The Parable of the Day Labourers

Last time, we rewound and started joining Matthew’s account of Jesus’ travels to Jerusalem with the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. Today we we continue that journey with another parable of both grace and judgment, the Parable of the Day Labourers.

Text

As found in Matthew 20.1-16, the parable goes like this:

[20.1] The Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out early to hire workers for his vineyard. [2] Coming to an agreement with the works to pay them one denarius for the day’s work, he sent them into his vineyard. [3] He also went out around the third hour and saw others standing idle in the marketplace; [4] and he said to them, “You, get up and go to the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is just. [5] And they went. Again, he went out around the sixth and ninth hours and did the same thing. [6] And going out again around the eleventh hour, he found others standing around and he says to them, “Why have you been standing there idle all day?” [7] They say to him, “Because nobody hired us.” He says to them, “You too get up and to to the vineyard.” [8] When evening came, the lord of the vineyard says to his manager: “Call the workers and give them their pay, starting with the last through to the first.” [9] When those hired at the eleventh hour came, they received one denarius each. [10] So when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but they also received a denarius each. [11] But when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, [12] saying: “These last guys worked for one hour and you have made them equal to us who bore the weight of the day and the heat!” [13] But answering one of them, he said: “My fellow, I have done you no injustice! Did you not agree with me for one denarius? [14] Take what is yours and go. I want to give the last the same as I gave you. [15] Am I not allowed to do whatever I want with what is mine? Or do you despise me out of envy because I am good?” [16] In this way, the last will be first and the first last.”

Experience

This strikes me as a perfect parable, since it so perfectly describes what the Scriptures tell us about God’s grace but does it in a way that’s hard for us to accept. There is clearly an injustice at work here (some are paid comparatively more than others for their labour), but that injustice creates a bigger justice (everyone goes home able to feed their families). In this sense, it reminds me of the Parable of the Unjust Steward.

Encounter

This parable has a cold opening, without any context provided. However, looking back at the preceding verses, Jesus has been talking to his disciples about the cost of discipleship.

In the parable we meet a man who is in charge of a large vineyard and different groups of day labourers he hires throughout the day.

Explore

Literary Context

This parable is told when Jesus is on the cusp of arriving at Jerusalem, so it’s not unexpected that the preceding chapters bear some resemblance to those we’ve been looking at recently in Luke’s Gospel, with similar themes of grace and lostness and foundness predominating. For example, Matthew 18 begins with the discussion of greatness and humility that led to Jesus telling the Parable of the Lost Sheep. Then there’s an extensive call-back to teachings from the Sermon on the Mount, including forgiveness (which culminates in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant),  radicalizing the Law, and teaching about humility and on the dangers of wealth. Then, after a discussion with his disciples about the cost of discipleship, Jesus praises them for having left everything to follow him, but warns them that “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” This sets up today’s parable, which introduces Jesus’ last teachings and actions before he arrives at Jerusalem.

Narrative Details

Jesus specifies that this parable doesn’t take place in some generic field, but in a vineyard. This immediately adds the weight of longstanding metaphor to the parable (Scott 290). For the vineyard was an important symbol for Israel itself, from at least the time of Isaiah. He compared Israel to a vineyard that the LORD worked hard to cultivate, yet which bore no grapes and only bad fruit, and so God decided to destroy it (Isaiah 5.1-6; note that this is just before the prophet’s disturbing commission that informed Jesus’ teaching in parables). So Jesus has chosen a meaningful setting for this parable.

The owner of this vineyard goes out to hire day labourers. Today, these represent the poorest of the working poor and experience greater risks of injury, abuse, and wage theft than other workers (Case-Winters 245; Lischer 131). Much the same was the case in the Ancient Mediterranean world (Blond et al). During planting or harvest it was common for large farms to hire day labourers; these could be experienced agricultural workers, but could also be shepherds and goatherds, or even low-level merchants (Walton & Keener). When he hires the first batch, he negotiates the standard daily wage of the time, one denarius for the day (Walton & Keener; SBL; Gage 66). Scott cites research suggesting that one adult would need about a half a denarius per day to survive, so if the worker had a family this would represent a living wage but just barely so (Scott 290f). The subsequent groups of workers do not negotiate a wage, but are simply told they’d be paid what is right. This detail drives the narrative drama of the parable.

The owner settles accounts at the end of the day, in accordance with the Law of Moses (Walton & Keener; cf. Leviticus 19.13). But things go sideways when he pays everyone, irrespective of their hours worked, the same wage. Those who had worked a twelve-hour day were understandably upset. The owner accuses them of envy. The Greek is more instructive, as he literally asks them if they have turned the Evil Eye on him. Belief in this low-level curse, born out of envy, was not only common in the ancient world, but remains so to this day, and represents a genuine cultural fear surrounding the power of possessiveness or covetousness to damage relationships and destroy lives (Case-Winters 245; NIV BTS; Walton & Keener; Blond et al).

