People very much like to think in black-and-white terms. Good and evil, night and day, justice and grace. In contrast, today’s Gospel text reveals that God’s justice and God’s grace may actually be in tension with each other, despite each being part of God’s nature. After all, the laborers who were hired at the start of the workday received the very wages they were promised. That’s God’s justice – I asked something of you, you agreed to follow my instructions, and you received the promised reward. Others were hired later – at noon and at five o’clock (the 6th and 9th hours). The former were promised only what was “right,” and the
latter received no promise of reward at all. At the end of the day, as the day-long workers stood like spectators on the sidelines, the half-day folks and the one-hour folks received the same wages they themselves had been promised. And then, insult to injury, there was no bonus for them – only what had been promised. The day-long workers reveal God’s justice. The others reveal God’s grace. In the case of the
one-hour workers, God’s extravagant, lavish grace is revealed.
Other notable features of this text include:
1. This is a parable about the Kingdom. So, it is not only revelatory about the nature of
God, but of his reign – of the web of relationships between creature and creature, and
between creatures and their Creator. It is about the Peaceable Kingdom that Jesus
inaugurates, and into which the Holy Spirit calls the Church as his messianic
community.
2. All of the workers in this story are vulnerable. True, a denarius was a day’s wage – but
only for dayworkers. And the workers hired at noon and at 5:00pm are more vulnerable,
given the brevity of their hire and the fact that but for this landowner they would have
received no wages that day at all.
3. The workers are living hand-to-mouth. They are paid at the close of the day, per the
Levitical code: “You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall
not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning: (Leviticus 19:13).
4. The tension between justice and grace is also a tension shared with that of generosity
and jealousy.
5. Perhaps this is harvesttime – why else would so many day laborers be needed, rather
than landowner’s fulltime farm workers. And so, perhaps this is an eschatological text –
pointing to the final harvest, the end times.
6. In the Old Testament, Israel is the vineyard: “For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the
house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his cherished garden…” (5:7). So,
although the text highlights the plight of the workers (as stated above), this is most
certainly a text about God and God’s people.
