Are Grace and Judgment Fair?

We’ve been talking about grace, our effort and our responsibility towards it, and the role that we have in our own salvation. Last week, we saw the deep emotional response—the emotional experience—that occurs when we see grace in action. In the recipient of grace we see surprise, joy, and celebration. We see that grace elicits a party. But that grace is contrasted with equal surprise but with jealousy and anger at its apparent unfairness. Thus, there are two responses to grace are: Joy or jealousy, celebration or anger. But it seems that, like judgment, surprise is a common reaction.

Last week, Jason introduced the topic of fairness as it relates to grace. Human beings rely on fairness to exist. The idea that life should be fair, that there should be equality to our actions, that we should get what we deserve and not get what we don’t deserve, is deeply rooted in who we are. In the garden of Eden, before the Fall, God’s intention was that mankind should exist with total dependence upon him. The Tree of Life in the center of the garden is the tree of dependence. It is the opposite to a tree of reason. It is the antithesis of cause and effect. You don’t get what you deserve from the tree of life—you get God’s sustaining power. You might call the Tree of Life, the Tree of Grace.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the tree of independence. It is the tree of judgment and discrimination. It is the tree of getting what you deserve. It is the tree of cause and effect. It is the tree of fairness and consequences. The Tree of Life is just what the name implies: It is the source of everlasting life. To simply eat from the tree of life is to tap into the power of eternal life.

Fairness, it seems, is a human trait. God is not fair. Cause and effect is fair. Grace is not fair. Maybe Jason is right that all we really want out of life is for things to be fair. Isn’t it remarkable, given what we know about ourselves (particularly as it relates to Man’s standing before God) that we would seek what is fair? Why do we seek fairness so tenaciously? Why are we so angry when we feel that God is not fair? If I were to ask you: “Is life fair?” what would you respond? Taken as a whole, would you say that your life is fair? Why were you born here and I was born there. Why are people richer than you? Why are people thinner, more beautiful, smarter, have better hair (or have hair at all!), or a different color of skin? Why do I get cancer and yet I’ve lived a clean and healthy life? Why are my children brats and yours are little angels? Why do you live in a mansion and I’m homeless? Why are you my neighbor and your basement flooded but mine did not? Manifestly, life is really not fair.

Why do we so value fairness? Why do we demand it when everything around us cries out that life is not fair? Would we not be better off embracing grace? Why do we insist on fairness when grace is a better deal? Is it just that grace is too good to be true, or is it that we view grace as good for the disadvantaged but we don’t consider ourselves disadvantaged? We’re spiritually advantaged. We are, after all, Jonah; we’re not the Ninevites. We’re the elder brother; we’re not the prodigal son.

Jesus told another parable about grace and fairness:

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and to those he said, ‘You go into the vineyard also, and whatever is right, I will give you.’ And so they went. Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did the same thing. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around; and he *said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’ They *said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He *said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’ “Now when evening came, the owner of the vineyard *said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, starting with the last group to the first.’ When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius. And so when those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they grumbled at the landowner, saying, ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day’s work and the scorching heat.’ But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go; but I want to give to this last person the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I want with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’ So the last shall be first, and the first, last.” (Matthew 20:1-16)

The pool of vineyard workers, we must see, represents us, taking life day by day, trying to work our way through it. Some of us are young, some are old. Some of us are strong and muscular, some are weak and thin. Some of us are flexible, some are stiff. Some of us are healthy, some are sickly.

The first ones to go from the pool in the early morning are the most fit, the most able, the most likely to produce good work. They’re selected first. They operate on a contractual fairness: One day’s wage for one day’s work. Off they go; the work of life is waiting. But the owner comes back for more. Notice that it is the initiative of the owner to come back and he does so knowing two things: First, that there are still more workers in the pool and second, that those left in the pool are less capable of work than the previous group. With each successive visit to the pool, the ability of the worker to work is diminished. Toward the end (he goes back to the pool five times in all) the workers are thin, less fit, less able to produce. Not only did they not work all day in the hot sun, but quite frankly they could not have done a day’s work in the hot sun. The last group is almost unable to work at all.

