The Eleventh Hour Wage

The name tag says her first name in somebody else's handwriting, and she has kept every one of them in a drawer at home, six of them now, one for each Tuesday.

The church library smells like old carpet and toner. There is a folding table with five chairs, a box of laminated workbooks, foam cups, a jar of highlighters, and a stroller parked in the doorway because there is nowhere else to put it. Around the table with her: a young man of nineteen, a woman about twenty six with the stroller, a man in his early thirties in work boots, and a woman of thirty four who takes notes in a beautiful hand.

And her. Seventy.

The leader is kind and about forty and says a sentence she has heard some version of every week: this is the foundation, and the rest of your life is built on it.

The rest of your life. She writes it down because she writes everything down, and then she sits there with her pen and does the arithmetic she has been doing since October, which is the arithmetic of a woman who was standing on wet grass at a graveside ten months ago when everybody else had gone to the cars. The straps were still on the lowering device. She had been coming to that church for two years because her husband's cousin brought her. And she said it out loud, to God, in a voice that surprised her: all right. It is You. I am seventy years old and it is You.

Ten months. The young man across the table has sixty years in front of him. The woman with the stroller will raise that baby in this. And she has, what, if she is fortunate. Fifteen? Twelve?

Everybody in this building is so pleased about her. That is the part she could never explain to any of them. They are delighted, and she is grateful, and underneath it sits a thing she has not said to a living soul: that she came in at ten to five, that the day is nearly over, and that a full day's wage in her hand feels less like a gift than like something she ought to hand back.

You know the arithmetic. Yours might start at fifty eight, or sixty four, or forty one after twenty years of nothing. And you know the arithmetic never stops running, and how quietly you do it while everybody else is celebrating.

He paid the last ones first

Jesus told a story about a man who owned a vineyard and hired all day long, and I want you to notice something in it that almost nobody notices.

He hired at dawn. He went out again at nine, at noon, at three. Then at five in the afternoon, one hour before the end of the working day, he went out and found men still standing there, and he sent them into the vineyard too.

Then evening came, and the pay table came out, and here is the detail.

And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, "Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first." And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius.Matthew 20:8-9

Beginning with the last. He could have paid the dawn crew first and sent them home before the eleventh hour men ever reached the table, and nobody would have known. He deliberately did the opposite. He put the latecomers at the front of the line and paid them in full while everybody watched.

You are not at the back of a line in this, and it is written that the ones hired at the eleventh hour were called forward first. That order is in the text on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved a detail about a pay table so that a woman of seventy in a church library would know what God thinks of a late arrival.

A denarius was the ordinary day's wage. Not a partial one, not a token, not a gesture. Full. And the parable goes out of its way to say each of them received it, so that no reader could imagine a discount was quietly applied to the men who came at five.

The complaint in your own mouth

Now the part that will do the work, if you will let it.

The men who had been there since dawn objected. Their complaint was that the last men worked one hour and were made equal with the ones who bore the burden of the day and the scorching heat. It is a completely reasonable objection. If it were wages, they would be right, and every payroll office in America would agree with them.

And here is what I want you to see, gently: for ten months, you have been the one making that objection, and you have been making it about yourself.

Nobody at that folding table said it. The leader did not say it. Your husband's cousin certainly never said it. That complaint is in your own mouth, aimed at your own hand, and it is the early workers' argument being run by an eleventh hour woman against her own wage. You are holding an accusation that came from the dawn crew and not from the householder, and it is written how he answered them. Scripture records his reply word for word, and the Spirit of truth is not the one who put that arithmetic in your head at a graveside.

"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 because I am good?"Matthew 20:13-15

Friend, he says, to the one arguing with him. Even there, tenderness. And then the sentence that ends the accounting: I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you.

You have something in your hand that was never priced by the hour, and the word says the householder chose to give it. It is a choice and not a rate, which is the difference between grace and payroll, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a woman who has spent seventy years earning things properly.

The years are a real grief and they are not a bill

Now I am going to say the thing the cheerful people in that building have not said to you, because somebody has to.

The years are a real loss. Seventy of them without knowing Him. All those Sundays you did not go, all the hard seasons you carried alone that you now understand you did not have to carry alone, the person you might have been to your children. That is not nothing and I am not going to tell you it is nothing. I keep watch over people's griefs for a living and I have learned never to hurry anybody past one. If you cry about the years, cry about them. That grief is honest and God is not offended by it.

But grief and debt are two different things, and they have been sitting in the same chair in your kitchen.

Grief says: I am sad about what I did not have. Debt says: therefore I owe, therefore I must not draw a full wage, therefore I should hand something back. The first is love looking backward. The second is an invoice nobody issued.

So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.Psalm 71:18

That is an old person's prayer, written into Scripture on purpose, and it does not contain one word of apology for the hour. You are inside the exact prayer the psalmist prayed at your age, and it is written for gray hairs and not around them. The Holy Spirit inspired a psalm for the second half of a life, and He did not include a clause where the old make restitution for arriving when they arrived.

And I am not going to promise you that these years will be made unusually productive to make up the difference, because Scripture does not promise that and I do not deal in things it does not say. You have today, and it is written that this is the day the Lord has made, which is a sentence about one day and never about a quota. The Spirit who is at work in a believer does that work by the day, at seventy the same as at nineteen.