Bible Study Guide for Sunday, September 24, Year A

• Exodus 16:2-15 (Track 1) or Jonah 3:10-4:11 (Track 2)
• Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45 (Track 1) or Psalm 145:1-8 (Track 2)
• Philippians 1:21-30
• Matthew 20:1-16

As Jesus’s parables tend to do, this week’s particular Gospel lesson strikes me as one of those anecdotes that raises far more questions than answers: “What?! How is this fair?” “What does this story even mean?” “Isn’t God the God of justice? How is this justice?” Such questions come from my empathy towards the laborers in the parable, who began their work in the early morning. These are the tried and true “old-timers,” the diligent hard-workers who woke up at the crack of dawn to “get the job done” so as to earn their due reward from their boss at the end of their very hard day’s labor. But then the landowner has the nerve to turn around and hire more workers—the lazy ones he just calls right off the street, who weren’t even looking for work and only end up working for one measly hour anyway—and still pays them the same wage. Were I the laborer who started my work early in the morning and witnessed such a gross injustice committed by my boss, I would absolutely partake in the grumbling complaints against him.

Whether following the lectionary’s track down the path of Exodus or through the story of Jonah, such complaints seem also to be the subject of this week’s lessons from the Old Testament. The Exodus text finds the Israelites grumbling against God for a lack of sustenance after they have been freed from slavery in Egypt, even as Jonah becomes angry with God for sparing the Ninevites from a violent end. In conjunction with Jesus’s parable from Matthew, it strikes me that—especially in the case of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness in the Exodus narrative—the  complaint is justified: quite literally, their complaint is that God will “kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Ex. 16:2). As in the parable, such a complaint is not the stuff of petty selfishness, but a matter of real justice. While Jonah’s complaint is more difficult to understand, on the other hand, his situation nonetheless recalls the Matthean parable’s juxtaposition between the early-risers and the late-comers: here, Jonah is the early-rising diligent laborer, while the Ninevites can be compared to those “late-comers” whom the landowner called off the street to work for a mere hour before paying them the exact same wage.

Such, though, is the nature of God’s grace as it is offered to us in Christ—namely, it is bound neither by our own selfish sense of false superiority nor by our entitlement. God’s generosity—the Divine predilection for life over death, whatever that means (a decent job for everyone, even the lazy! Full bellies over starvation in the desert! An abundant and peaceful life over war and violence!)—extends far beyond our own flawed judgments regarding who is and is not worthy to be included amongst “the least of these.”

Even so, as a cradle-Church-goer who has persistently been involved in an institutional church in some form or another throughout my life, it is still all too easy for me to identify with the “laborers” in the parable: the “old-timers” who have faithfully peopled the pews for years, who’ve worked tirelessly to keep them polished and sturdy and to build their communities from the ground up, only to be met with the inevitable costliness of grace that is the demand of every disciple of Christ. Such generous grace demands my embrace of the “Other,” the “newcomer,” in whatever form that takes—a person who has hurt me; someone in a small group conversation who baffles me; someone on the opposite side of the political aisle with whom I find it difficult to even have a civil conversation. And when it feels easy to complain—nay, justified to complain—about these inevitable costly demands, these stories remind me that God’s response always opts for Love in the face of those complaints, however justified or silly they might be. “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” (Matt. 20:15) “…should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:11) “Draw near to the Lord, because he has heard your complaining…at twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning, you shall have your fill of bread” (Ex. 16:9, 12).  May I have the grace to be overwhelmed by joy in God’s generosity as Christ tends to all my complaints, even if in ways I do not yet understand. —Katie Wrisley Shelby

 

• Think of a time when God’s generosity has surprised you. What did this situation tell you about the nature of God?
• Today’s reading from Jonah provides the conclusion to this very short book in the Old Testament (only four chapters!), wherein Jonah flees from God so as to avoid prophesying to the Ninevites and is then swallowed by the whale for three days. Why is Jonah angry with God at the beginning of this week’s reading?
• How might this week’s reading from Philippians thematically relate to our Old Testament and Gospel lessons?
• Is there an area in your life in which you have a justified complaint? How might God’s generosity be meeting you (or someone else!) there?