When the payment comes, the teaching of Jesus is very clear: In the kingdom of heaven, fairness is not what runs the economy. It is not the object. The object of the kingdom of heaven is grace.

Once again we see the strong emotions aroused by grace. There is obviously joy in the short-term worker and “grumbling” or “anger” (depending on the Bible translation) in the long-term laborers. But notice that at the end of the day, every worker had enough. They got what they needed, just like the Israelites got the manna. At the end of the day, no one went home hungry. Everyone had a denarius. In the end, Jesus says, grace is the great reversal: The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.

What we see, then, in the parables of grace, is a picture of judgment. The judgment is not about how much good and how much evil you do. I believe we need to think again about the judgment and about the books in heaven containing a record of our deeds. Psalm 130 seems to speak to this. This version is taken from the Message Bible. This is the psalmist talking about the books of heaven:

Help, God—I’ve hit rock bottom! Master, hear my cry for help! Listen hard! Open your ears! Listen to my cries for mercy. If you, God, kept records on wrongdoings, who would stand a chance? As it turns out, forgiveness is your habit, and that’s why you’re worshiped.

He then goes on to talk about worship and concludes with:

O Israel, wait and watch for God—with God’s arrival comes love, with God’s arrival comes generous redemption [you could substitute “grace”—Don] No doubt about it—he’ll redeem Israel, buy back Israel from captivity to sin..

What we see in the story of manna, the story of Jonah, the parable of the vineyard workers, and the parable of the prodigal son, is that the Christ is the criterion for, and the picture of, judgment. So this is the judgment: Will you place your works and your independence into judgment, or will you place your dependence into judgment and accept God’s grace?

Long-term workers in the vineyard put their works into judgment. Notice in Matthew 20:12, “we slaved all day in the hot scorching sun.” This is a presentation of their work into judgment. In Luke 15, the elder son says: “Look how many years I have stayed here working for you, never giving you a moment’s grief.” The daily gathering of manna by the Israelites—the works of their hands—was rotten by the next day. Jonah 2 presents Jonah’s devout credentials before God: “I turned my face toward God, I looked toward the mountain, I remembered my Redeemer.” This is the judgment choice then: “Let me present my pious, independent credentials to God. Judge me by this, I say to God, judge me by my prayers, judge me by my tithes, by my humility, my piety, my generosity, my obedience. Take it all, look it over, and judge me by it. And let me then take a look at my books, and show that I have done all these good things for you. Or take my badness and my brokenness and dependence on God and judge me by that.”

Over and over in the teaching of Jesus we see these two poles of judgment. We see it in Luke 18, in the story of the Pharisee and the publican:

Now He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and began praying this in regard to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, crooked, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’ The tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to raise his eyes toward heaven, but was beating his chest, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other one; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9-14)

To the Pharisee, his own work was pious. He was proud of it. It was independent and he was quick and easy to put it into judgment. Not like the publican who pleaded for God’s mercy and put himself in dependence upon God and God’s grace.

This is the question, then: Why does Jesus tell so many parables about grace and judgment, contrasting grace with human effort. Doing things God’s way (the obedience that we talked about several weeks ago) seems to be necessary but insufficient. In a world full of unfairness why don’t we simply embrace grace? Is dependence harder than independence? And why is fairness so intuitive and grace so counterintuitive? Why is grace so hard to swallow? Is it just not severe enough?

If grace is really easy, then why is it so hard? Jesus even likened grace to pushing a camel through the eye of a needle, because we know that grace is the route to heaven. Why, in the face of grace, do you wish to present you and your work to God? When God asks: “Do you wish to be judged by my grace or by your works?” why do we always present our works?

