Matthew 20:1-16 "For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard…
The parables of Jesus can be a challenge for us. This one can be particularly challenging because it has to do with the nature and character of God Himself—who God is, what God is like.
I’ve had people—lifelong Lutherans—come up to me and say things like, “The thief on the cross, is he really in heaven? I mean, he went his whole life not believing in God and then at the last minute Jesus tells him He’s going to be with Him in paradise? How’s that fair?”
We struggle when it comes to God and the question of His fairness. But what’s truly behind the question of fairness? The prophet Jonah didn’t think it was fair that the Lord would spare the horribly brutal, evil people of Nineveh when they finally turned and repented. There was the other brother in the parable Jesus’ told—the “good” brother, the faithful brother—who didn’t like the fact that Dad was celebrating the return of his no-good rotten son while there was no celebration for him. And what about Jesus’ disciples who almost seemed to enjoy pointing out to Jesus just how much they were giving up in life to be His disciples? They said, “See, we have left all and followed You. Therefore what shall we have?” (Matt. 19:27).
Is God going to treat us fairly? In answer to that, we have the words of Jesus which you just heard. Words that may be tough to hear. Words that confess what we know to be true in the face of all our questions about fairness: that our God is good! Depicted as the landowner in Jesus’ parable, we see God’s goodness in that (I) He mercifully calls and (II) He graciously rewards.
- He mercifully calls.
Even in our own day and age it still goes on. In the South if you drive past any major big-box home improvement store early in the morning and you will find day laborers standing outside, waiting to be hired for the day. So it was with the landowner in Jesus’ parable. He “went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard” (v. 1). It was normal for the landowner to do this.
However, this landowner in Jesus’ parable is not quite normal. This landowner keeps going back into town throughout the day to hire more workers. At the third hour—around nine a.m.—he went and found others standing around in the marketplace, nothing to do, no one to work for. So he tells them, “You also go into my vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you” (vv. 3-4). At the sixth and the ninth hour—at noon and again around three p.m.—he does the same thing; he finds more unemployed people to work in the vineyard (v. 5). Even at the eleventh hour, around five in the afternoon, when the workday is starting to wind down, he goes back again to the marketplace and finds more people just standing around (v. 6).
Why does he do it? Why does this landowner just keep hiring workers all day long? It’s in that eleventh hour call, especially, that we really find out what his purpose is. He asks them why they’re standing around doing nothing. They answer, “Because no one hired us” (v. 7).
Excuse me? Those guys have been standing in the market all day long, like bumps on logs. Certainly they had to have heard the landowner’s previous calls to come and work for him at his place, but for whatever reason they decided to stay put. “No one hired us?” Sounds like a copout to me. Maybe they thought someone else would hire them. Or who knows? Maybe they just didn’t want to work that hard—after all work in the vineyard is hard work, all the vine-trimming and grape-harvesting. Either way, these are guys that have frittered away any opportunity they were going to have to work that day. By that point, they deserved to be left standing there unemployed, without any prospects at all.
Yet what does the landowner do? He tells them, “You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right you will receive” (v. 7). He doesn’t treat them the way they deserve to be treated. He has mercy on them… And it’s at just that point that you begin to understand what the landowner’s been up to—going back to the marketplace constantly to hire idle, unemployed workers to come and work in his vineyard. He was having mercy on them.
And in that sense our God is good! He is not neutral or impartial. He is good! He is merciful! He does not treat us the way we deserve to be treated. We are the day-laborers! We are the ones who deserve to be left alone without hope of a future. We ruined our opportunity to a life in the kingdom of God a long time ago, when we rebelled against the Divine Landowner—the Maker of heaven and earth—and wanted to do things our own way instead of His way. We deserved to be forsaken by God for all eternity.
Yet God, in spite of our rebellion, comes to us and calls us to Himself. That call came early for most of us, when we were carried to the baptismal font by our parents. Yet He doesn’t just call once, but He keeps calling over and over throughout the relatively short “day” that is our lives. