days between thou wilt make precious by thy presence and memorable by thy redemptions and deliverances. Give us confidence, we humbly pray thee, in these solemn land gracious truths then shall our hearts be quiet and shall cease from fear, and our life shall be profoundest peace.

Let thy blessing rest upon the land. God save the Queen, spare her life and increase her comfort and her joy. Direct all who lead our sentiment, and give us our attitude amongst the nations of the earth. Be with all great men, with all rulers, judges, magistrates, and persons in authority, with all who direct our thinking and lead our sentiment, and grant unto every man the assurance that his work is blest from on high. Disappoint those whose hearts are set on mischief, overrule events upon which we can exercise no decisive control, unfold our life unto us day by day, keep us from all impatience and impious curiosity, subdue within us the penetration that would spoil thy secrecy and transgress the mysteries of thy government; give us a holy resignation, a spirit of waiting, a calm assurance of faith, and the end shall see the meaning of it all, and in doing so thou wilt increase our love and heighten our song. Amen.

Mat 20:1-16

The Larger Justice

We cannot understand this parable by itself: it is the puzzle of all persons who come upon it without paying any attention to the circumstances which led up to it. You see from the grammatical construction of the first verse that this parable belongs to something else " For the kingdom of heaven is like unto." We must therefore ask, What has given occasion to this method of presenting the kingdom of heaven? Peter had put a selfish question. Having heard Christ's speech about the rich man and his infinite difficulty in entering into the kingdom of God, Peter said to Jesus, "Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" He wanted his Christianity to pay, his eye was wandering in the direction of results, he wanted the quid pro quo. Now the parable was meant to show that the kingdom of heaven is not founded upon rules of barter: it is like unto a householder who proceeded upon a larger principle than had yet been tried, a principle which created antagonism at first, but which in the end vindicated itself.

Looking at this parable within its own limits, looking at it from a mere trade point of view, regarding it in the light of what we call political economy, it is absurd; it touches the sense of justice very sharply in every man, and we are prepared to stand beside those who complain, and to say that they have a strong point in their favour. But the whole object of the parable is to show that there is to be no bargaining about the kingdom of heaven: it is not a question of time, of pennies, of understandings and covenants that can be measured in the marketplace. By this parable Jesus Christ lifts the kingdom of heaven right away above all trade considerations and all economical criticisms, making a new thing of it altogether, and carrying itself up into a larger and completer justice than could be measured by our arithmetics and reckonings and commercial laws. God has one reward for all he gives to every man a penny the last is as enriched as the first, and the first as the last so it seems to be. Yet it is not so. Jesus here takes delight in confounding us, utterly turning upside down all our favourite calculations and canons of justice and rules of barter. From end to end he upsets our regulations and calculations, and it was his delight to do so, to mystify and bewilder us, and to bring in a householder who contradicted every rule of every trade and every instinct of limited justice.

Has God only one reward for all? So in very deed it would seem from this parable. Do you tell me that the martyrs who went up to heaven in chariots of fire shall have no more than the child that died in its mother's arms with a believing prayer, who had never encountered one difficulty or endured one great trial for Christ? Has the martyr a penny and the child a penny equally? Shall the old worn-out missionary, who has gone to heathen lands and suffered all the dangers of travel and the perils of climate, and all the difficulties of strange relationship shall he have no more than the man who has never gone out of his own country, but who has enjoyed Christianity as presented by and defended by the highest and richest civilisation of his day? Has each to have but the bare penny? So it would seem on the face of this parable, and yet there is not a word of truth in that representation. The martyr, and the man who has died in what may be called the luxury of Christianity, cannot have the same in reality, though they may have the same in mere denomination of quantity.

Therein is a mystery easy of explanation, not, perhaps, easy to be set out in so many words; but the martyr and the non-martyr, each receiving his penny, have not received the same, except in mere nominal value. We are rewarded as we go. We get a victory in every fight, we have a heaven every sunset; we are paid by the hour, by the moment, by the breathing. We get what we can receive, we are rewarded according to our capacity, and we are not at liberty, according to this parable, to estimate things by hours and by pennies and by time spent, but by another law which comes into revelation and operation oftentimes beyond the limits of mere words, so that we cannot explain the law to a man who has not actually lived under its beneficent operation.

