Jesus’ parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard is a little like taking medicine—you know it’s supposed to be good for you, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. Even as a kid in Sunday School, I can remember thinking there was something about this story that just didn’t add up.

The way Jesus tells it, a vineyard owner goes out first thing in the morning to hire some laborers. He offers them a fair day’s wage—a denarius—and they all agree. However, by nine in the morning, it becomes clear that additional workers will be needed, so the vineyard owner returns to the marketplace to hire some more. He does the same thing at noon, and again at three, and yet again at five, when most of the hard work has already been completed.

Then comes the moment the laborers have all been waiting for (some longer than others)—it’s time to get paid! Beginning with the last to be hired, the owner presses a single shiny denarius into each of their hands. It’s an exceedingly generous act, considering that they barely broke a sweat; and of course, it causes the others to begin calculating what their compensation will be.

But before they can work out the arithmetic in their heads, they, too, are presented with a single shiny denarius. “This is not fair,” they cry out. “You have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and scorching heat. We are being cheated here!”

“How are you being cheated?” the owner asks. “You are receiving exactly what you agreed to work for—and more to the point, it’s my vineyard and my money. Am I not permitted to do as I please with what belongs to me, or do you begrudge my generosity?”

You bet they do! Like most of us, they have an innate sense of what is fair and what is not. Equal pay for equal work is fair; equal pay for unequal work is not. Rewarding those who have worked the longest is fair; rewarding those who have done the least is not.

Of course, how we hear this parable depends largely on where we picture ourselves in this line of laborers. If we think of ourselves as the ones who have been working since the crack of dawn, then it does feel like we are being cheated. However, if we see ourselves as the ones who were called into service at the last possible moment, then it may strike us that we have just received an extraordinary gift.

But if you ask me, even more important than where we place ourselves in that line is the realization of how blessed we are to be in the line at all. Remember, at the beginning of the day, none of these laborers had a job. They were just standing idly about at the marketplace, waiting to be hired. So maybe the real act of grace here is that God called us into service in the first place.

Each of the gospel writers records the life of Jesus in a different way. Only Matthew and Luke, for example, include stories about Jesus’ birth. John is the only one who tells us the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead or Mary Magdalene weeping at the Easter tomb. In Matthew we get the Sermon on the Mount, while Luke seems to recall that the same sermon was actually preached on a wide plain.

But one story that all four gospel writers remember is the miracle of the loaves and the fish. It is a story that emphasizes Jesus’ desire to provide not only for our spiritual needs, but also for our physical needs. When people are sick, Jesus heals them; when they are broken-hearted, he comforts them; and when they are hungry, he feeds them!

According to Matthew’s account, there are five thousand men present—so, when you add in the women and children, Jesus ends up practically feeding a small town. But it is a miracle that almost didn’t take place, because the disciples’ initial suggestion is to send everyone home. It’s not that they are insensitive or uncaring; they are simply being practical. After all, night is coming, they are out in the middle of nowhere, and frankly their own stomachs are beginning to growl!

However, Jesus has a better idea. “They need not go away,” he tells the disciples. “You give them something to eat.”

I wish I had been there to see the look on their faces. They must have figured that Jesus had been standing out in the sun too long. “Lord, there are over five thousand hungry people out there. How can you possibly ask us to give them something to eat? We barely have enough to feed ourselves.”

“Then bring me what you have,” says Jesus.

If you ask me, that invitation is the key to understanding this whole story, because while God is ultimately responsible for this miracle, the disciples still have their part to do. Put another way, this is not a story in which the disciples just get to sit back and relax. It is almost as if Jesus has said, “Stop thinking that bread is suddenly going to fall from the sky and start sharing what you already possess!”

“Bring me what you have”—that’s always the point when true discipleship begins, isn’t it? We are not called upon to sit idly around waiting for God to take care of every crisis. We are called upon to do what we can, where we are, with what we have.

To be sure, there are times when we will look at our meager contributions and think that they are hopelessly inadequate for the task at hand. But God looks at the very same offering and says, “I can do wonders with that! Just bring it to me.”

Have you ever heard of “psychological priming?" Don’t worry if you haven’t, because until fairly recently neither had I. The term was first coined by John Bargh, a professor of social psychology at Yale University, who has devoted his life to exploring the question of why we behave the way we do.

One of his experiments involved asking two groups of students to make grammatically correct sentences out of different sets of scrambled words. For instance, you might receive the following words—ball, the, threw, he, high—from which you would need to construct a sentence as quickly as possible (i.e., he threw the ball high). Once the students had successfully unscrambled all ten sets of words, they were to walk down the hall to the professor’s office and personally hand him their completed sheets.

