Unfair Grace

Original sermon given on The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 20, 2026 written and delivered by Pastor Jeff Leininger at First Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church.

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“Unfair Grace”

Matthew 20.1-16

Unfair Grace

In the name of the Living God and His Risen Christ. Amen.

What’s the hardest, hottest job you’ve ever had to work? For all you young’un’s out there, I have a little assignment for you. After worship, talk to one of our older members and ask them about the most difficult job they had to do, under the worst conditions. Believe me, they’ve got some stories for you. Then, instead of the 17th Sunday after Pentecost, we can rename today the “Festival of ‘Back in My Day!’ Sunday.” Welcome to “Back in My Day” Sunday!

Well, “back in my day,” I remember cutting grass all day up and down huge hills and laboriously landscaping under the midday heat in the hottest Minnesota August at that point on record… for $4 an hour. (And I was thankful!) But I can’t imagine doing that and then getting paid the same as the guy who only mowed the last hour. That’s not fair.

My maternal grandfather grew up in a farming community in Bay City/ Saginaw, Michigan area, and he would tell stories about harvesting potatoes all day by hand at 3 cents a bushel. If you really worked it, you could do 50 bushels in a day — but at least you got out of school to help with the harvest! (What do you students think? Go to school or pick potatoes in the heat all day?)

Now my Grandpa Pruetz was a religious man and a faithful Lutheran Christian, so I know he heard this parable many hundreds of times sitting in church. I wish I could ask him today how it strikes him. It certainly seems very unfair. Farm labor is hard. The harvest doesn’t wait for the weather to cool down. You sometimes have to bring in extra help, especially if there’s a big harvest. You agree to work for a certain wage, but then when it’s “quitin’ time,” the workers who only came at the end get paid for working all day. When it comes to your turn, expecting maybe a bonus or something, you get paid the exact same amount as the last-minute slackers. All day. Hard labor. Scorching heat. Same pay. Totally not fair.

This might be the most un-American of all of Jesus’ stories. We like our rights, don’t we? We’re almost obsessed with fairness, making sure that everyone gets exactly what’s coming to them. Consider our nation’s fair work legislation (which I’m in favor of) like the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which strictly prohibits sex-based wage discrimination. Or Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits compensation discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Or the Age Discrimination Employment Act of 1967, which protects workers age 40 and older. Or Title 1 of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 — again, all of which I am definitely in favor of.[1]  Let me ask you, how many lawsuits would this Landowner have coming to him if this parable was set in America?

But this story isn’t about fair labor law. It’s not meant to tell us how to run a business, or an economy, or a country. It’s meant to teach us how the kingdom of God operates wholly unlike any of these things. In the kingdom of God, none of us get what we really deserve, and therefore all of us live under grace beyond measure. The parable then really isn’t about fairness, it’s about graciousness; it’s not about equity, it’s about generosity. It’s meant to cut right into all the comparison games we play, especially with regards to God. What we think we deserve compared to others; who’s been given more; why God seems to bless others and not me, even when I’m doing all the right things. What God should be giving me compared to others, especially since I’ve been working so hard for him. But what if none of us really deserves anything from God, and yet all of us have been given underserved grace in abundance? How might that make us less resentful of his generosity, and less insistent on constantly playing the comparison game?

Think about the parable in a different way than my grandfather might have: if each of those workers had only concentrated on what they had been given to do, and what the gracious Lord was paying them, there would have been no problems, and in fact, no parable at all. Those hired first: they are given honest work, which they need. They are given decent, good, even generous pay for their work. They get to work in a vineyard and participate in the making of wine, which is always nice. (I’m sure everyone in the parable is over 21.) They are paid on time and are given just what they were promised — fair pay for a fair day’s work.

It’s when those hired first turn their eyes off the gracious Lord and start looking at others, that’s when they get into trouble. “Hey, those hired last get paid the same as us?! Totally Not Fair!”

The Bible has a particularly graphic way of describing these workers’ jealousy towards the late coming, last hour workers. The Lord in the parable says, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” Begrudge here is literally having an “evil eye” or “bad eye.”[2] Stinginess, jealousy, resentment of God’s generosity to others a “bad eye,” a bad look, in the Bible. A bad eye can’t see all the good we’ve been given; and it looks at others only through the lens of comparison.

How’s your “evil eyesight” these days? How much energy and effort do you spend in resentment towards others’ blessings? When we take our eyes off our Lord and how gracious he’s been to us and instead evaluate our relationship with God based upon what we think others have been given, we’ll never be satisfied. Rather, Jesus’ words take the community of faith and its members, and places them all on the same level: completely covered in his grace alone.[3] All work because God calls them; all receive abundant grace regardless of their status or accomplishments; all will, under his grace, receive their equal eternal reward. That’s not fair exactly, but praise God that He isn’t fair. Let me ask it in this way: would you rather have him give you exactly what you deserve? Would you?

In the paragraph following today’s reading our Lord tells us how he will live out bodily the parable, and this phrase: “the first will be last.” After this difficult parable, as they’re going up to Jerusalem, Jesus gathers privately the Twelve around him, and tells them, “…the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life” (Matt. 20.18-19).

The one who had the most — the eternal son of God — became the least. He who knew no sin became sin for us. The perfect gives himself for the imperfect, the Holy One for the Unholy, the Righteous for sinners. The One First became last, and all the last, first. Is that fair?

By this gift of his very self, he has won for us a vineyard of bounty and blessing that will never end. The cross is the great equalizer, not because it means that we all get exactly what’s coming to us, but precisely because we don’t.

May this work of the cross pluck from us our “evil eyes” that we may we see instead with eyes of grace.

Come soon Lord Jesus. Amen.

[1] I’m grateful to “Lectionary Kick-Start, from concordiatheology.org for this illustration.

[2] I borrow this illustration from R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, 751

[3] C.f. Gibbs, Matthew, 991

Image Source: Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990. Day Laborers Brought in by Truck from Nearby Towns, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/58897 [retrieved September 22, 2026]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Negro_day_laborers_brought_in_by_truck_from_nearby_towns,_wa..._(3110578766).jpg.