This is the judgment choice, then, between accepting grace or being weighed by our works. We see Cain and Abel in the field and Cain presents his work. Abraham at the altar presents his all on the altar, but it’s not enough, Moses and the rock, Jonah and his prayers, Job’s friends, and many parables of Jesus all point to this polarization of judgment between grace and works. Help me understand something that seems like it should be so easy yet seems to be so hard.

Can we live without measurement? Notice the first laborers get a contract, a measured reward. One denarius for one day’s work. The others are promised only a fair wage. No measured amount is noted. No measured amount is promised. There is no contract or agreement. Why are we so uncomfortable to accept a fair wage?

Let’s say that you are going to come to work for me. You want to know what is your job description You want to know what the contract will say, with everything spelled out. When do I start my work day? When does my work day end? How many breaks do I have and what times are they? What about my lunch break? What about my vacations? What about my pension benefits? Would you go to work for someone who would only offer you a fair wage?

Do you trust God enough in the judgment to fall only upon his grace, or do you want to know here and now what you have to do to be saved? Do we say to God: “Your everlasting, everlasting, unrelenting grace is not enough. Please God, let me add my piety, my prayers, my patience, my generosity and my obedience.”

Kiran talked a few weeks ago about “cheap” grace, which is implied to be grace without works. Cheap grace to me is adding my effort to God’s graciousness. Why is grace simply not enough for us? “Let me see the Book of Deeds, to see where I stand. Let me make sure that I have been forgiven of all my bad deeds; let me make sure that I get credit for my good deeds.”

John gives this definition of the judgment:

And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light; for their deeds were evil. (John 3:19)

As we talked about last week, substituting the word “grace” for “light”, and “independence for evil”, we get: “And this is the judgment, that grace has come into the world. And men loved independence rather than grace; for their deeds were evil.”

Is living a life of grace even possible? Is it desirable, even? Is it impossible because of our fallen nature? What are your thoughts today about grace and fairness, about placing ourselves and our work and our effort into the judgment or leaving the judgment to God’s grace?

C-J: I have a very different take on grace. I’ve worked many times for unfair wages, doing really physical hard, long days. But the trade-off is in my head. I’m not happy about it, but I have a job, and God has given me health. I have shelter. I have community. And so those are the trade-offs. And it’s the only way I could make it. I would be a pretty angry person if I did that list of “Why can’t I have…?”

I also think that the beauty of God is that there are many actors on the stage of life, and each of us has a very important part to play. And those that are the most depressed—the innocent victims of whom we say “I’m glad that isn’t me,” or “This person has the worst luck”—receive a portion of grace that we can’t begin to understand. It teaches us empathy, it gives us an opportunity to be extremely generous with what we have in our kindness. I think that God gives them an extra portion. Yes, they suffer greatly. Yes, they are denied the most basic of human rights.

I’m thinking about us leaving Afghanistan, knowing that in a very short period of time that country will probably look much different than it has for the last 20 years. Or even in my own neighborhood: Why are children dying? Why every day do I turn on the TV and find more violence against the innocent, or health issues. But I think God measures that out in terms of the big picture. It’s not about what I deserve. It’s about my role on that stage and how well I’m willing to do it—grudgingly (and I’m an angry person) or with generosity of spirit. Am I willing to tear that piece of bread in two for the one who has none?

Donald: We weave together works and grace into the same conversation continually. Grace doesn’t come with effort, with works. Grace is by its very nature a gift. It’s not earned. But we can’t seem to have a conversation about grace and let it go at that. Why is that? I don’t know. I think it’s probably human nature, because in life, we think we get what we deserve, or we try to earn something and then we do get it. So there is a quid quo pro.

Last Sabbath I said something about gift-giving on Christmas morning and one of the kids gets less and complains. It’s still a gift! The kids who got everything they wanted, or more, aren’t gonna say anything! An elderly lady to whom I mentioned this said: “Well, that was the problem of the parent. It had nothing to do with the gift. The parent should never give unequal gifts.”

