We’ve arrived – at the point where Isaiah spells it out: God’s way are not our ways (Is 55:6-9). And we have another passage from Matthew’s gospel where the point is illustrated yet again (Mt 20:1-16a). This time it’s a bit more pointed, both because we can relate to it very directly – who has not felt that sense of frustration or irritation when we think we’ve been treated unfairly, and because Jesus pushes back more firmly on our assumptions and expectations – who are you to decide how God should behave?
The underlying point is the same – God is not “fair”, by our standards. He loves everyone completely. What we might think of as our worthiness to be loved, or our unworthiness, or our sense of entitlement based on how hard we’ve tried – I’m sorry, none of that has any bearing on the matter at all.
We’ve heard it said over and over, as had the people of Israel before us. But we’re hard wired to have certain expectations about actions and results and consequences. Some of this I suspect is wired into our biology.
This is where Isaiah’s metaphor of God’s ways being as high as the heavens are above the earth in comparison to ours may be misleading for us. We are the first generation of humans who have truly absorbed that while the heavens may be a long way from the earth, that are just that – a long way. If you keep going long enough and far enough you will get there. There is no fundamental difference between the heavens and the earth, they are just separated by distance, exactly the same way as New York is separated from London.
So we may be tempted to think that our goal is to understand God’s ways so that we can fit in with them. We just have to travel some distance, maybe quite a ways, but we can get there – then God’s ways will be our ways, or our ways will be God’s ways – we’ll get synced up.
Nothing could be further from Isaiah’s perspective. For people at that time, and the time of Jesus, and right through until a few hundred years ago, the heavens and the earth were not places separated by a distance – they were utterly different, with no overlap, except possibly through death. How exactly they differed and how it was that we could experience these two worlds was a matter of great debate, but no one suggested that they were basically the same (until Galileo).
So why does this matter when we read this Scripture?
Because reading it as modern people, knowing there is no fundamental difference between the heavens and the earth, leaves us wondering then how exactly are God’s ways different from ours. Are they just hard to understand, or confusing, or in a sense arbitrarily different, in the way that one language is different from another, although they both serve the same purpose. But for Isaiah God’s ways were simply different, totally different, as different as the heavens and the earth.
But that didn’t mean they were strange or peculiar or hard to understand.
There is nothing hard to understand about the gospel story we hear today. We can identify completely with the workers in the story. We know we would feel exactly the same about being treated fairly. But the point is we would be wrong. Not wrong to feel that way – we feel what we feel, and feeling guilty about our feelings is unhealthy at best and possibly dangerous. But we have to accept that God works by different rules. This is the Law that the psalmist talks of so lyrically. Jesus simplifies or condenses that to the law of love.
To love as God loves is not natural for us humans, it’s not easy, but that’s not because we don’t know what to do; because God in heaven is a long way away and hard to figure out. God in heaven is right next to us, he’s just so very different from the way we’re built. But he explained quite clearly what he expects of us. He went so far as to send someone just like us to explain it.