Seems pretty straightforward, right? However, unbeknownst to the students, one group had been given sentences sprinkled with words like “aggressive,” “rude,” “disturb,” and “infringe”; while the other group was given words like “respect,” “considerate,” “polite,” and “courteous.”

Two actors were then hired to stand directly in front of the professor’s office and pretend to be having a conversation—thus, blocking the students from handing in their assignments. (Incidentally, the actors were instructed to make this conversation as boring and trivial as possible!) The point of the experiment was to see if the students primed with “polite words” would take longer to interrupt the conversation than those primed with “rude words.”

Bargh’s initial hunch is that the difference between the two groups would be minimal at best. After all, these were busy students with things to do. They weren’t likely to wait while two people, whom they did not know, carried on a mundane conversation. But amazingly, there was a difference—a significant difference!

Those primed with “rude words” all interrupted—on average after just a few minutes. However, of those primed with “polite words,” the overwhelming majority—82 percent—never interrupted at all. If the actors had not been instructed to stop their conversation after ten minutes, who knows how long these poor students would have stood in that hallway, patiently waiting?

Bargh decided to call this phenomenon—“psychological priming”—and it has since been confirmed in countless other experiments. Bargh is quick to point out that psychological priming is not brainwashing. You cannot program a person to rob a bank, for example. However, it does appear that the words we read have a powerful influence over how we act, even when we are not consciously aware of it.

With this thought in mind, is it any wonder that so many of us turn to the words of Scripture when we are in need of guidance? The psalmist writes, “I meditate upon thy holy word, O Lord, day and night”—not just because God’s word gives us life, but because when we immerse ourselves in God’s word, we begin to live our lives differently!

Occasionally I will hear people claim that, in order to experience true spiritual renewal, you need to escape from the daily grind, with all its disruptions and distractions, and spend some time with God in quiet solitude. For them growing closer to God means retreating from—or better yet, rising above—the mundane and seemingly “unspiritual” things of everyday life and intentionally seeking the higher, purer things of the soul.

To be sure, there are times (preferably at regular intervals) when, as Jesus did, we withdraw from the world in order to commune one-on-one with the Almighty. However, we need to be careful that we are not withdrawing from the world out of disdain for it. Keep in mind that ours is a God who so loved this world that God chose to enter it. Ours is a God who did not retreat from human flesh-and-blood, despite its weaknesses and limitations, but actually become one of us. Ours is a God who promised us not only a new heaven, but also a new earth!

Put another way, it is okay to take a break from this troublesome world in order to spend some time in prayer, just as long as we remember that part of our responsibility is to pray precisely for this troublesome world. It is okay to turn off the evening news (which is usually depressing these days) in order to spend some time reading the good news of the gospels, just as long as we remember that our study of Scripture should inform the very things we watch on the evening news—our business practices, our political decisions, and our involvement in current affairs.

If our spirituality is to be genuine, then its chief aim cannot be to escape from life altogether. True spiritual renewal is always seeking fresh ways to reengage with the world. After all, our relationship with God may be personal, but it is never private!

There can be little doubt that Jesus was a spiritual person. After all, he was conceived by the Holy Spirit. At his baptism, the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he healed the sick, preached good news to the poor and oppressed, taught with authority, and cast out demons. Ask the average person, “Was Jesus spiritual?” and he or she will wonder how you could even raise such a question. Is the world round? Is the Pope Catholic? Does 2+2=4? Of course, Jesus was a spiritual person!

However, the fact remains that Jesus did not live the kind of life that people in his age (or in ours) expected of a “spiritual” person. He attended parties, ate and drank his fill, and seemed to have had a good time doing so. He talked more about how folks acquired their money, and what exactly they planned on doing with it, than he did about heaven. He was as concerned with the physical health of our bodies as he was in the spiritual state of our souls.

He associated not just with the pious and morally respectable, but also with the immoral and unbelieving. He defended those who were ridiculed by society and rejected by the religious establishment. He believed that human need always takes precedence over strict compliance with the law. He made a point of serving others, rather than asserting his own superiority.

He loved his enemies, and actually went out of his way to do good for those who wished him harm. He trusted God even when it did not pay off in terms of personal success or happiness. He continued to pray even when everything he had hoped and worked for was taken away and he felt utterly forsaken by God.

He did not seek to be popular among the people; nor did he seem the least bit interested in being the kind of Messiah they clearly wanted. Instead, he came to announce the coming rule of God’s justice and compassion, and to invite people to give up everything they had, in order to follow him in the costly service of this kingdom.