Don: That’s exactly what the long-term laborers said.

Donald: Exactly. So we’re not really comfortable with grace. We see this book of judgment and deeds and all the rest of it. Why can’t we let that go and go with grace? Why do we still have this picture in our head that it’s good to have it all written down so there’s no mistake. I guess I’m still confused.

C-J: I think it goes to the idea of “to whom much is given, much is required.” I saw a man at the beginning of COVID who had lost both of his arms up to his elbow and his legs at his knees. But he was alive, and he was learning to adjust to this new life and he was filled with gratitude. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be filled with gratitude. But where he began, that was gratitude.

If you have a great deal, if you haven’t had to struggle for half a sandwich in the whole day, and you’ve worked all day, 12 hours in the field, and you got a glass of water to drink with it, you would feel blessed. It’s where you begin. If you’re born in a palace, gratitude is almost an assumption. I see it through a different lens. Nobody deserves anything, but to whom much is given, much is required.

Carolyn: I really feel that grace has given me more freedom than any other word that God has given us. The freedom of just knowing his grace is sufficient. It is the freedom of knowing where I stand with the Lord. And it’s just nothing I can do. It’s only him.

Donald: We want more. We don’t want “sufficient.” We want streets of gold. The stories we are reading make it kind of difficult to put the pieces together. They don’t seem to fit right.

Carolyn: All I know is I feel like when I start deciding what I have to do, I must walk with the Lord, be filled with his Spirit, and allow him to do it. Therefore I am not trying to attain—I have already reached the goal because I have God’s grace.

C-J: That works if you’re only living to go to heaven, whether it’s 20 days or 20 years or 200 years, if your goal is only to get to heaven, then you notice it’s a blink of an eye. But if your goal is to get to the end of the next hour, it’s a different way of living. “If I can just get out of out of this war zone, if I can just pay this bill, If my kid just comes home safely….” It’s a whole different way of living. They just see the long road, but they live in that moment and that moment is not easy. They can’t go to the refrigerator and open it. There is no refrigerator.

Carolyn: That’s very true. But once you have the mindset that you’ve placed your hand in the hand of Jesus, you know he’ll make something happen.

C-J: So what if you don’t have a Jesus?

Carolyn: This is where grace is. The Holy Spirit works through us to be able to give that hope, that joy, of knowing you have a God in heaven who has grace for everyone, and it’s abundant. But it doesn’t mean it’s always tangible.

C-J: But what if you’re born into a different culture? What if you’re born into a different belief system? What if they call their gods something different? What if their God doesn’t look like mine, or does different things?

Carolyn: I am just saying there is sin in the world and sin will separate us no matter what we do. But God has also commissioned us to go and tell, so we rely on the Holy Spirit to help those who are not in the know about what your joy is. I can only do what my joy is. Because I can’t tell them how they should act, or how they should feel, or anything, because I don’t know what it’s like. Only the Holy Spirit can do it.

Sometimes it’s just a smile. It’s just a hug. And it’s sometimes just caring enough to hear their problem. And I don’t care what culture they’re from. We all are human. And we come at that level—at the level of the cross—and this is where I draw my strength. All I have to offer is what the Holy Spirit gives me.

Anonymous: This discussion is beautiful. I’m enjoying it. Thank you.

C-J: I just watched a documentary about an Ethiopian tribe whose members are still superstitious. If a child is born out of wedlock, lacking the blessing of the elders, and the child’s teeth come out on the top first and not the bottom, it is killed. This tradition is thousands of years old and still happening today. Some of the children were lucky enough to be taken by missionaries and educated. One of them who grew up became a teacher went back to his tribal community and said to them: “This is wrong, and here’s why.” One woman, probably in her late 60s, had lost 12 children to this superstition intended to protect the tribe.

