The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard

You can find a very brief introduction to what a parable is, here.

This week’s parable (Matthew 20: 1-16) is sometimes called the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. You can read the parable here.

The titles of parables are shorthand labels that we can use to refer to the parable. They are not original to the text, but are added by later commentators. Titles and labels both conceal and reveal. It’s often helpful to consider alternative titles. You might like to think of some other title for this parable. It’s really important not to let the title influence our reading of the parable.

Sometimes this parable is “spiritualized” or allegorized. We turn it into a story about grace or heavenly rewards. Today I would like to keep this parable firmly in the actual world.

The parable begins with the landowner going to the marketplace to hire day laborers. It’s a little odd that he didn’t send his manager, but otherwise there’s nothing surprising so far for Jesus’ listeners. There is some debate among scholars about what the “usual daily wage” was and if it was barely a subsistence wage or somewhat more than that. There was, it seems, a general expectation about what a day laborer was paid. Regardless of the actual amount of pay, day laborers, then as now, were not well paid and were among the poorest people in society.

As the day wears on the landowner keeps going back to the marketplace and hiring more people. When the text describes the laborers as “idle” it’s not implying laziness. The workers are idle because they don’t have work. The first set of workers hired know what they will be paid. They appear to have negotiated for the usual daily wage. The other sets of workers are promised “whatever is right”.

This is where the story starts to get interesting. What is “right”? And who decides? Is it solely the bosses decision? The first set of workers may have negotiated their pay but the other sets of workers apparently don’t negotiate. We might assume they aren’t in any position to negotiate. Time is passing and they aren’t working. Some pay is better than no pay.

At the end of the day, as was customary and expected, everyone was paid. And here the story gets more interesting. The people who worked the shortest time received the usual daily wage. This is a surprise, an unexpected amount of wages for them. Seeing this the people who had worked longer wondered, hoped, maybe even expected that they would be paid more. They lived, as we do, in a society that assumes people who work more get paid more. It’s only fair, right?

The landowner paid everyone the same, regardless of how long they had worked. The first workers are upset. The landowner’s rationale is that he paid them what was agreed upon. In his view the workers have no right to complain. We might want to pause here and think about the relationship between what is right, what is expected or customary, and what is just. The parable is getting complicated, isn’t it?

Consider our modern wage and salary norms. People who are paid hourly expect and are paid by how long they work. If you work more hours, you get paid more. Sometimes the wage is adjusted for the difficulty of the work or productivity. But the bottom line is a clear relationship between labor and wages. In our times and in the first century CE this was and is considered fair. Of course, salaried people and business owners have a different set of compensation rules that are not generally based on how physically difficult the work is or how long you work. Salaried workers have their own set of concerns about fairness and justice.

The landowner’s final statement on the matter of fairness is – to paraphrase- it’s my money and I can do what I want with it” -because it belongs to him. He asks, “Are you envious because I am good?

What do we make of all this? Who do you identify with in this parable? Are you comfortable with that? Remember this parable has something or several somethings to suggest to us about the reign of God and how that is lived out on earth. What is the correct relationship between work and wages? How much pay is enough? The landowner believes himself to be generous because he paid everyone the same and yet also he paid everyone the minimum wage. We can make the assumption that as a vineyard owner he was financially well off (vineyards were generally profitable). It is likely that he could have paid more and not even have affected his standard of living. Can a well off person do whatever they want with their money? How generous should they be? Do they have a responsibility to the poor? And if so, what is it?

Notice also that the landowner’s action, intentionally or not, sowed seeds of distrust and dissent between the first workers and the owner and also between the workers themselves. The first workers claim they worked more and in the “scorching heat”. They have a point. Is that the other workers’ fault? Is it to the landowner’s advantage to keep the workers upset with each other? If they can argue among themselves who worked harder and thus who deserves more pay, that takes the focus off the landowner’s actions.

By now you may be quite confused about this parable. Especially if you have been told it’s a parable about God’s graciousness. Keeping the parable in the “real world” creates complicated questions. We are faced with uncomfortable questions about what is fair, what is just, what is generous. It asks us to think about the relationship between employers and employees. It questions us about wealth, is our money truly ours? What is our responsibility to the poorer people in society. Is giving them a subsistence wage and keeping the rest for ourselves the right thing to do? ¹

No wonder we are quick to allegorize this into a story of God’s generosity, and not about ours. One thing that does seem clear is that life in the kingdom of God will upset life for all of us. It will be good news for us all. But it may not be exactly the good news some of us were expecting. Can we imagine a world where one’s livelihood is disconnected from work? Are we willing to have less so others can have more? Are we able to stop calling ourselves good when we offer others just enough to survive?

I am not offering answers to the questions. Nor am I offering a single interpretation. We are quick to rush to an answer, especially when we are uncomfortable. I think we need to sit with this parable for a while.

1. You may have noticed, I changed from third person, “The landowner” to first person plural, “we” and “us” because most readers of this blog live in the US and by global standards are well off. ↩︎