Meaning

This parable expertly plays off of our sense of justice (Scott 297; Nuechterlein Proper 20A^). What does it mean for justice to be done? Is it equality, with everyone being paid for what they have done, no less and no more? Or is it equity, with everyone leaving with enough to be housed and fed? From our bookkeeping- and comparison-driven minds, the latter approach feels unjust, but the moment we drop the comparison and keep our eyes on our own plates, we see that there is no injustice here at all: Everyone leaves with enough (Scott 295). While this is a new spin on the theme of grace, it’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the other parables we’ve looked at: there is no sense of merit or achievement at work in God’s Kingdom, only the invitation to enter the vineyard in the first place and our decision whether to celebrate or reject the late arrivals because they don’t measure up by our own standards (Scott 297; Capon).

A rabbinic parable stands as an interesting comparison. There, a hard-working labourer is paid more than the others, symbolizing God’s special reward for Israel for its diligence as compared to the Gentiles (Sifra Beckhutokai 2.5). This has a feeling of justice to it, as both groups are awarded according to their contribution, but it’s not the Gospel: “Jesus’ point was quite different: God is gracious to bless all who serve him, including those who seem the most unexpected to enter his kingdom” (Walton & Keener; cf. Nuechterlein).

The equity lens is also helpful in looking at how the ‘great reversal’ plays out here. I’ve previously suggested that if we take the logic if the Scriptures seriously, the great reversal ends up being the great equalization: there are no last or first at all. And this parable brings that into full view. It is framed on either side by proclamations of the great reversal and yet the ‘first’ here are not excluded from anything, but are simply joined by the ‘last’ (Case-Winters 244f).

Challenge

Subversion of First-Century Expectation

As Scott points out, this parable “deliberate provokes its audience” (Scott 296). It speaks of a justice that runs deeper than ‘fairness’, that rejects comparison and entitlement to focus solely on the creation of healed and whole relationships in a world where everyone has enough. This is always challenging, as we’ll see below. But its take on justice is not something that would represent an essential challenge to the Judaism of his day. As provocative as it was and is, its message is consistent with a proverb recorded in the popular Second-Temple Jewish work Sirach (traditionally known in English as Ecclesiasticus): “A greedy man’s eye is not satisfied with a portion. A stingy man’s eye begrudges bread” (Sirach 14:10). Enough, it tells us, should be enough, and we should be happy for all to have it.

Contemporary Challenges

Unsurprisingly, the provocative nature of the parable has made it controversial to this day. Several scholars believe the traditional interpretation is in fact so unjust that it cannot have been what Jesus had in mind (Lischer 134; Herzog 80). Herzog, for example, insists that it really describes the injustice of this world and has nothing to do with God’s kingdom (Herzog 79ff). While such scholars’ hearts are in the right place — wanting justice for workers — there is little to commend such interpretations that force the parable to mean the opposite of what its most natural meaning and narrative context suggest.

Such focus on the apparent lack of generosity the landowner shows towards the first-hired misses the point; the stinginess only exists in our minds: everyone leaves with their day’s pay. Once again, we’re left with the problem of bookkeeping and comparison that we’ve seen time and time again in these parables. And, it would seem, as is so often the case, the Western and white, highly educated scholars purportedly speaking out on behalf of the poor miss how the parable lands for the poor. In Ernesto Cardenal’s landmark publication of discussions held with the poorest of the poor in Nicaragua (The Gospel in Solentiname (1975-1977)), the workers’ feelings were summarized by the following quote:

And it seems to me that when you make a revolution, the first ones that work in it shouldn’t demand more than the others who join it at the end. Because the revolution is equality. It makes everybody the same. (Quoted in Lischer 141)

In other words, they understood perfectly well that comparison and bookkeeping have no place in the way things should be. Everyone should have enough and that is the goal rather than individual gain. Such an idea fits well with Girardian philosophy’s insistence that comparison and rivalry are at the root of sin and injustice:

Judging, and the mimetic jealousy [i.e., wanting what other people have] that comes from it, prevents us from seeing how each of us is being uniquely brought into being as sons and daughters in God’s kingdom. (Nuechterlein)

And this is the real point: the owner’s generosity is not revealed so much in his wages as in his “persistently going out … to invite more laborers” (Nuechterlein).

Expand

This parable expands our circle of empathy and faith by shifting our focus away from comparison and on to welcome. It also helps us to grow in faith by recognizing that part of the ‘death to self’ that is at the heart of Christ’s incarnational example, is setting aside our petty bean-counting.

Summary & Conclusions

In this wonderful parable, Jesus provokes our ideas of justice and fairness by telling a story in which people don’t ‘get what they deserve,’ but instead everyone gets what they need. It’s a different, bigger, and more godly version of justice than what we tend to want, but it’s God’s idea of justice, so we’d all better get on board.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.

^ All references to Nuechterlein in this post will be to his page on Proper 20A.