Hearth & Altar

A landowner hires workers at dawn, at nine, at noon, at three, and at five in the afternoon - a full workday's worth of hours between the first hire and the last. At the end of the day he pays every single one of them the same amount. The men who worked twelve hours are furious, and if you are honest, your first reaction probably sides with them. Good - that means the parable is doing its job.

The landowner's answer is short: friend, I am not cheating you, did you not agree to a fair wage? Are you envious because I am generous? That last question is the one to bring home tonight. The Greek behind "envious" is literally about having an evil eye - a way of seeing that turns someone else's good fortune into your own grievance. The workers who arrived first were not shortchanged. They received exactly what they agreed to. What ruined their day was watching someone else get the same thing for less effort.

Isaiah gives the reading that explains why God runs the vineyard this way at all: my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways. A household runs on fairness by necessity - chores get divided, turns get taken, and that is right and good. But God's economy is not a fairness economy. It is a generosity economy, and those are not the same system with different numbers. One measures out. The other simply gives.

• For our family, that we would celebrate someone else's good fortune instead of measuring it against our own effort, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who feel they arrived too late - too late to the family, too late to the faith, too late to make up for lost time, we pray to the Lord.
• For the grace to seek the Lord while he may be found, as Isaiah says, rather than waiting for a more convenient day, we pray to the Lord.
• For everyone still working out whether God's ways can really be trusted when they don't match our own math, we pray to the Lord.

At Sunday dinner, have each person name one time this week they felt resentful about something good that happened to someone else. Not something bad happening to them - something good happening to another person. Say it out loud, without defending it.

This parable is made for a family with more than one child, because "that's not fair" is a sentence every household has heard a thousand times, usually about something genuinely small. Use tonight to name the difference between fairness and generosity directly. Fairness says everyone gets exactly what they earned. Generosity says the person handing things out gets to decide, and sometimes decides to give more than anyone earned.

Tell your children plainly: God is not fair, in the strict sense their sense of justice wants him to be. He is generous, which is a bigger and better thing than fair, but it takes some getting used to, especially when the generosity is aimed at someone other than you. Ask them to think of one person in their own life who seems to have gotten more grace, more chances, more forgiveness than they think that person "deserved" - and ask what it would take to be glad about it instead of bothered by it.