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JULY 30, 2010
TELLING GOD WHO HE IS
“...they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said,
‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’” (Matthew 20:11-12, NIV)
More than once, I’ve had a thing or two to tell the architect. Some holes, at least from my point of view, are
just so poorly designed—even when the lay of the land would have allowed for something so much better.
But I must be careful, because there are more than a few things I do not know. Maybe the architect was limited by a
small budget, or the bankrolling owner of this land dictated the design here. Perhaps what I am seeing is not the architect’s original work at all, but instead the tricked-up outcome of an
overzealous greens committee chairperson. It may be that the architect was “paying tribute” to his mentor, and while the sentiment was nice the result missed badly. You see, there is just so
much that could have happened along the way to the hole I’m playing today. I might do well to shut my mouth.
The first-hour workers in Jesus’ parable about those who worked in the vineyard might have done
well to zip it, too. They thought they understood justice—that which benefited them, right? Uh, no.
Actually, let’s give them a little slack. Let’s say they were on the side of generosity. When the workers
who came in the eleventh hour were paid a full day’s wage, these hardworking men who truly had labored all day in the field figured the landowner had a bit more than that in store for them.
But when it turned out that the generosity went elsewhere—to those who were paid more than they
“deserved”—suddenly these men wanted an explanation. To be sure, the landowner gave it to them: he could, he told them, do whatever he wanted with his own money.
They didn’t see it that way. They didn’t see that in their full day of work they had not once worried, like
these other men had, whether they would find a job that day, whether they would be able to bring home some groceries for dinner that night. They didn’t see that they already had every advantage a
man of this earth could need. In fact, how quickly their need of the morning turned to greed at the close of the day! What they did see was a lord who didn’t do things the way they thought it
should be done. And therein lay their sin: they went off telling the master how their world should be run.
Who would ever be so foolish?
--
Jeff Hopper
July 30, 2010
Copyright 2010 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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