“A Day’s Wages for a Day’s Work?”

Matthew 20:1-16

Pastor Deb Troester, STHPC, Sept. 24, 2023

When Joe and I were graduate students at Penn State, one Saturday Joe went on a bicycle ride with the Penn State Cycling Club. It was a beautiful fall day. They rode about ten miles out to a vineyard, where the workers were busy harvesting grapes. It was difficult to find enough people to pick the grapes, so the vineyard owners had come up with an idea: anyone could work for an hour and get a bottle of wine; work for two hours and get two bottles, and so on. If you came and worked all day, in addition to the wine, they would provide a picnic lunch for you, and on game days, they would broadcast Penn State Football while you worked. Joe took advantage of the offer to work for an hour. He said it was mostly hauling boxes of grapes from the vines and loading them onto a tractor, but he got his bottle of wine!

Contrast this offer with the payments the vineyard owner makes in the parable. In ancient Palestine, the denarius was the standard day’s wage for a day’s work. Those who worked from early morning until evening would expect to be paid a denarius.

Those who came to work at noon would expect half a denarius, and so on. But to everyone’s surprise, at the end of the day, those who had worked only an hour got the same salary as those who had been there sun-up to sun-down. Is that any way to run a business? One commentator speculates that the next day no one showed up to work for that guy – at least not until late in the afternoon!

But of course this parable is not really about a vineyard, or running a business or even how to pay your workers. It is about God’s grace. No matter how hard you work, you cannot earn God’s love and forgiveness. All who answer God’s call are given the same reward: God’s infinite grace.

This message would have seemed radical to Jesus’ listeners. After all, there are over 600 laws in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, that devout Jewish people were supposed to follow in order to please God and avoid God’s wrath. That is why some of the religious leaders criticized Jesus for healing on the Sabbath; the commandment says to remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy and do no work on that day. Healing was considered work. Jesus said that he did not come to abolish God’s laws, but to fulfill them. He taught that the two most important commandments are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Loving one’s neighbor meant healing the sick, even if it was on the Sabbath. Furthermore, Jesus taught that loving our neighbor is the same as loving God, in that whatever we have done to help even the least among us, it is as if we were helping Jesus himself.

There are still people today who believe we must work hard to please God. Some think that if we always try to do what is right, we somehow deserve a reward from God. If something bad happens, we might even say, “God, that’s not fair. I’m a good person!” But life doesn’t work that way. As Jesus said, “God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

Some of us may labor in the vineyard of the Lord all of our lives. Others may come to faith in Christ only late in life. Yet God gives us all equally the blessings of his grace: forgiveness of sins and eternal life. The very word “grace” means “an undeserved gift.” This parable reminds me of the words of Ephesians 2: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

As you may recall, that was the whole point of the Protestant Reformation: “Sola gratia” - “Grace alone” – was the watchword of both Lutherans and Calvinists, our ancestors in the Reformed faith of which we Presbyterians are a part. The reformers of the 1500’s were reacting to the false teaching that doing acts of charity or penance, or even giving money to the church, could bring about forgiveness of sin and entrance into heaven. Theologians such as Calvin, Luther, and others, emphasized that God’s grace alone is sufficient; there is nothing we can do that entitles us to salvation. As Paul wrote in Romans 3:23-25: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” 

Some might say, “Well, having faith is in itself a work – after all, believing in Christ is something we do” but, as John Calvin wrote, even faith comes “by the mercy of God.” In other words, it is the Holy Spirit working in us that enables us to have faith.

So why should we even try to do good works? Why bother to help others? Why struggle for a more just society? Ephesians 2:10 explains, “For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we may walk in them.” As the prophet Micah wrote: He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.” Being a Christian means being in relationship with God through Jesus Christ. When we are in a relationship with someone, we love that person, and that person loves us. Whether we are talking about spouses, parents and children, or good friends, if we are in a relationship with someone,  we want to do things that will please them. It is the same with God. If we truly love God, we want to show that love by doing the things God desires: helping others; worshiping God; being kind and forgiving; working for justice and peace, taking care of the earth, taking care of ourselves, because God loves us and wants us to be healthy and whole. We do these things out of love for God. And, like the generous vineyard owner, God's grace is a gift God wants us to share. As the anthem the choir sang says, “May we who have witnessed your grace gladly share Your justice and love with your world everywhere.”

This parable actually says more about the nature of God than it does about the workers. A few years ago I was in a Bible study in Tanzania where we read this passage. A Tanzanian pastor commented that when the landowner hired people at the end of the day, his concern was not paying people according to how much work they had done, but rather according to their needs. Near the end of the day, he saw that the people who were still in the market waiting for a job would go home hungry, with no money to buy food for their families.

Their children would go to sleep with empty stomachs. He felt pity for them. That is why he hired them and paid them a full day’s wage. God’s grace is based on the depth of our need, not on what we somehow think we, or others, have done, or have not done, to deserve it.

An Orthodox liturgy based on this parable goes this way: “May those who toiled from the earliest hour receive their just payment this day; May those who came at the third hour rejoice, giving thanks; May those who came at the sixth hour have no hesitation, for they will lose nothing thereby; May those who dallied until the ninth hour come forward boldly and without fear; May those who failed to appear until the eleventh hour have no fear because they came late. For the Lord is generous. The Lord receives the last as the first; … The Lord forgives the latecomer and cherishes the first; …The Lord honors work accomplished and praises good resolutions: Enter, all of you, into your Master’s joy.”

I will conclude with a few words from a poem by Maren Tirabassi,

I came to the vineyard at noon,
and the parable is for me, too,
for I worked under the sun
but was not burned,
…and at end of day I held out my hand
and received everything.

Amen.

©Deborah Troester 2023