Infernal Labyrinth

IYKYK

   

Lections: The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 25), AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Grace is a remarkably dangerous idea.

We resist it in pride. We receive it with joy. We witness it lavished upon others with discontent. And when we find ourselves expected to exhibit it, our affrontedness kindles rage.

Grace goes against our nature, or at least the nature of our fallen condition. We like to think that we earn what we get. That’s fair; that’s just; isn’t it? Work hard, keep your nose clean, and rightly reap rewards. Many might describe this as the American Dream. “Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was,” yes? Such sentiments aren’t unique to our nation, but they are particular to it.

And I certainly admit to the appeal. Most of us want to do the right thing, or so I should hope; to grow into good men, good women. We do so by by diligently pursuing our education, trying to keep out of trouble, helping our neighbors, holding down a career, paying our taxes, living honest lives—convictions beneficial not only to ourselves but to our societies, to all of those around us.

We hold to the values of middle-class morality, Thomas Jefferson’s vaunted yeoman farmers. But there are cracks in that system, both above and below, try how we might not to see them. Oligarchs accrue wealth, power, and influence far beyond the greed of any dragon, holding more monetary value than literal billions of their fellow human beings. And then we have the homeless, the hungry, the poor, the addicted, our tragically uneducated underclass.

And we don’t like acknowledging that. It disrupts our ethical calculus. We cannot accept a world so unfair. And so instead we swallow lies: that centibillionaires, striving to be trillionaires, somehow earned more for themselves than entire continents; that they deserve the Mandate of Heaven, like the divine-right kings of old—despite the fact that every crown in history descends from an ancestor swinging an axe.

And as for the poor, well—if only they could get their act together, pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Haven’t they had the same opportunities that all of the rest of us share? It’s a pity; it really is; but what can you do? They dug that pit for themselves, and so now they have to claw their own way out, like a corpse crawling up from the grave. The alternative would be to admit that we live in an unjust world, and nobody wants to do that. Because then we might begin to wonder whether we have deserved what we’ve got.

Thus we end up with a sort of twisted Western iteration of the Hindu caste system, with those at the top ordained by God and those underfoot crushed beneath the weight of karma. We erect this conscientious edifice, in theory, to defend the justice of the cosmos, when in reality it bolsters injustice. No-one deserves the wealth of the nations. No-one deserves destitution. It would be lovely if everyone reaped naught but that which he or she individually sowed—or perhaps we would find it a horror—but either way, it’s not the world in which we live.

And the only way out of this infernal labyrinth is grace. The only path to liberation is the Kingdom of Our Lord. But that’s going to tick a lot of people off, and likely offend us as well—which is why Jesus warned us that He comes not to bring peace but a sword.

Our first reading this morning wraps up the tale of Jonah. And Jonah, mind you, is a joke. I mean that literally. The Book of Jonah is a four-chapter set-up for a punchline, but what a punchline it proves to be. You may recall the bones of the story from Sunday School. God commissions the prophet Jonah to travel to the great imperial capital of Nineveh, there to pronounce the doom of said metropolis: “40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

And in response, Jonah catches the first ship that he can find to the opposite end of the earth. Yet God is God, and will not be denied. A great storm halts the ship in its proverbial tracks; so Jonah launches himself overboard, into the watery abyss of death. He’s a stubborn one. But God then sends a great fish—a whale, we tend to say—to pull up Jonah from the depths and vomit him back on shore.

To be clear, this is funny. We miss the point when we take it too seriously. A little context makes it all the more humorous, when we realize that Nineveh worshipped Dagon, a god most often portrayed as a man emerging from the mouth of a fish. Jonah then perfunctorily preaches the lamest sermon in the Bible, a single sentence, and retreats to a hill from which to watch the imminent annihilation of the city. But somehow, miraculously, ridiculously, all of mighty Nineveh repents, from the poorest of the poor to the emperor on his throne. And God relents from the evil He intended.

Now comes the punchline. “I knew it!” Jonah sputters. “I knew that You would do exactly this, that You would chicken out in the end, because you are a God who is slow to anger, abounding in mercy! That’s why I ran away—for I knew that You were merciful, and I want to see them burn!” For indeed, Nineveh was one of the triple capitals of the awful Assyrian Empire, the great villains of the Hebrew Bible, the ISIS or the Nazis of their day.

Here we were led to think that God was wrathful, and humans reluctant, when really we were the monsters all along, we who could not stand to see God’s mercy ladled out upon people whom we hated, people whom we deem unworthy. That’s the joke. And it cuts us to the heart.

Similarly, the parable from our Gospel reading this morning: in it, a man owns a vineyard, and goes out to hire laborers. He promises them a day’s wage for a day’s work, to which they eagerly agree. A few hours later, he goes out again to find other men standing idle. He hires them as well, promising to pay to them whatever would be right. He repeats this hiring practice five times in a day, welcoming some in at 5:00pm for a single hour of labor. And then at the close—wouldn’t you know it?—he pays them all the same, a full day’s wage.

And this upsets those whom He had brought in first: not because he gave them less than he had promised, not because he’d cheated anyone, but because the original crew didn’t think that other folk deserved it. Why should they get the same amount for having labored less? To this, the vineyard owner says, “I choose to give the same to these as I have given to you. Can I not do what I want with mine own? Or are you envious because I am good?”

There’s an old sociological experiment, wherein subjects encounter the option to receive $100, upon the condition that someone whom they don’t like receives, say, $500. It makes no sense to say no, to cut off your nose to spite your face. Yet most people reject the deal. We would rather work against our own interest than bring blessing upon those whom we despise.

The vineyard, of course, is an ancient image of Israel, with the vineyard-owner standing in for God. In this context, Christ appears to be talking about Gentiles, non-Jews, welcomed into the Kingdom of God concurrent with the Jews, who suffered so long for their faith. But it also remains, more broadly, an object lesson in grace, and how disruptive it can be.

We think of grace as weak, a namby-pamby mercy permitting an “anything goes” mentality, whereby we’re simply swept into the Kingdom on the wings of the Spirit, softened sinners one and all. But the truth is that grace is outrageous. It dismantles our notions of fairness, our pretensions of propriety. Grace takes a hammer to the lie that we have earned all of our blessings, and the subsequent assumption that we don’t owe a damn thing to anybody else.

The Kingdom of God is not a gated community. It’s not a ladder by which we pull ourselves up and into Heaven. It bows neither to caste nor to capitalism. Throughout the length and breadth of Scripture, from Adam to the Apocalypse, the Kingdom of God is nothing less than a reshaping of Creation into the world as it was meant to be: “a place where no-one starves, where no-one has too much, where everyone has opportunities to rest, and where all minds are freed from want or worry to focus on the glory of God.”*

The truth alone will set you free. But first it will make you mad.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

*Quotation by Cameron B.R. Howard.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026