Grace is Not Fair

The men start showing up before it is light. By six the yard is full, and a man with a clipboard walks the line and picks the ones he wants. He tells them what the day pays. They agree on it, and they go.

He comes back at nine and hires more. At noon, and again at three, more. At five in the afternoon, with one hour of daylight left, he finds a few men still standing in the yard and sends them out too.

At sundown he lines everyone up to be paid, and he starts with the men hired last. The man who worked one hour takes home a full day’s wage.

The men at the back of the line see it happen. They have been in the sun since six. If one hour in the cool of the evening buys a full day’s pay, then twelve hours in the heat has to buy something better, and with every step toward the front they are quietly raising the figure. Then they reach the table and are handed exactly the same amount.

Every man in that yard knows what just happened. Every man in that yard is right. It is not fair, it was never going to be fair, and you could put that ledger in front of anyone, in any century, in any language, and get back the same verdict inside of ten seconds.

That is not a story about labor. It is a story Jesus told, and He built it to produce the exact reaction you just had.

He Got Away With It

The account is in Matthew 20, and the owner of the vineyard answers the complaint himself.

“Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?”

Matthew 20:13-15 (ESV)

The ESV drops a footnote on that last question, and the alternate reading is closer to what the Greek is doing: is your eye bad because I am good? The grievance is not really about money. It is about what the sight of someone else’s good fortune does to a man’s face.

And there is a detail here that is easy to read straight past, because the story is arranged so that you will. Every worker in that yard accepted his own denarius without a word. Nobody objected to his own pay. They agreed to it at dawn and they were content with it at dusk. The trouble started the moment they looked sideways.

That reaction has a name.

In 1948 Bertrand Russell went on the BBC and conjugated an adjective the way a schoolboy conjugates a Latin verb.

I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool.

It works on almost anything. I have reconsidered the matter; you have changed your mind; he has gone back on his word. I am thrifty, you are careful with money, he is a tightwad. I am devout, you are very religious, he is a fanatic. Once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it, and within three weeks the New Statesman and Nation was running a competition for readers to send in more of them.

Watch the machinery, because it is doing more than swapping synonyms. In the first person the word is an adjective describing a virtue. By the third person the grammar itself has changed, and the man is no longer being something, he is being called something. A pig-headed fool is not a description. It is a label, a verdict, a noun phrase you hang on a person. The sentence gets longer and colder the further away its subject stands. The distance is doing the work.

Now conjugate the thing the yard was fighting about.

I received grace. You were forgiven. He got away with it.

Same event. Three times. The only variable is where the speaker is standing.

The Prophet Who Ran

Assyria was the empire that would eventually come down on Israel and take it apart. Nineveh was its capital. A prophet named Jonah was told to go there and preach, and he went to the harbor instead and bought passage in the opposite direction.

The fish is the part everybody remembers. The part almost nobody quotes is what he prayed inside it.

Chapter 2 is a psalm of thanksgiving. It is not grudging. Jonah, drowned and hauled back, sounds genuinely grateful, and he ends the prayer by declaring that salvation belongs to the LORD. But before he gets there, he says this.

“Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.”

Jonah 2:8 (ESV)

Sit with the position that sentence stakes out. He is inside a rescue he did not earn, did not ask for, and actively fled from. And from inside it, his considered theological view is that idolaters have forfeited any claim on God’s steadfast love. He is thankful for grace and certain that other people have disqualified themselves from it, in the same breath, in the same prayer.

Two chapters later, Nineveh repents. God relents. And Jonah, who has just watched an entire city receive what he received, files his objection.

“O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”

Jonah 4:2 (ESV)

Read what he is actually saying. He did not run because he doubted God’s character. He ran because he was certain of it. He knew the mercy was coming, he knew the city would get it, and he wanted no part of being the man who delivered the message that made it possible. He is the only prophet in Scripture who flees an assignment on the grounds that it might work.

He is not an unusual case. He is just an honest one. Balaam had three separate mercies stand in his road with a drawn sword and beat his donkey for every one of them (Numbers 22:21-33). A Pharisee named Simon watched a woman weep on Jesus’ feet in his own dining room and saw nothing in the scene except what kind of woman she was (Luke 7:36-39).