Things got really ugly. People tried for years and years to educate, to inform, and to show the destruction it did in the families and that it’s a superstition, a tradition that no longer is valid. One elder said: “If you do this, we will all die.” And I thought that was the truth in terms of why this tradition began. They live a nomadic life in a very dry, hot place. If every child lived, there wouldn’t be enough food when the rains fail.

That really was the crux of this tradition: That the rain didn’t come because somebody did wrong. And they asked “Where’s the anomaly?” And that became their truth, and it was passed on generationally. In the end, the government said it would will no longer allow the tribe to kill the children. It established an orphanage for them.

I watched that documentary with such empathy, in the simplicity of what truth could become. I bring this up because I think we have been incredibly blessed. We might not have everything we would like, or we feel we’ve earned. But we are incredibly blessed. All of us have lived a long life. We don’t go hungry (or we don’t have to go hungry, there are food banks), we have health,… we are very, very blessed. But when I watched that documentary, the first thing I wanted to do was just hold to those children, and the women who lost their children, and the grown men crying: “They took my only son.”

It was a very powerful illustration of what life is like in other places.

Jay: We want more out of life. When we stop and reflect upon that, we can see that it’s selfish. But that’s very different than when we think about what we deserve. We believe that we deserve certain things and certain rights. I think this is where some of our cognitive dissonance comes from—that discernment of “what I deserve.”

It goes back to the concept of fairness. From a physical, human perspective, it really requires some discernment. It requires a cognitive judgment about what should or should not have happened in a specific circumstance. Those are judgment calls, and grace has nothing to do with human discernment or judgment, in a spiritual sense. Grace is just a grace. It doesn’t require us to ask: “Should you have gotten grace? Should you not have gotten grace? Is there more grace? Is there less grace?”

Grace is grace. It’s a gift, It’s when we change grace into trying to make discernment about it, that the cognitive dissonance arises. We do it because we are so hardwired—through our fallen nature—about fairness and judgment. When you take the Bible back all the way to the garden scene, the garden experience, the fall of man, it’s really about discernment. Should you or should you not have the ability to discern good from evil?

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is about discernment. And God is saying: “That’s not your place. You are a created being. If you want to get into the business of discernment, I can promise you, you’re going to mess up. It’s not for creative beings to be in the business of discernment of right and wrong.” But once we were fallen and find ourselves in the situation that we’re in, now we’re measuring everything against that discernment.

In my very simple way of looking at it is really coming down to the concept of fairness and the difference between equality and equity, two very, very different things that require discernment, and we are not in that business, but we so badly want to be in that business. So we we want to make grace be about discernment, but grace has nothing to do with discernment. It has nothing to do with “Who should have, who shouldn’t have, who got more, who got less, when it comes, when it doesn’t come, etc.” Grace’s is out of that realm but through our fallen nature we want discernment so badly.

The only way we know how to make constructs to understand things is through discernment, through quantitative measurement. If we can let grace be outside of that, if we can let it be apart from fairness and discernment and quantitative or qualitative measurement then I think we can find the grace that God is talking about.

Don: But for Christians the link between grace and discernment is deeply rooted in our theology. Stories about grace always seem to end up with “…but then God knew this person’s heart and and extended grace to them.” What’s in your heart is not the criterion for grace.

Reinhard: I look at it from a different angle. Jesus was addressing an audience of Jews, who (it seems to me) had tunnel vision about how to appease God: By works. They wanted to make right with God so God would not punish them. They wanted to follow the law. Jesus wanted to shake up their mindset about how God does business, how God treats people,

In human society, in human enterprise, in human business, fairness is the number one issue. We want to prevent criminality and reward fairness. But God knows better how we should live. The ultimate message here is about salvation. Because there’s only two choices: Death or life. To be on the left or on the right. There are people who have lived all their life in a godly family, doing the right thing. following the law of God, living a good Christian life. Then there are people who never experienced such a life but who, in the end, accept Jesus and repent, like the criminal on the cross,

The ultimate goal, the reward, is the same for all: Life or death. There is no third option. Some people may do the right thing from from the beginning, some people are in between, some people only get there at the end, but the reward is one: Salvation. Some may object to the salvation of latecomers. Jesus wanted to teach the people of his time that God’s business offers only one reward: Salvation, so no matter how we live in this life, God’s grace is going to whoever he chooses.

