September
22, 2002 - Eighteenth
Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus
16: 2-15
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KJV
CEV
Matthew
20: 1-16
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KJV
CEV
“The Nature of Grace”
One of the categories theologians look at is the distinction between nature and grace. That distinction asks the question, “How far can we come in our knowledge of God naturally, that is just as we are as human beings, and when does Divine self-disclosure enter the picture? Many books have been written on the topic and there’s a great diversity of opinion, as you might expect. There are times I wonder whether we get caught up in making distinctions and miss the whole point of the exercise. Maybe we should be examining the nature of grace and leave it at that? Actually, I think we need to go beyond that point and get around to practicing grace. The more I study and reflect the more I realize that grace isn’t a category, it’s an approach to life.
I had heard of Philip Yancey and read reviews of his writing, but had never actually read his book What’s So Amazing About Grace. Because the texts this week speak so directly to the nature of grace I sat down with Yancey’s book – and devoured it. It may not be a technical theological work, but it exposes the nature of grace with an honesty and elegance that thrilled me.
At the very outset of the book he offers an illustration that made me shiver. He told of a prostitute, a drug addict and the mother of a two-year-old child, who had begun to sell her child for sex acts. She did it to buy food for the two of them and to satisfy her drug habit. When her social worker, Yancey’s friend who had told him the story, asked the woman if she had ever considered going to a church for help, she offered this response: “Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.” [p. 11] When Jesus was among us in the body people like that woman flocked to him. They came to him feeling, knowing that they would be accepted as they were and healed. If the church is the “body of Christ,” and we continue the incarnation, why do they run from us? Could it be we don’t understand the nature of grace?
So, what is the nature of grace? The Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin wrote that, “Grace is the freeness of love.” Grace is unmerited favor, a gift, and it is meant to rejoice the heart and free the spirit. Those of us who call ourselves ‘Christians’ are supposed to be people of grace. God has loved us and, in turn, we’re supposed to love others as freely as we have been loved. The nature of grace is just that basic and yet for two thousand years we can’t seem to live accordingly. Is grace absent from our world, or are we just missing the point?
Jesus tells the story of the generous vineyard owner to make the point more clear to us. In those days, as the Biblical scholar William Barclay reminds us, the marketplace was like the employment agency. A man came there first thing in the morning, carrying the tools of his trade, and waited there until someone hired him. The folks that hired themselves out this way were the lowest class of workers. They literally lived from day-to-day, which is why they continued to hang around the marketplace, even to the end of the day, hoping that someone would hire them. For these people a day’s wages could make the difference between the family being fed or going hungry.
The best tier of workers, who had been hired early in the day, had bargained with the vineyard owner. They had an estimation of their worth and they expected to get what they had bargained for – which they did. The owner wasn’t at all unfair. Look at the protest again, we world all day, they only worked an hour, and you’ve made them equal to us. The workers who had been there all day long, who only went to work after they had struck a bargain, had been paid what they had bargained for. What they wanted was merit pay! You see the workers who come at the various times when he goes hiring don’t try to make deals. They just want to work. They didn’t bargain with the vineyard owner, they didn’t have an estimation of their worth, they just went out to work. So they go to get their pay for an hour’s work and … surprise! The owner pays them a whole day’s wage, more than they expected, far more than they could have ever bargained for. And the top hands, who see this, now expect more than they bad bargained for and they don’t get it.
Jesus tells this story to make a point with the descendants of the Exodus. God’s chosen people have been missing the point of God’s grace for a long time, and still seem to be doing it. God demonstrates boundless generosity in freeing a captive people – they complain about hunger. Now slavery in Egypt looks a great deal better than freedom in the wilderness and the road to the land of promise looks long and hard. They miss the point that the God who has freed them can, will, and does, feed them. God’s generosity is greater than any of their expectations, but grace – and here is where we’d need to look a little farther into the text of Exodus than our reading does today – is not something which can be stored up or hoarded. Grace is something that must be sought after daily, like the manna. And, like the manna, grace must be looked for in the most ordinary, humble places, even in the places we’d least expect to find it – like in a prostitute. Grace is, thus, a risky thing.
We look at the world, I’m afraid, like the all-day workers, like the Israelites on the march. We think of it in terms of rights and fairness and what is due to us. One commentator put it so well: