That’s what I understand ethicists do: they provide a moral framework against which every action can be described as either good or bad.

But Jesus doesn’t give us that information. Jesus doesn’t treat us like that. Jesus actually treats us in a far more grown up way than that. So we have the story of these two sons, these two children - ‘Go and work in my vineyard!’ ‘No’ says the first, but he goes. ‘Yes’ says the second, but he doesn’t.

There are lots of points that can be made about this story, but I want to suggest that the story also suggests that there are no strict categories of right and wrong, that life is actually much more complicated than that, and that Jesus leads us towards an understanding which affirms the complicated nature of life.

I want to move to a different Gospel story to try and illustrate what I’m trying to say.

You will know the story when Jesus says to his followers, ‘If someone says to you, “Carry my pack one mile”, I tell you to carry the pack two miles’. Now there are lots of understandings of this as well: one of them being that the Jewish soldiers of the day were allowed to enforce people to carry their pack one mile, but if they carried it more than one mile the soldier would be punished. Now that’s one way of looking at it, but I just want to leave that on one side for a moment.

I want you to take that rule that Jesus gave the community: to carry the pack two miles as a rule. So now we’re going to have, over the next five years, a rolling programme of training, we’re going to have workshops and small group events and parish days on carrying the pack two miles. And in five years time we’re going to invite Jesus back.

OK it’s five years later. We’re all very very good now at carrying the pack two miles. Jesus comes back to the church community and says – well, what?

Would he say, ‘Well done! Fantastic! You’ve really understood my framework for living now that you’re all carrying the pack two miles! Tick - very good – go to the top of the church!” … wherever!

Or would he say to us, ‘Oh, well done. But you’ve taken that a bit literally though. Now I’d like you to carry the pack the third mile’. And that is what this understanding of Jesus’s framework for the living is called: The Third Mile. He doesn’t give us a clearly defined set of guidelines against which we judge right from wrong.

Back to today’s story: Jesus is talking to the chief priests and the elders in the synagogue. They live their life according to absolutely defined rules. Nothing they can do is given any kind of parameter for decision; it’s all set in stone. It’s all about ticking boxes. They would have hated that story. The story of ‘no’ but does it, ‘yes’ but doesn’t do it. It confuses their understanding of right from wrong.

As we seek to follow Jesus, we live in a constant search for new ways to serve. Being a disciple of Christ we must expect a constant shift in Jesus’s expectations of us – the goalposts are constantly moving. It’s ironic in this day and age when in business and commerce you get people constantly bemoaning the fact that ‘my boss is constantly changing the goal posts’, that we follow a man who is doing the same to us everyday. If we are consistently following Jesus and constantly following Jesus, we will be consistently aware of constantly changing goalposts.

Paul in his letter to the Philippians makes the same point in a different way. ‘Do nothing from selfish ambition and conceit, but in humility. Regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.’

If we do that, if we really do that, constantly look to the interests of others, we will discover that the expectations laid upon us by our Christian faith are constantly changing and then we will be walking The Third Mile.