Do I believe that Jesus was a spiritual person? Absolutely. But what I have come to realize is that, rather than measuring Jesus’ life against my own preconceived standards of spirituality, it should really work the other way around. If you want to know what a Spirit-filled person—or for that matter, a Spirit-filled community—truly looks like, you need to look no further than Jesus himself. He is our model of what it means to be spiritual!

When the Apostle Paul writes, “We know that all things work together for good,” he is not implying that every single thing that happens in our lives is good. What he is saying is that, ultimately, even that which is bad can be transformed, through the power of God, into something good.

In a similar fashion, when we affirm that God is sovereign, we are not claiming that everything that takes place in the world is necessarily God’s will. Frankly, there are a number of things that I would have serious trouble attributing to a loving God. I do not believe, for instance, that God sends—or even wills—floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, diseases, cancer, or tragic accidents, to name but a few.

Because life is both fragile and finite, there will inevitably be suffering and death in one form or another, at one time or another. However, I do not believe that God wills or causes the particular way and time that such things occur. And I am absolutely positive that God does not will or cause any form of sin, evil, and injustice—or for that matter, the personal and collective suffering that results there from. Sickness, sin, suffering, evil, injustice, and death are, by definition, what God does not will, what God is adamantly against—indeed, what God has always been at work in this world to overcome and destroy!

How can we know this for sure? We know it because God—our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer—desires life for us, not death. Even the outright rejection of God’s love that eventually led to Jesus Christ being crucified was not, in my estimation, what God willed, but precisely what God did not will.

Think of it this way—Was it actually God’s intention that Jesus be mocked, mistreated, and killed like a common criminal? If people had listened to Jesus, and followed the example he set, instead of hanging him from a cross, would God’s plan have been ruined? Of course not. The crucifixion is not the fulfillment of God’s plan; it is the rejection of God’s plan. Nevertheless, because God is sovereign and all-powerful, God is able to take even that which is contrary to God’s will and transform it into a sacrificial act of saving grace!

To affirm God’s sovereignty does not mean that we must piously accept of our own suffering, or that of others, as being the unquestioned will of God. Neither does it mean that we shrug our shoulders at the world’s sorrows and injustices and conclude, “That’s just the way things are.” Rather, it means that we remain hopeful and confident—and therefore continue to work—for the way things were intended to be, and one day will be, and for that time when we can finally say, not only in expectant prayer but in actual experience, “Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.”

According to the Book of Genesis, when God tells Abraham that he is going to be a daddy, Abraham starts rolling on the ground, doubled over from trying to stifle a loud, raucous guffaw. For her part, Sarah darts quickly behind the tent’s flap, so as not to tip off the Lord that she, too, is in hysterics.

In both instances, God promises the seemingly impossible gift of an heir. And in both instances, Abraham and Sarah laugh out loud. Why? I think the fairer question may be, Why not? Why not laugh in the face of a promise that seems so utterly preposterous? After all, don’t we sometimes laugh when things strike us as being ridiculous and absurd? When the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote race off the edge of a cliff, and both stand there for a moment, suspended in midair, looking at one another, until the Roadrunner points out that there’s nothing beneath Wile E. Coyote’s feet—it causes us to chuckle!

In a sense, that’s exactly what grace does. It stretches the limits of reality beyond the normal, expected boundaries. So is it any wonder that Abraham and Sarah—a couple who might well have been on the downside of their diamond anniversary—start laughing at the thought of strapping a child safety seat on the camel?

I don’t think we should begrudge Abraham and Sarah their laughter. It is part of what makes them human. Moreover, it indicates that they now realize that something extraordinary is on the loose, something so otherwise incredulous that laughter is the best—and perhaps the most faithful—thing they can do.

Personally, I have never interpreted God’s question of Sarah—“Why did you laugh?”—as a reprimand. I don’t believe God is angry with her. I think God is simply inquiring, “Why do find this so funny? Is there anything too great for the Lord?” But notice how quickly Sarah starts backpedaling. She denies that she was laughing—and mind you, she does so because she is afraid.

There may be a lesson in that for us. Far too often, fear cripples our emotions, keeping us from experiencing the fullness of joy God means to bring us. God wants to celebrate life with us; and what could be more fitting for a celebration than laughter?

Thankfully, Abraham and Sarah never stop laughing. They giggle with amusement when God first promises them a child. They chuckle with delight all the way through the pregnancy. And then, when the child finally arrives, they name him Isaac, which is the Hebrew word for—you guessed it—“laughter.”