Grace of God

Sunday Readings: Jonah 3:10—4:11 & Matthew 20:1-16

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I’ve heard it said many times that there is a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New testament. It’s a classic distinction that’s made to help us better understand scripture and who God is within the texts we hold sacred.

Typically, what is meant with this distinction is that God in the Old Testament is an angry, scary God who punishes and is filled with the spirit of war, spite, and might. God in the Old Testament represents just how much power God possesses. And God in the New Testament has changed. In the New Testament, God is filled with love and care. God listens patiently to our prayers, understands that we humans are held in the grips of the world and God’s grace and forgiveness overflows to all peoples.

In Bible Study this past week, this distinction was raised as we began our study of the Old Testament prophets. I encouraged everyone who was there to attend church  this Sunday because I knew this week’s text would give me an opportunity to show how God doesn’t so easily fit into the mold.

In our reading from Jonah, “the God of the Old Testament” – for it is the Old Testament where the book of Jonah is stored - spares the Ninevites. A forgiving God… in the Old Testament!?

God forgiving is the end of that famous story which includes Jonah and the Whale. It’s important to remember that the story isn’t so much about the whale as it is about Ninevah’s salvation. Let me explain. Ninevah was the huge capital city of the Assyrian Empire. This Empire spanned from Egypt north and east through the Holy Land encompassing all of what we now call Iran, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India. Nineveh was located roughly where Baghdad is today in Iraq. The Assyrian Empire basically controlled the East-West trade routes. It was a powerful, rich, expansive empire and they were feared.

One day, Jonah is called by God to travel east to Nineveh, and go stand in the middle of the capital city and shout – “MY GOD SAYS YOU ARE A BUNCH OF SINNERS! REPENT AND BE SPARED!” Which would have basically been a death sentence for Jonah because he’d ultimately be challenging the authority of the King and the gods of the Assyrians right in the middle of the King’s capital city.

So, what does Jonah do? He starts a journey to Tarshish.  The problem: Tarshish is in Spain all the way across the Mediterranean Sea – literally the other end of the known world from Nineveh.

This is why Jonah is eventually swallowed by a whale and spat back up onto the shores of what we call Gaza today. After his ‘whale of a journey,’ he begrudgingly made his way toward Nineveh. He arrives at the city and cries out, “MY GOD SAYS YOU’RE A BUNCH OF SINNERS! IN 40 DAYS NINEVEH WILL BE DESTROYED BY the LORD IF YOU DON’T REPENT!”

And guess what? They repent! The story even says the King himself takes off his robes and sits in ashes. Then, “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”

Well, that made Jonah pretty mad. Jonah wanted God to destroy those terrible, awful, no-good, scary, mean Assyrians! And that’s where we pick up the story today. Jonah says, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That’s why I fled to Tarshish; I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, Lord, take my life, for it is better for me to die than to live!”

Jonah is so stinkin’ mad about God’s capacity for grace and forgiveness that he would rather die than witness it being granted to the Ninevites.

Then our Gospel text takes us to “The God of the New Testament” as described in Jesus’s parable today. There’s a landowner who allegorically represents God, and this landowner is so generous that even the last workers arriving to work for just the last hour, get a full day’s wage.

Well, the workers who worked all day for that same amount of money got mad about that! They said, “Those guys only worked an hour and you made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat!”  

The landowner replies, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

The parable never tells us if the workers answered that question. But, deep down, I think we know the answer: YES! the workers are stinking mad about that! Of course they are! It’s not fair!

God’s grace is enraging! That grace is supposed to belong to the good people, the ones who dutifully worship and serve, and give to the church and help people, and confess their sins and right their wrongs and love their families and overall be good upstanding citizens! In short, that grace is supposed to belong to people like us! Right!?! 

It is so frustrating that God’s grace is also for the ones who sin without shame, who are mean, rude, arrogant, self-serving, and all the other evil things.  

That is so stinkin’ frustrating…. But, isn’t that the best news you’ve heard all week?

God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and ready to relent from punishing.

God’s grace is also for the ones who sin without shame, who are mean, rude, arrogant, self-serving, and all the other evil things.

And it turns out, after all, the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the SAME. God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

That’s why I’ve never really been satisfied with the distinction of God as an “Old Testament God” and as a “New Testament God.” Because God is the same in both testaments.  

Both testaments attest to the deep feelings that God has for creation and all the peoples in creation. These feelings of deep love are sometimes manifested as frustration and anger towards the people because God knows God’s people could do better and it’s so frustrating to God when we don’t and so the Prophets for example, share about God’s frustration. But ultimately, God’s love pours out to us in the form of grace through Jesus Christ.

It’s ok that we can, at times, be like Jonah or the workers who worked all day and be envious of the grace received by those we don’t think deserve any. As Pastor and theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber (who I quoted a couple weeks ago, too) says, “God will probably play a trick on me and seat me next to the one who I don’t think deserves any grace at all when we are all sitting together at the great heavenly banquet table enjoying the abundance of God’s love.”

I hope we can laugh alongside God when that happens.

Praise be to God.  

Amen.

Rev. Ryan | September 20, 2026 | Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost