Sunday sermon: Matthew 20.1-16 The generous vinyard owner - a parable of God's generosity

Matthew 20.1-16

 

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the labourers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Does anyone know what the average wage for a Premier Division footballer is?

It’s a great game isn’t it judging people on the basis of their wage or salary? We often measure someone’s worth on what they earn don’t we? Or, as in the case of the footballer, we might raise our eyebrows and make some comment about the madness of a system that pays obscene amounts to some people who seem to add little in real value to society in comparison to those who do, such as nurses, the police, care-workers or prison officers who are paid a pittance in comparison.

When we play that game, if we’re still in work, the essential rule is to compare what we earn - or used to, if we’re retired – with what someone gets who we perceive has less value to society than we do, particularly if that person earns more than us but is less skilled, or educated, or productive. “I work three times as hard for a third of the money!”

Oh yes, if you want to get people upset very quickly, all you have to do is start talking about earnings, and of course, despite the legislation we still don’t have equal pay do we?

And what about if we stop talking in a general sense and make comparisons closer to home? How many times have you heard the lament of the older man who thinks he lost out to someone inferior because of anti-discrimination laws? (In our house we call that sense of entitlement “black-lesbian-in-a-wheelchair syndrome” because it encompasses all the disadvantaged groups in one persona.)

Well, the older man, in the parable’s terms is the man who started working at dawn or nine o’clock and those who anti-discrimination laws have sought to protect are the ones who started at three or five o’clock.
  Money, salaries, equal pay for equal work, anti-discrimination laws: these ideas cause all kinds of tensions within us and it’s with this same sense of discomfort that we approach this parable of Jesus for today.

 When you examine the parables of Jesus, they’re enormously creative. Many people would claim that Jesus is one of the greatest story story-tellers who ever lived and his parables illustrate that point. Why? Because Jesus’ parables are always from everyday life and because of that they speak to people’s personal experiences. They’re from the market place, the farm, the family, the fishing boat, the building site. Well, today’s parable is about another of life’s common themes: salaries, wages, and a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. 

In short, the story goes like this: there was this man who was a landowner owner and his property included a vineyard and he needed workers to harvest his grapes. He went to the village square at six o’clock in the morning and hired workers who went out and worked all day for twelve hours until six at night. But that wasn’t enough to get the work done, so some more workers were hired at nine o’clock and they worked for nine hours. Then more were hired at noon and worked for six hours; more at three o’clock who worked for three hours; and yet more were taken on late in the afternoon and worked for one hour.  Well, that’s the market economy at work so there’s nothing particularly odd about the story so far – until the landowner decides to pay everyone the full daily rate. Well, surprise, surprise, those who had worked the longest felt hard done by.

Well, we’ve all been there haven’t we? We put in the full effort while someone who works with us is a known skiver but is paid on the same rate. Where’s the justice in that?

What is the purpose of this story? The parables of Jesus are always earthly stories with heavenly meanings. So what is the heavenly meaning of this earthly story for us today?

This is a parable about faith, I think: it’s about people who come to faith in Christ at different times in their lives and who receive the same reward because that’s the deal. The workers who came later weren’t skivers and that’s where the modern comparisons break down. There’s nothing in the story to suggest that they somehow worked with less enthusiasm or commitment.

In John’s Gospel Jesus said, “I came that you shall have life in all its fullness.” What he didn’t say was, “You can only have that fullness of life if you are a cradle Christian. Those of you who came to faith later in life? Well, that’s a shame, because you only get a proportion of what I offer depending on how late you came to faith.” Remember the thief on the cross? You don’t come to faith much later than that, but the promised reward was there for him too.

The deeper meaning of this parable should be clear to us: God is inviting people to be in a relationship with him and he comes looking for us. We’re the people in the market place. In the parable the landowner not only seeks workers, but does so repeatedly until the end of the day, picking up those who were there at the crack of dawn and those who came later. This parable encourages us to see God in the same way, as the one who seeks perpetually with his offer of abundant life made through Jesus.

What we seem to struggle with in the parable, to have the most difficulty accepting, is the landowner’s extravagant generosity. What we often fail to see is that all God’s gifts to us – his generosity and his grace - are undeserved. St. Paul told the Christians at Ephasus this very thing, “For by grace you have been saved …. Not through your own good works, in case any of you should boast.”

When Jesus says, “I have come that you may have life in its fullness” there’s an implied contract there and there was a contract in the parable too: while some people got more than they expected, no one got less. No one got ripped off.

Matthew must have made his point well because we seem to have internalised the moral: we tend not – at least not that I’ve ever noticed – to bemoan the fact that those who come to faith later get the same benefits as those who came earlier but it must have been as issue for Matthew’s community. Jewish converts to Christianity could claim that they had been God’s children all along. There were obviously new converts who had come later and were equally welcomed under God’s grace. There must have been some chuntering about that or this parable would not have been included in Matthew’s Gospel. But we seem to have learnt from it.

So, although the parable doesn’t say so explicitly, it would be right to see this as an ongoing story: the landowner will be back the next day and the day after looking for more workers to bring under his patronage because that is the nature of God.

So, where does that leave us? We’re all here today because at some stage we have come under the patronage of the landowner: God sought us out and we signed up, so to speak. For some of us, that’s been a lifelong process and we’ve grown into that faith: we can’t remember a time when we didn’t have that faith in God. Others of us came to the same faith in a variety of different ways and there may have been a point in time when we can date the moment our faith began.

But how did it happen? These things don’t happen in a vacuum: there were triggers along the way; something we read, something someone said to us that lodged in our minds. There may well have been many of these triggers over time which didn’t come to fruition all at once but which built up over time until it all fell into place. We rightly recognise this to be the work of the Holy Spirit but the Holy Spirit, while she works in the lives of people does that through other people. That’s us: we are the triggers for others. We talk to people, invite them to things, lend them books, whatever and the Holy Spirit does the rest.

To use the language of the parable, we may have been taken on at dawn or at nine o’clock or at midday but there are others still waiting to be brought to the market place so that the landowner can find them waiting for him.

“I came that you may have life in all its fullness.” Isn’t that something we should want to share?