Adding Up the Working Years

The light comes off the shed roof about seven, and that is when he starts.

He does not mean to. He is sixty six years old, sitting in the metal chair with the paint going at the arms, with a mug of coffee he made at five and has not finished, and the tomatoes along the rail need water. The neighbor's dog is going up and down the fence the way it does. And around the time the sun leaves the shed roof, without ever deciding to, he starts the subtraction.

Seventeen to sixty five at the plant. Forty eight years. He can see the whole of it from here.

He came to faith last August, four months after he retired and about five weeks after they buried a man he had worked beside for twenty two years. He does not talk about how it happened and he has no word for it. He went to a church he had driven past his whole life because he could not think where else to go, and he went back the next week, and here he is a year later on the porch doing the numbers.

Because this is what the numbers say. Forty eight years of Sunday mornings. Eleven men he trained, some of whom are dead now. His daughter's whole childhood. The two years his mother was ill. Every single one of those, he was somebody else, and there is not one hour of it he can go back and hand over.

He is not bitter. He would tell you plainly that he is glad, and he means it. He would also tell you, if he told anybody anything, that he arrived here with his hands empty and his working life spent, and that whatever a man is supposed to bring, he has none of it left.

His wife calls him for supper about half past seven, most nights, and he goes in.

You know the porch. Yours might be a kitchen table, or the drive home, or the ten minutes before sleep when the arithmetic starts up on its own. And you know the sum: the number of years on one side, and on the other side, nothing you can do about a single one of them.

The complaint in verse twelve

There is a parable with a line in it that a great many late arrivals have quietly turned around and used on themselves, and I want to hand it back the right way up.

A householder hires men for his vineyard through the day. Some at dawn, some at nine, some at noon, some at three. At the eleventh hour he hires a last group, and when the day is over he pays every man the same. The men who worked from dawn are not pleased, and they say so.

Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day.Matthew 20:12

Now look at whose sentence that is. It is not the householder's. It is not the eleventh hour men's. It is the complaint of the workers who had been there since morning, and it is the complaint of men who were, in the story, mistaken.

And what a man on a porch has been doing every evening at seven is running that complaint against himself. He has taken the argument of the first hour men, the argument the parable is correcting, and he has hired it to prosecute his own case.

You are running a complaint that was raised inside the parable and answered inside it, and it was answered a long time before you sat down in that chair. Matthew 20:13 has the householder turn and speak, and it is the Spirit, not any sympathy of mine, who takes an answer given in a story and stands a man of sixty six inside it on his own back porch.

And here is what the householder actually said back. He said: Friend, I do thee no wrong. Then he asked whether it was not lawful for him to do what he willed with his own, and whether their eye was evil because he was good.

You have a householder's answer standing on the record, and the first word out of his mouth was Friend. It is written that he did not scold and did not renegotiate, and it is His Spirit who carries a word like that one across two thousand years and puts it down on a rail beside a cold mug of coffee.

Because no man hath hired us

Now go back further in the chapter, because there is a detail there that most people read straight past and it is the whole thing.

The householder goes out at the eleventh hour and finds men standing around, and he asks them a question. Why stand ye here all the day idle.

And they answer him. Because no man hath hired us.

They had been standing in that marketplace since morning. All day. Not at home with their feet up and not hiding: standing where a man stands to be hired, watching other men get picked, and nobody came for them until five in the afternoon.

You were standing in a marketplace nobody came to, and Scripture puts that in the men's own words rather than leaving it to be guessed at. Matthew 20:7 is where the answer sits, and the Spirit who kept a one line reply in the record for twenty centuries did not keep it there so it could be skipped over.

And watch what the householder does with that answer. Nothing. He does not investigate it. He does not ask them why they were not somewhere better, or whether they had tried hard enough, or what they had been doing with the other eleven hours. He says: go ye also into the vineyard.

You have a God who asked nothing at all about the eleven hours, and that silence is in the text rather than in my kindness toward you. Scripture records the question, the answer, and then the sending, with no audit in between, and it is His Spirit who makes an absence in a text into something a man can actually rest on.

I am not going to stand here and tell you forty eight years is nothing. It is not nothing. Those were Sunday mornings and men you trained and a daughter's childhood, and they are behind you, and nobody can hand them back to you, and I will not talk you out of grieving them. Grieve them. That grief is honest and it is not unbelief. What I am taking off you is the verdict you have attached to it, which the parable already overruled.

A birth does not come prorated

So put the new birth back in the middle of this, because that is the actual question underneath the arithmetic.

The question is not really how many years are left. It is whether a man who arrived at five in the afternoon received a smaller version of the thing. A partial one. A late one, with something missing that the dawn men got.

And the parable answers it with a coin. Every man gets the penny. Not a portion of a penny scaled to his hours. The same coin, into every hand, and the householder is not confused and is not being sentimental. That is what he agreed to pay for a day.

You are looking at a birth, and a birth has never once arrived in fractions. John's first chapter says born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, and the Spirit who did that work did not scale it to what was left of anybody's calendar.

That is why Scripture calls it a birth rather than a career. A birth is not measured by how long the person then lives. Nobody ever said of a child that the birth was smaller because the life was short. It is entire when it happens, and the hour on the clock has nothing to do with the size of it.

You have a word that measures this by whose work it is rather than by what hour it happened in, and that measure was fixed before you got to the vineyard. John 1:13 rules out three sources and leaves God holding it, and it is His Spirit doing that work rather than the length of anybody's remaining service.