This Son of Yours

The younger son takes his inheritance early, spends it, ends up feeding pigs, and comes home rehearsing a speech he never gets to finish. The father sees him a long way off and runs. Ring, robe, sandals, calf, party. Everyone knows this half.

The other half happens in a field.

The older son comes in from work, hears music, asks a servant what is going on, and refuses to walk through the door. His father comes out to him. That is the second time in this story the father leaves the house to go find one of his sons, and it gets a fraction of the attention the first trip gets.

“Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!”

Luke 15:29-30 (ESV)

He has been keeping books. Years of them. And he has been keeping them while living on his father’s land, eating his father’s food, wearing clothes his father paid for, which means every entry in the ledger was written with a pen he did not buy. He discovers the concept of fairness on the one day it costs him something.

Notice what he calls his brother. He does not call him his brother. He says this son of yours.

“It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

Luke 15:32 (ESV)

The son put distance in a pronoun. The father took it back out. That is the whole correction, and it is the last thing the father says.

It is also the last thing anyone says. Jesus ends the story there, and the silence is not an oversight. The parable stops with a man standing in a field, holding a ledger, listening to music from a party he has been invited into and has not yet walked into.

I Know It When I See It

Three people have now watched grace happen and read it wrong. A prophet who knew the doctrine cold. A son who had lived in the house his entire life. A yard full of men holding money they were perfectly happy with until they looked to the left.

You are probably confident you would have done better.

In 1964 Justice Potter Stewart wrote a concurrence in a case about an Ohio theater and an obscenity conviction, and produced one of the most quoted sentences an American judge has ever written. He could not define hard-core pornography, he said, and perhaps never could succeed in doing so intelligibly. But he knew it when he saw it.

Half of that is exactly right, and it is the half worth keeping. You will not get this word out of a dictionary. Nobody was ever changed by a definition, and if a definition were going to do it, the church would have finished the job several centuries ago.

The other half is where it breaks. Pornography is unmistakable and merely hard to phrase. Grace is easy to phrase and constantly missed. Jonah had the words memorized and missed it. The older brother watched it from forty feet away and missed it. The men in the yard had it in their hands.

The reason is not stupidity, and it is not that those people were worse than you. It is where Stewart was sitting.

He was on a bench. He was a third party, at a distance, examining a thing that had happened to somebody else and deciding which box it belonged in. That is the one posture from which grace cannot be seen. You recognize it as a recipient. You never recognize it as an observer, because from the observer’s chair the only available question is whether the thing was deserved, and that question returns the same answer every time.

There is an accident in the title worth pausing on. A Justice was asked to recognize grace. Justice is precisely the framework that cannot see it. Not a broken framework, and not a lesser one. A different one, built for a different job, and it will report an error every time you point it at a gift.

The sentence did not survive, incidentally. It turned out to be unworkable as law, and nine years later the Court replaced it with a three-part test that could be applied by people who had not personally seen anything. The system could not tolerate recognition without definition, so it built a checklist.

Religion does the identical thing, for the identical reason. Grace cannot be administered. You cannot run an institution on “you have not earned this and it is yours,” so somebody always builds a test. Every list of requirements ever nailed to a church door is a Miller test for grace.

A Word With No Body

Here is the strange thing about the word itself. It did not fall out of use. It fell into pieces, and the pieces are all still lying around in ordinary English, each one holding a fragment of the original.

A dancer is graceful. A loan has a grace period. A composer writes a grace note, a note the harmony does not require. You say grace over a meal you did not have to be given.

The Latin family is the useful part. A gratuity is by definition not owed, and the instant it becomes owed it stops being a gratuity and becomes a service charge. Gratis means free. An ingrate is not someone who failed to pay you back. An ingrate is someone who failed to acknowledge. The language has known all along that this thing creates a debt of thanks and never a debt of repayment.

So we already have the raw material. What we do not have is a definition anyone can use.

If you grew up anywhere near a church you were probably handed one. Grace is unmerited favor. It is not wrong. It is a fair rendering of the underlying words and generations of people have taught it in good faith.

It is also inert.

