Temple of the Living God

Proper 20A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

“Are you envious because I am generous?” (Matthew 20:15b). It seems clear from today’s parable that God plays by different rules. Jesus’ parable paints a concrete example of living out the Sermon the Mount. Following the way of Jesus will change us. Indelible human dignity doesn’t come from merit, or righteousness, or power, or even fairness, but purely from God’s grace. Surrender your envy, your moral judgements and join the party.

Yet, this is precisely where the gospel gets under our skin. We can agree, in principle, that everyone should have enough food, clean water, and a place to live. After all, a recent report found that more than 1 in 3 Chicago households and nearly 1 in 2 households with children, are food insecure which means they do not have consistent reliable access to enough food. But when someone receives benefits without doing all the things we did to secure them, suddenly we want to talk about fairness.

Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal are zoologists at Emory University who studied the evolution of fairness.  Does our sense of fairness arise from culture, or is it hardwired? They did an experiment using capuchin monkeys in adjacent cages where they could see each other. The monkeys were trained to trade small rocks for piece of cucumber. Capuchins love cucumbers. They handed over their rocks with enthusiasm.

But then, instead of a cucumber, one monkey received a grape — a coveted prize in the monkey world. The neighboring monkey perked up at this and handed over another rock, expecting, of course, to receive a grape, too.  But no — the handler gave her another piece of cucumber.  To make things worse, the handler then gave the second monkey another grape—for free!

You can watch what happened on YouTube.  “The first monkey just about lost her mind.  Not only did she refuse to eat the cucumber; she hurled it at the handler’s face.  She then proceeded to bang against the bars of the cage, throw her remaining rocks in every direction, and make furious gestures at her grape-eating companion.” Experiments with other primates yielded similar results. Scientists also found that infants as young as nine months old will react quite negatively to perceived unfairness.  Brosnan and De Waal concluded that the concept of fairness is deeply rooted in the human psyche. (Debi Thomas, “On Fairness,” Journey with Jesus, 9/13/20).

Jesus’ parable runs the same experiment—but on us—rather than monkeys or infants. He said, ‘the Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a landowner who went to the Home Depot parking lot to hire day-laborers.  Some worked twelve hours, some worked nine, others worked for six hours; while others only worked for three; and some only worked one hour!  And yet, he paid them all the same, beginning with the last ones hired to the first. Then he insisted on paying his workers in reverse order, absurdly making sure that the first workers saw what their less deserving counterparts received. Their reaction was not surprising. ‘Hey! No fair!’ they complain.

But what offense had the landowner committed? He kept his promise to the first workers. His generosity toward the last costs the first workers none of their agreed-upon pay. What they lost is the difference they expected to see between themselves and the others. And that was enough to turn a day when everyone receives their daily bread to become a day of grievance.

Peter and disciples had left everything. Jesus had promised them much. He told them, ‘Those who have left homes, family, or fields for his name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life.’ But what happens when people who have not traveled the same road receive the same welcome? Will Peter be able to rejoice in that? Or will he complain like the workers? The parable ends where Jesus began: the last will be first, and the first will be last (v16). It is a promise to those who have been left waiting, but it is also a word to the disciples about what they are following Jesus into. (Micah Krey, “Matthew 20:1-16,” Writings on Recovery and Preaching, 9/20/26)

Shock and dismay at the generous love and mercy of God is the tie that binds today’s readings together. Rather than joy at the wild success of his half-hearted preaching to inspire repentance among his enemies, the Ninevites, Jonah complained bitterly. God’s equal-opportunity mercy disgusted Jonah.

A side note: this week for the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur Jonah’s story will be read in synagogues everywhere. God asked Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry?”  Jonah’s answer, of course, is an emphatic yes! He complains, See, “I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2). God’s little object lesson involving a weed, a worm, and the wind did nothing to dispel Jonah’s bitterness. Will we harbor bitterness and resentment? Or can we open to something like the grace God makes possible in us?

Disgust and rejection at God’s mercy finds an echo in our own time among people of faith. Political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, speculates that the inherent and indelible dignity all human beings carry deep within themselves is the foundation of a liberal society. We feel a deep woundedness when that base level of equal dignity is not recognized. “Ralph Ellison wrote a novel called The Invisible Man, back in the 1950s about the experience of African Americans moving from the south to the north. Blacks no longer faced official legally sanctioned segregation. What you had was invisibility.” White people in the north simply didn’t see a black person as a fellow human being. The pain of poverty, Fukuyama argues, is this invisibility to other people. Likewise, a lot of our politics today, is driven by people who feel they’re invisible. There’s the feeling that the world being is run by educated elites who don’t listen to the concerns of people like them and don’t recognize them as being fully equal because they don’t have the education or the sophistication. It’s this unequally distributed recognition which is actually at the base of a lot of our problems, Fukuyama says. (The Ezra Klein Show: Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About ‘The End of History’, Sep 11, 2026)

How can we free ourselves from the doom-loop of backlash and resentment? Jesus did not tell this story because someone asked him to settle a payroll dispute. Jesus calls us out of the prison cell of our petty ego to life with him in the expansive undying life of God. The old Adam and Eve must be daily drowned in the waters of baptism. Our small self must die with Jesus on the cross so that our true self may be resurrected with him and emerge from the tomb. Like the sage Honi, in our second reading from the Talmud, we strive for the benefit of our children, and our children’s children.  We work for the flourishing of all life to the seventh generation. God’s farm is all creation. We the laborers, have an ownership stake in the whole enterprise. You are a temple of the living God. Each of us is made stronger, healthier, and whole when we all are well and thriving. This is the greater purpose for which God frees us and toward which God now calls us.