If you are like me and most people I know, the parable of the workers in the vineyard is hard to understand and appreciate. This parable that Jesus told is recorded in Matthew 20:1-16. Jesus set the context of the parable with the statement,
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.”
matthew 20:1-2
The context of this is a parable is the kingdom of heaven.
According to the parable, a vineyard owner hired some workers for the day to work in his vineyard. Those first workers began early in the morning, and they agreed to work for a denarius. The comments in the margin of the NIV translation notes that a denarius was the usual wage paid for a day’s work at that time. This makes sense so far.
As the parable goes, the vineyard owner went back out to the marketplace throughout the day, and he continued to solicit people to come work in the vineyard, saying, “I will pay you whatever is right.” And so, additional workers began working at 9:00 AM, at noon, at 3:00 PM, and again at 5:00 PM.
When the work day ended at 6:00 PM, the vineyard owner told his foreman,
“Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.”
Mathew 20:8
Beginning with the workers who started at 5:00 PM, each one was paid a denarius. The workers who began at 3:00 PM were also paid a denarius, and so on.
When the workers who began the day early and worked through the entire day stepped forward, they expected to get more than the other workers. Each one, however, only received a denarius.
They naturally began to complain to the vineyard owner about the unfairness of the vineyard owner. Why should the workers who worked only an hour (or three hours or just half a day) receive the same compensation as the workers who worked all day? Doesn’t that seem unfair?
The early workers agreed to work for a denarius; they got what they agreed to work for; and a denarius was, in fact, the going rate of compensation for a day’s work. From that standpoint, the wage they were paid was fair, but why should a worker who worked for only one hour be paid the same wage?
The relative compensation seems patently unfair to us. Though the first workers got what they bargained for and got what was considered to be a fair wage, the later workers got the same wage for less work.
One thing I had not noticed before is that the point of this parable is to provoke our sense of fairness. How do we know that?
Go back and look at verse 8: Jesus says the vineyard owner specifically informed the foreman to pay the last workers first … in front of all the other workers. If he had paid the first workers first, they would have gotten what they expected, been satisfied with it, and left – not knowing that the later workers were paid the same wage. Instead, he made a point of paying the last workers first.
This parable “works” precisely because it offends our sense of fairness. It seems God expects it to offend us! But what does that say about God?
Continue reading “God’s Radical, Generous Unfairness”
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