God will not have our calculations in the church. He says the first shall be last and the last first what does he mean? Does he mean, in a merely literal sense, that he will put Judas in the place of Peter and Peter in the place of Judas, and thus perform a little fantastic trick in arrangement and gradation in his kingdom? No. What, then, does he mean? To expel the whole system of reckoning from his church to banish arithmetic, and all that little, dwarfed, mistaken reasoning that pretends to say how things should be in the eternal sphere. He takes your arithmetic out of your hand, and says, "Make no use of this in the church." He takes your dried-up, desiccated reason, that adds two and two, and says they make four, and he says, "They do not, in the church: such reckoning in the marketplace may be right enough, but in the church none of your two-and-two reasoning; another law, wider and higher, and all-comprehending, must rule the spirit and the administration of things Christian." How, then, we are snuffed out, and how our knuckles are rapped by the iron rod, and how we are beaten back when we come to reckon up things by numbers and gradations and appointments, and all the arrangements of the Heavenly hierarchy! We are reasoning by arithmetic, and Christ says, "He who has worked from sunrise to sundown shall have a penny: he who has worked only one hour towards the westering of the sun shall have a penny. The first shall be last and the last first." He takes delight in confounding our reckoning and making confusion of our mighty reasonings. If he did so in this parable only, it might be difficult to maintain the position, but it is the rule of his universe. Thus you say it was unjust on the part of the man to give those labourers who came in at the eleventh hour as much as was given to those labourers who went out early in the morning. Are you sure that your notion of the word just is right? May not the word "just" be a larger word than you have yet realized? May we not need larger and truer definitions of common terms in order to enable us to rise to the height of these great Christian arguments? Consider whether there is not a point in that suggestion.

But see, and tell me how your idea of "just" vindicates itself under such circumstances as these. Here is a child a day old, and that child is tainted with a disease for which itself is in no degree accountable. Its life will be a pain, its days will be a burden, its future will be a cloud, and yet the little one is in no degree responsible for the tremendous and insufferable infliction under which it groans. Is that just? And yet it is a fact. God will not accept our little ideas of justice: he always rebukes them. They are too narrow, they are too shallow, they do not bring in all the terms and elements which belong to the subject. We see within the limits of a day, we draw a little circle around us, and call that little circumference the sum-total of all things. God will show us a wider revelation some day: he will give us a right scale of measurement, and then we shall know that what we thought was injustice was but one section of a grand whole. He will "vindicate eternal providence and justify his ways to men."

Take, again, the notion of sin and everlasting punishment, and see the very principle of this parable in active operation there. Let the case stand thus. Take what notion you please of the words "everlasting punishment," let them mean everlasting destruction, complete annihilation, or eternal torment; the definition of these terms has no relation to what I am now about to say but take them in any sense, and then answer whether it is just that a man who has lived a few years in a world he never asked to come into, and who has sinned those few years all through, staining every moment of them with blackness what are the moments but a handful, what are the days but a sharp sudden breathing and all is over, a spasm and the life is forgotten and yet for these few days' sinning he shall be thrust into a lake of fire, shut up there for ever to burn in eternal consciousness of pain, or shall be snuffed, obliterated out of the universe, or shall die a lingering and painful death in some hidden hell? Where is the proportion? There is none.

The parable is written upon all the economies of God's administration. If it were a question of arithmetic, a question of quid pro quo thus much sin and thus much punishment there could be no proportion between the sin possible to a man in all his seventy years if he never slept an hour, if he cursed God in every throbbing moment of the seventy years there could be no proportion between that short blasphemy and infinite duration of penalty. So the Lord teaches us in this parable that we must not begin to reckon, and to audit God's ways, and to carry forward sums, and bring up additions, and make an arithmetical calculation of his providence and his way. The first shall be last and the last first the missionary shall have nominally as much as the man who never went from home, and the martyr shall have the same penny in mere name that is given to the man who lived a life of Christian ease, useful enough within its own limits, but without one pang of martyr fear, without one throb of martyr suffering.