C-J: I go back to the garden in the sense of a small community. As incredibly blest people we can live independently. If I don’t have a needed skill set, I go pay someone who does. I don’t have to learn it. I don’t have to be dependent. But in this little tribal community they were interconnected. Not just by their faith but also by sharing what little food there was. They were codependent on one another.

But everybody I see sitting here is able to survive without any one of us being next to us. We need certain tools, but we could survive independently of one another in a tribal community in a relationship with God. Personally, I could not survive without my faith in God, which is a gift. And I see God’s grace everywhere in my life, even if I may not be happy with a particular moment or not understand it. I’m trying not to look through my eyes, I’m trying to look through what God is teaching me, or how God might be using me.

But I think those who have many scars are incredibly aware of grace. Because every day they’re choosing. Being comfortable in my faith, I am assured that if I live this way and I truly believe, God will take care of me and I’m going to get to heaven. But if you have been beaten up, denied, abused, neglected, it’s hard to see any of that no matter what hand it comes from, nevermind what kind of God is that. What kind of God would allow my child to be shot while he’s watching TV—through the house, with his family—and die? Or a three year old child in the backseat of a car? Where’s God there?

We can all sit here and say: “I believe and therefore I’m good. And if they didn’t get a visit from a missionary, well, I’m sure God will give them grace because they knew nothing else. Maybe they saw God in the wind in the trees.” But I can tell you that grace has nothing to do with fairness. I don’t even think it has to do with faith. I think grace is choosing to see God in all things, or not believing in anything other than “Today, I live; tomorrow I die.”

That to me is the difference. Grace has nothing to do with fairness, or who you are or where you were born or any of that. Grace is a decision solely left up to the maker and I think that the grace God has extended to me is extended to all of his creation, whether it’s a tree, a bird in flight, or humanity. I see grace everywhere.

Donald: So again we’re combining the idea of what we have in abundance as being God has been good to me. My things are really not that important. When it comes right down to it, we here are probably pretty well off and don’t have to worry about where lunch is coming from lunch today. But when someone’s very, very ill, they don’t care about things. What they care about is relationships and comforting each other.

So I think life can be pretty empty with a bunch of things and we should be talking about relationships, as opposed to stuff. I am very grateful for the life that God has provided, the abundance that God has blessed me with. But the reality is, if you don’t have people, you’re empty.

A hospital doctor goes into patients’ rooms constantly. Who’s surrounding those patients? They’re not thinking about what they’ve got at home. They’re thinking about the relationships that they have and tying that all together. That’s really what it comes down to. We get confused in our daily activity. I agree that if we’re going hungry, that’s a big one. But who gives you a piece of food? Somebody else. Hopefully God looks after those people.

Don: One of the areas that we have to explore yet and is, I think, troubling but in the background, is that if grace is so powerful why isn’t everybody saved? Or maybe another way of asking the question: How can you not get hit by grace? It’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous, it’s unrelenting. Just look at the story of Jonah and how he tried to run away from grace but grace kept bugging him, following him, persisting, pestering him? How does one deprive oneself of the oxygen of grace? This is something we have to look at a little bit more.

Jay: When we talk about that, we really have to talk about our perception of how hard or easy it is to be saved and/or lost. I think we have a perception that being saved is hard and lost is easy. But maybe it’s the other way around.

Pastor Giddi: I’m just thinking of grace and predestination. Some people think of grace—or disgrace—as being predestined. I’d like to talk about that next time.

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