Unmerited is a negation; it tells you what the thing was not earned by. Favor is an abstraction, and a badly worn one, because a favor to most people now means an errand or a small bag of almonds on a table at a wedding. One Latin loanword explained by a second Latin loanword. You can repeat the phrase perfectly, word for word, for forty years, and picture nothing at all.

And it fails a simple test. Unmerited favor does not distinguish grace from winning a lottery. Nobody merits a jackpot, and a jackpot is unambiguously favorable. The phrase describes the receiving end and stops there, which leaves out the only part that matters: somebody paid.

The Hebrew does not have this problem, because the Hebrew words have bodies.

Chen is favor, and the first man in Scripture said to find it is Noah, who found it in the eyes of the LORD (Genesis 6:8). Chanan, the verb, carries a picture of stooping, of someone with height bending down toward someone without it. Grace has a direction built into the word. It runs downhill and it does not run the other way. Rachamim, the word for compassion, is built on rechem, the word for a womb, which is a mercy you can feel in your body rather than argue about.

Those words grew up somewhere. Ours was imported. Grace came into English already abstract, Latin gratia arriving by way of Old French, a finished idea in a robe with no childhood behind it. That is why it feels slippery in your mouth. English never watched it grow up.

The Greek at least kept the family together. Charis sits next to the word for joy, and eucharistia, thanksgiving, is built directly out of it. In that language the only available response to grace is grace handed back as thanks.

The Name He Gave Himself

If no definition works, the question is where anyone was supposed to get one.

God supplies it Himself, once, and the circumstances are the point.

Israel is roughly six weeks out from the covenant at Sinai. Moses is up the mountain. At the foot of it the people take the gold out of their own ears, melt it into a calf, and hold a festival for it. This is not a slow drift or a lapse under pressure. It is the fastest betrayal recorded in the book.

What happens next is that God renews the covenant. And on His way to renewing it, He introduces Himself.

“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…”

Exodus 34:6-7 (ESV)

Do not skip the last clause. The same sentence that says forgiving says will by no means clear the guilty, and any account of grace that quotes the first half and drops the second is doing to the verse exactly what has already been done to the word.

But look at when this is said. The fullest description God ever gives of His own character is delivered to the people who had, within the month, proven beyond argument that they did not deserve one. The definition of grace arrives as an instance of it. That is why the lexicon was never going to work. This is not a word you look up. It is a word that is handed to you at the worst possible moment, by someone who has every reason to be handing you something else.

Israel kept it. They prayed it back to Him for centuries, at varying lengths, in pieces, the way people quote something they actually know by heart.¹

Which means Jonah had it word perfect. He was not confused about God’s character. He recited it accurately, in a complaint, as evidence for the prosecution.

A Dead Dog at the King’s Table

One piece of background, because without it the next account reads as a nice gesture instead of a stay of execution. When a new dynasty took a throne in the ancient world, the previous king’s family was killed. Not out of cruelty, particularly. Out of policy. A surviving heir was a rebellion waiting for a sponsor.

Saul is dead. David is on his throne. Somewhere out past the Jordan, in a town called Lo-debar, there is a man named Mephibosheth who is Saul’s grandson and Jonathan’s son, and who has been lame in both feet since he was five years old, when the household fled and someone dropped him. He has spent his entire adult life being exactly the sort of person a king goes looking for.

David goes looking for him.

“Do not fear, for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan, and I will restore to you all the land of Saul your father, and you shall eat at my table always.”

2 Samuel 9:7 (ESV)

Mephibosheth answers like a man who has never once been confused about what he is. “What is your servant, that you should show regard for a dead dog such as I?” (2 Samuel 9:8).

Two words get used interchangeably in most conversations about this, and they are not the same word, and this room separates them better than any dictionary.

Mercy is that the rival heir is not executed. Grace is that he eats at the king’s table every night for the rest of his life. Mercy is subtraction and grace is addition. Mercy empties the courtroom. Grace sets the table.

And notice what the kindness is anchored to, because the text says it outright rather than leaving it to be inferred. It is not for anything in Mephibosheth. There is nothing in Mephibosheth. It is for the sake of Jonathan. Somebody else’s covenant, somebody else’s name, and a man with no assets and no legs eats on the strength of it for the rest of his life.

