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The Good News in the Scriptures for us today is that God always gives us exactly what we need. It may not always be exactly what we want; it may not always be what we think we deserve; but God always gives us exactly what we need. And what we need from God, what God has to give us, is love and life, God’s own presence and God’s own Spirit, so that we can be redeemed, and we can be transformed, and our lives can be made new in God.

That’s what’s going on with Jonah and the Ninevites in our First Testament lesson today. Jonah has been sent as a prophet to the great city of Nineveh, a city so filled with sin and wickedness that God has determined to destroy them unless they repent and change their ways. At first Jonah tries to run away from his prophetic assignment; but after some adventures with a storm at sea and a great fish and some firm direction from God, Jonah ends up at Nineveh, and proclaims his message of repentance—and the Ninevites, lo and behold, repent. They proclaim a fast and a time of prayer, they change their ways, they ask God for mercy—and God has mercy on them, and God determines not to destroy them, and the city is saved.

Now you may think that Jonah would be pleased with this turn of events. After all, a whole city, and a city as bad as Nineveh, listening to a prophet’s preaching and repenting all at once—that makes Jonah about the most successful prophet that ever lived. He accomplishes the goal God sent him to accomplish. He should be happy. But Jonah is not happy. In fact, he’s pretty ticked off. Here he’s come all this way, and through all these adventures, to proclaim a message of destruction and divine retribution against a city whose sins are really juicy—and at the last minute God changes his mind, and calls the fire and brimstone off, and all these sinners are gonna get off scot free. It makes Jonah mad. So he goes out of town, and sits up on a hill, and waits and watches to see if maybe God will destroy the city and those sinners will get what they deserve after all. And we know the rest of the story: how God patiently explains to Jonah what mercy is all about, and how God cares for this great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who are so morally challenged they do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals.

I love that story. What I find interesting about this story is that there are really two generous acts of redemption that God does: one redemption for the Ninevites, and one redemption for Jonah. And the remarkable thing is the amount of time and effort and love God puts into redeeming Jonah. Forgiving the Ninevites seems like a fairly simple matter: they repent, God forgives, the city is saved, the case is closed. But Jonah is a tougher matter. He gets all peevish, and petulant, and petty; he holds on to his grudge as hard as he can; he tells God he is so angry he might as well just go ahead and die. At this point you might think that God would have had enough of Jonah; you might think that God would say, “Fine, go ahead, be that way”; you might think that God would say, “The Ninevites have been forgiven, that’s what I called you for, your job is done, if you want to be angry that’s your business.” But God hasn’t had enough of Jonah; God doesn’t give up on Jonah; God sends a plant and a worm and a wind to try to get through to Jonah. God painstakingly shows Jonah what it is like to care for something, to care enough to want it to live, the way God wants Nineveh to live, the way God wants Jonah to live. God redeems Nineveh, and God redeems Jonah—and redeeming Jonah turns out to be the harder thing to do.

So God gives both Nineveh and Jonah exactly what they need. God gives both of them forgiveness, God gives both of them redemption, God gives both of them new possibilities for life. But God gives the gift differently, according to the different sins and different needs of each of them. God gives them exactly what they need—not necessarily what they want, not necessarily what they deserve—but what they need for life and love and wholeness in God’s grace.

And that is also how Jesus pictures God acting in his parable in our Gospel today. Each of the workers in the vineyard gets exactly what he needs for the work of a day. In the story each worker gets a denarius, and a denarius was the basic pay for a day’s work, it was the “livable wage” of that time that covered all the expenses and living costs of a typical day laborer. A denarius was what a worker needed in order to keep going from day to day. So in the story every worker gets exactly what he needs. Some of the workers don’t deserve a whole day’s wage, since they didn’t work a whole day; and some of the workers don’t want just a day’s wage, since they worked more hours than the ones who came in late. But each worker gets exactly what he needs—and the gift comes from the generosity of the landowner, and not the qualifications of the workers.

And that, Jesus says, is how God is with us. God gives us exactly what we need, what we need to keep on going from day to day, what we need to keep on growing in the knowledge and love of the Lord. And what God has to give us is not a denarius, not wages received for work performed. What God has to give us is God’s own love, and God’s own life, and God’s own self present with us in the Holy Spirit. And God’s love for each of us is infinite, and God’s life for each of us is eternal—so we all receive the same thing from God, because what is infinite and eternal cannot be subdivided into more or less, depending on who is more or less deserving or has worked more or less to earn it. God gives each of us infinite love and eternal life, and God gives it to each of us exactly as we need it most.

I had a friend who told me once about going through a very difficult time in her life. She was having some medical and health problems, and they in turn led to some financial difficulties in her family, and that in turn put stress on her family life and led to some relationship problems as well. All of these things sort of layered on top of each other, until she began to feel very trapped, and very anxious, and very much like there was no way out, and very much like she was on the edge of becoming desperate. And one night, she said, she woke up in the middle of the night, and she felt like all her worries and all her anxieties and all her troubles were pressing in on her all at once, and she thought she was going to lose it right there, because she didn’t know what to do. And so she prayed: she prayed that God would show her a way out, because she sure couldn’t see one; she prayed that God would just fix everything and make everything better; she prayed that God would pull her out of the mess she was in, because she knew she was in over her head. And then, she said, all of a sudden, she was filled with a sense of warmth and peace, suddenly all her anxieties just flowed right out of her, suddenly she could almost feel herself being hugged, being held by everlasting arms that would not let her go. She just lay there in bed for awhile, holding on to that feeling, and gradually she fell back asleep.

In the morning, when she woke up, she said that she knew all her problems were still there. There were still tensions in the family, and there were still bills that would be difficult to pay, and she still had challenges to her physical health and well-being. But she said she was no longer anxious, she was no longer afraid, and she knew, she just knew, that she and her husband and her family and her close friends and her doctors and her church could work together to do what had to be done, to make right what could be made right—and she knew that in the end all would be well. In that prayer in the middle of the night, she said, God had given her exactly what she needed, the strength and the courage and the hope to keep on going, the love and the life and the grace to be faithful even in a difficult time. God had not given her what she thought she’d wanted, God had not given her what she’d thought she deserved—God had not waved a magic wand or snapped magic fingers and made all her problems disappear—but God had given her what she’d needed, and God had given it to her in the way she’d needed it most. What she needed was to grow in faith to respond to the new possibilities God was giving her that would make her life new—and that growth stayed with her long after her problems were solved. God always gives us exactly what we need—even when we ourselves don’t realize what we need the most.

And that is how God comes to us as well. God doesn’t always give us the things we think we want; God doesn’t always give us the gifts we think we deserve. But God gives us exactly what we need: forgiveness and redemption and grace; courage and strength and hope; love and life and joy; God’s own presence, with us in Christ, dwelling in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. God gives us exactly what we need, and for that gift, in our Eucharist today we give God thanks and we give God praise.

In the Name of God: the Holy One, the Holy Word, the Holy Spirit. Amen.