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The Madman in the MarketplaceThe great nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche told a story about a madman running into a crowded marketplace and anxiously announcing the death of God. Everyone in the marketplace was going about their normal business—buying and selling things—and they thought he was insane (hence the title “The Madman”). But the irony of the story is that the madman was really the only one who saw things clearly.What Nietzsche meant by this is that belief in the Christian God was dying out at the time, and therefore everything that people’s lives and their society had been built upon was about to change drastically in radically unforeseeable ways. One of the questions this story asks, then, is: What happens when the story that tells us who we are and why we live the way we live disappears? What do we found our lives on then?These themes are relevant to our Gospel reading this morning.The Master Who Keeps CallingChrist says the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out into the marketplace to hire labourers. The master of the house several times calls these labourers throughout the course of the day to fruitful service in his vineyard. As we have just heard, some came right at the beginning of the day, some came part of the way through, and some came right at the end of the day.All of this represents, of course, the way that God calls us—calls men and women to himself. He calls us into the Church, and he calls us into a life of fruitful labour in his service. Some people respond at one time; some people respond at another.The Same Wage for AllIn the story, the master pays the workers a denarius for their service. This has often been taken to represent the reward that God offers to those who respond to his calling: everlasting life, eternity, the promise of an eternal life with God.I’m sure you all noticed the interesting twist in the parable: although people responded to the master’s calling at different times, and therefore did more or less work, at the end of the day he gave everyone the same amount. He gave everyone a denarius—even those who had laboured only for a few minutes.What can this mean? How are we to understand it?I think it must mean that the so-called “payment” we receive from God is not a payment in the normal sense. At the very least, it does not correspond to the number of hours worked, or to the moment at which we respond to God, or to the amount of things we do for him. We might go further and say that this is not really a payment at all, but a gift of God’s grace.Another way of thinking about it is to say that God gives us our lives, he gives us a calling, he gives us the ability to respond to that calling, he gives us the capacity to labour for him, and he gives us our reward. God gives us everything, and so we cannot put him in our debt. Everything is a gift from him—our lives, our very existence, everything.The Danger of Comparison and EnvyWhen we return to the parable and put it in this context, the response of those first workers becomes inappropriate. On receiving their denarius and seeing that others were paid the same, they grumbled at the master of the house and said, “We have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” They were implying, of course, that they deserved more than those others.In a sense the master does not really enter into their quarrelling. He simply says: We agreed. I do as I choose with what is mine. Do not begrudge my generosity.Friends, I think here we are to see a warning against comparison with other people and what they receive—and particularly against the sin of envy, especially in the context of the Church. It is a very human thing to think—in many ways a very natural thing—that because I have been a Christian for a long time, because I have done so much for God or for the Church, I am actually a far more significant person in his kingdom, and therefore I deserve a lot more than these newcomers who have done so little