The chapter ends like this: “So Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem, for he ate always at the king’s table. Now he was lame in both his feet” (2 Samuel 9:13).

The writer held that last clause back and set it down right next to the table.

The Seat You Are Sitting In

You have someone.

Everybody has someone. A person who did a thing you would not have done, who by any reasonable accounting should be paying for it, and who instead appears to be doing fine. You may never have said the sentence out loud. You have thought it, and it has a shape, and the shape is: he got away with it.

Every account here is somebody in that chair. A prophet sitting in a rescue, drafting theology about who else does not qualify. A son on his father’s land, holding a ledger written with his father’s pen. A yard full of men who were satisfied with their pay right up until they turned their heads.

The point is not that you are worse than they were. The point is that you are sitting where they sat, and the chair does the rest. The conjugation only runs if there is a third person in it. It needs somebody far enough off to be looked at.

Paul files the verdict on the entire procedure in one sentence.

“Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.”

Romans 2:1 (ESV)

And then, a chapter later, he removes the chair. “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:22-24). There is no distinction and there is no distance, which means there is nobody left standing far enough away to conjugate about.

There is a fair objection forming at this point, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a nervous one. If none of it is earned, and none of it can be earned, then why do anything? Why not take the wage and go home and behave however you please?

Paul was accused of preaching exactly that, which is worth noticing on its own. A message nobody ever accuses of being too loose is not the one he was preaching. His answer was two words: by no means (Romans 6:1-2). And the fuller answer is that grace is not a permission slip, it is a teacher. It “appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions” (Titus 2:11-12). The good works are real, and they come afterward, and they were prepared beforehand for people who were already His workmanship (Ephesians 2:10). Nobody works to get to the table. Everybody at the table works.

The Foremost

Paul is not a man who needed the concept explained to him from the outside. He held the coats at a stoning and then went house to house dragging people out of them and into prison.

“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

1 Timothy 1:15 (ESV)

Look at what he just did with the grammar. Everyone else in every account here put another man in the third-person chair. Paul climbs into it himself and pulls the door shut behind him. Not among them. Not one of them. Foremost. First in the line he is describing.

And then he gives the reason he was let off.

“But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.”

1 Timothy 1:16 (ESV)

He was not handed mercy as a private arrangement between himself and God. He was handed it as a demonstration, on purpose, for the benefit of everybody who would ever stand where he stood and wonder whether the offer ran that far.

He began by looking at other people. He ended up looking at himself. And the last thing out of his mouth is about everyone else getting in.

Today

Three crosses. One of the two criminals is mocking Jesus along with the crowd. The other one answers him.

“Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.”

Luke 23:40-41 (ESV)

The first thing he does is settle up. He is receiving the due reward of his deeds. That is the yard at sundown, and this man looks at the total, checks it against the work, and agrees. He is the only person in any of this who examines what he has earned and says the number is correct.

The second thing he does is say we.

Not I deserve this. We deserve this. And the we takes in the man on the third cross, the one who is at that moment sneering at both of them. He will not conjugate. He has a dying man’s last few minutes and every reason in the world to put some daylight between himself and the criminal next to him, and he does not do it. Nobody taught him that. He worked it out on a cross, in about an hour, having never read a word Paul would later write.

He has nothing to offer and no time in which to offer it. No restitution. No record. No years ahead to build one out of. He asks to be remembered.

“Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Luke 23:43 (ESV)

Not you will be in paradise. With me. The destination is company.

Grace is not fair. The men in the yard were right about that, and so was the man on the cross, and neither of them was ever going to be talked out of it, because it is true. Fair is the due reward of your deeds. Fair is getting the total you actually earned, checked against the work, correct to the penny.

Fair is the last thing in the world you should want to arrive.

The books balanced. They just did not balance on your side of the ledger, and that is the only reason there is a table with your name on it.

References

• The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV). Crossway, 2001.
• Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), Stewart, J., concurring.
• Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).
• Bertrand Russell, comment on The Brains Trust, BBC Radio, 26 April 1948. The New Statesman and Nation competition for further “irregular verbs” was printed 15 May 1948. https://wist.info/russell-bertrand/3387/

Footnotes