Isn’t it lawful for me to do what I want to with what I own? Or is your eye evil, because I am good?’
Matthew 20:15 (WEB)
in its setting: Matthew 20:1-16
1 Where we are
Izwan is thirty-four and second-in-charge of the outlet. At ten past three on Tuesday he is on the back step with a bubble tea, scrolling, and a news piece says a first-timer who comes forward now goes straight to case management in the community. He was twenty-six. He did fourteen months for the same thing. The unfairness lands before he can stop it, and underneath it is not a wish for anyone to suffer. It is the fear that his fourteen months bought nothing — that if the price has changed, those years were only years, taken, with no receipt anywhere. The boy on the 4pm shift is that boy. Izwan taught him to steam milk.
2 What the passage is doing
Peter has just asked the blunt question: we left everything, so what do we get? Jesus answers with a vineyard. Men hired at six in the morning agree to a denarius, a day's pay. Men hired at five in the evening, with an hour of light left, are handed the same. The all-day workers complain — reasonably, by any wage table. The owner replies to one of them, not to the crowd: you got exactly what we agreed. Is your eye grudging because I am generous?
πονηρός
ponēros · evil, grudging
The householder does not say the man is angry. He says his eye is ponēros — an old expression for the grudging, narrowed look that cannot stand to see somebody else handed something. It is a word for a way of seeing, not a mood. English gives us envy, which sounds like wanting what another has. This is sharper: it is being unable to be glad, while your own pay is still warm in your hand.
3 Taking it with you
Notice what the owner does not do. He does not tell the man his feeling is ugly, and he does not pretend the day was not hot. He shows him his own hand: the wage is there, uncut, not one cent moved to the late-comer. Mercy shown to somebody else on easier terms is not taken out of your pay. That is the arithmetic that has to break in you, and it breaks at the cross, where Christ carried the whole heat of the day and was paid nothing, so that the ones who came in at the last hour could be handed everything. You were one of them. Your years are not a wasted invoice; they are known, and God does not measure you against him.
A prayer you can pray
God, I am carrying a resentment I did not ask for and cannot argue away. You know what those years cost me. Show me that nothing given to somebody else was taken from me, and that what I have from You was never a wage I earned. Make me able to stand next to him this afternoon without doing sums. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