So the parable is not written here once for all. It is the parable of the universe, it is the mystery of providence; it shows itself as vividly in the higher and nobler aspect of reward as in the aspect of punishment. What relation, arithmetical or statistical, is there between believing and eternal life? Some men seem as if they could not help believing. It comes, in a sense hardly to be explained, natural to them to go to church and to believe and to be good. They seem to have no individual Devil that tears their life in twain every day, that blows away with hot hell-breath their devotional breathings at the throne of the heavenly grace. They are not tortured, torn, mangled, pursued, but they fall with easy grace into ways that are good. What relation is there between their believing and eternal honour, Heavenly paradises, celestial inheritances, immeasurable duration of bliss? Why, if they had believed the moment they breathed, and if they had been singing hymns all their life, and doing deeds of charity through all the cycle of the seventy years, what relation could there possibly be between seventy years, how crowned soever with service and sacrifice, and innumerable millions of ages of reward? There is no relation. You cannot find out God to perfection in this matter, you cannot search him with arithmetic, you cannot make his ways equal by statistical schedules, your barter laws are not known here. This is the great mystery of life a revelation of a wider justice, a glimpse of an infinite administration that will not stop to be measured by the measurements of sense and time, and our dwarfed and crippled justice.

Jesus never departs from the spirit of this parable. Wherever we find him, he is living this parable out. Thus: "How oft shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?" Peter will be arithmetical; he will have two sines in his book; he is determined to reduce everything to logarithms: "How oft shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?" and in some mood of charity, very sublime to him, he says, suggestively, "until seven times?" Jesus anticipates this very parable, condenses it into a sentence, says, "Until seventy times seven." What is the meaning of that representation? The evident meaning is that there is to be no arithmetic in the church, no reckoning by numbers, no algebraic symbol representing numerical value, no sign for "equal to" in all the reckoning of the church. Thus is the justice of God evidently displayed on the one side of life as manifestly as on the other, for he himself will not take a cup of cold water without giving back a cup of wine for it. Where is the relation arithmetical? There is none. He himself will not be sick and imprisoned and visited without giving all heaven in return. Where is the barter equality? There is none.

These reflections lead up to the still grander thought that reason as such, in its carnal limitations and possibilities, has no place in the inner and upper sanctuary of divine purpose and thought. There we live by faith, there we say, "Not my reason be done, but thy justice not my will but thine be done."

So, then, we do the work without any reference to the reward. You who came to Christ full fifty years ago will have your penny as well as the dying thief that had to bring only yesternight one foot out of hell. Will, you, then, be placed on equal terms? It never can be so. Can a man of fine capacity and mind go along any road and have as the result of his walking only that which the common clodhopper has, who "thought the moon no bigger than his father's shield, and the visual line that girt him round the world's extreme"? Have they both equal enjoyment out of the same circumstances? It is impossible. The walk to the philosopher is a walk in church, a climbing up the altar stairs. He sees angels, he hears voices, he is touched by reverences, he is in the presence and sanctuary of God. Yet the road the same, the day the same the road through a garden, the day the queenliest in all the summer train, yet in that walk one man found heaven, the other only a convenient road to a place to sleep in.

So with Christian service. We get out of it according to our capacity. We are rewarded by the work itself, and we are to enter into it in the spirit of love, and in no other spirit. Yet ye say the way of the Lord is not equal. Judging him by this parable you would come to false conclusions about the law of the kingdom of heaven. The teaching of the parable is this; no reckoning in numbers, no clever schedule-making in the church, no comparative statistics banish the whole of them, and live in love. Beware of the statistician in the church: he will mislead you, though he says he takes the prose of facts. Facts may be so represented as to be lies. The statist tells me that our service last year amounted to, say, ten thousand, and our service this year amounts to, say, two thousand, therefore he says we have gone down. He seems to have right upon his side: people say you cannot quarrel with figures. Within given limits that statement is perfectly true; but the limits themselves are wrong. Within given limits the earth stands still, and yet the earth never pauses for one moment. Within given limits you can draw a straight line upon the face of the earth, and yet, really and truly, no line upon a globe can be straight. I must therefore go further in my judgment, and ask under what circumstances the two thousand was realized? Circumstances of great depression, circumstances of great trial and trouble, circumstances that made strong men tremble, and hopeful men begin to feel the coldness of a great fear, and under those circumstances the result was two thousand. Under what circumstances the ten thousand? Summer all the year round: the earth but touched, and she laughed in flowers and in fruits; the hand but put out, and it brought back riches. Then the two thousand are more than the ten! The first shall be last and the last first!

Let God be judge, and banish foolish talk about the eleventh hour, and the first hour, and the heat and burden of the day, and the penny given to each and all alike. You can make a tale of distress out of it, but in the soul of it God will justify himself.