Begrudging God–Matthew 20: 1-16

September 18, 2011
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

I did a couple of conferences this past year where some of the speakers were classmates of mine. In fact, some of them were in the classes below me when I was in seminary. And look at them now! Headlining major conferences! They’ve done so well! I’m so proud of them!

No I’m not! 

I keep thinking: Why them and not me?

Sometimes I go to big conferences or hang out with some of my fellow ministers and I’m trying my best to stifle my embarrassment. They know the big names personally: “Walter called the other day—Walter Wink, not Walt Brueggemann.”

“Oh, Barbara asked me to co-lead a workshop with her—Barbara Brown Taylor? She is so sweet and unpresuming!”

“I got a phone call from Phyllis the other day—Trible, of course—about the Emerging Church movement. Well, actually she was calling for my blueberry muffin recipe, but we got to talking….”

These folks don’t mean any harm. They’re talking about the reality of their lives. But I’m—well, I can get a tad jealous. It’s not fair! They know these famous people! Whereas sometimes I’m tongue-tied just walking into the room with them.

It’s not fair! Why can’t I be invited to be the headliner at the conference?

Jealousy. What an icky, icky emotion.

In our parable today, the workers who negotiated what they thought was a fair deal are jealous. In fact, one translation says they are “envious.” The people who haven’t worked as hard as they did are getting exactly the same deal. Is it fair?

No. Of course, life isn’t fair. But the fairness problem in this parable is unusual. It’s reversed. It’s not that the laborers who worked all day aren’t getting enough—it’s that those who worked less are getting just as much. It’s not fair! Why do I work so hard but for them it all comes so easy!

We’ve all said that now and then—some people work all their lives to develop a talent like acting or singing or athletics, and then somebody comes along who can do it so easily we feel like idiots. Some people breeze through exams that you and I sweat over. Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth and others have to work their way up. And some never even have that much of an opportunity.

And they get jealous.

We try to dress it up. “I only want what’s fair,” we say, when we complain about others having opportunities we never had, or entitlements that we aren’t entitled to. But it’s jealousy, plain and simple.

Jesus wants us to recognize it for what it is. It’s not negotiating a fair deal. It’s “He got two pieces and I only got one!” Jealousy.

Jealousy is one of the Seven Deadly, or Cardinal, Sins according to Roman Catholic tradition. Jealousy isn’t simply wishing to have something that another person has—it is wishing to deprive them of it as well. “Dante defined this as ‘a desire to deprive other men of theirs.’…In Dante’s Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. Aquinas described envy as ‘sorrow for another’s good.’”[1]

That’s how the Church Fathers described it. Here’s how Jesus describes it: It is begrudging God’s generosity. “Why do you begrudge me my generosity?” The Landlord asks the jealous workers in one translation. “Yeah, so I gave these poor folks a leg up. What’s the big deal? Did you get cheated somehow? Aren’t you getting good things in life? Why is it that you are jealous of another person’s good fortune?”

Jesus says that jealousy is begrudging God’s generosity. What that means is this: we think somehow that the good things we have aren’t good enough, because someone else has better things. God is showing favoritism! It’s not fair!

There are lots of ways that people become successful—more successful than us—that have very little to do with God. It is not true that God makes wealthy people wealthy and poor people poor. But when we’re looking at the world through the eyes of what Shakespeare calls the Green-eyed Monster—and when we see another having benefits that we think we deserve, what we’re really starting to question is whether God is paying me enough personal attention. We want God to prove how much God loves us by showering us with blessings the way we imagine others are showered with blessings.

It’s not so much that we think the world is unfair, but that we think God is unfair TO ME.

Live life long enough and you discover that life is unfair to everybody, no exceptions. In fact, in twenty-five years as a pastor I’ve discovered that most people carry around such great pain and heartache that, if you heard it, it would make you weep. But they keep on keepin’ on, often even finding happiness and joy and satisfaction in life.  Life is unfair, but most of us learn to deal with it. And that’s a good thing, because it means that at base we have an essential trust in the nature of things—perhaps, one could say, a basic trust in the goodness of God.

That’s what Jesus is calling our attention to. There is an imbalance in life, an unfairness in the way that the bad things of life get handed out—but there’s also an imbalance of generosity. God is far more generous than we imagine or we deserve. God’s grace is unbounded and indiscriminate. We may look at someone else with jealous eyes, believing somehow their good luck is the cause of our misfortune—but what we’re really doing is not trusting God. God’s generosity is so great that no one can take it away from us.

The challenge is to have faith that God’s generosity is the real ruling principle of the universe. To look at the world not through the green-eyed lens of jealous, but with the clear eyes of faith. This is not a universe of scarcity, but of abundance. It’s not an abundance of material or worldly things, of wealth or of opportunity to make it big or of talents or abilities, but it is an abundance of chances to live fully and joyously, to live with passion and compassion, to grow spiritually, to meet your own needs and those of others.

We express that confidence in the generosity of God by rejoicing in the good fortune of others. That seems to be a lost art in our personal lives and in our political discourse today, where it’s assuming to be a given that some other American’s personal wealth or tax break or social entitlement is a slap in my face and a cause for me to be outraged at the unfairness of The System.

I’m not talking about seeking a political solution to our problems right now—I’m talking about the spiritual solution to problems that are hardening our hearts. The spiritual challenge for those of us who trust in God’s generosity is to rejoice that others receive some benefit that we do not—to rejoice that somebody else is wealthier than me, or that somebody else gets a tax break that I don’t get.

And not just that—to rejoice when somebody else succeeded at something I’m not succeeding at; to rejoice when somebody else has a good family situation when I myself might have a bad one; to rejoice even in my own misfortune to know that someone else is having good fortune.

We rejoice and are grateful because anyone experiencing an extra helping in life is proof that God gives extra helpings to us all, if we only look for them. And if we’re willing to acknowledge them in the lives of those we’re jealous of, then we’re certain to see the extra helpings that God provides for us, as well—extra helpings we might otherwise have missed if we’d continued to let our eyes be clouded by jealousy.

We express our belief in the generosity of God’s grace by being generous ourselves—especially to those we think are somehow benefitting at our expense. Generosity, especially when we’re living in a time when we feel like our resources are scarce, is a powerful way to demonstrate to the world that you believe in a generous God.

It’s also a powerful way of reinforcing your own belief in God’s generosity when you start to doubt it. And it’s all too normal to doubt it. One of the most important clues that we’re doubting God’s generosity is when we find ourselves jealous of others, envious of their seeming ability to thrive when we feel like we’re just barely making it. Odds are, they’re feeling the same way about somebody else.

The issue isn’t how real our concerns about scarcity are. Because, yeah, sometimes we do have hard times. These times are harder than some we’ve had in a long while. It is true that sometimes our resources are scarce. It is true that others are managing better than we are. That’s life.

The issue is whether we are looking at the world through the clear eyes of faith rather than the green eyes of jealousy. When we look with eyes of faith, we can see the evidence of a generous, self-giving God—a God who loves us, who is with us in the bad times as well as the good, who has his eye on us, who generously gives us new opportunities for spiritual growth, for stronger relationships, for becoming more truly and spiritually human, a God who can even turn suffering to good spiritual purpose—if we will only get out of worrying about ourselves and open ourselves to God’s gracious, generous Spirit.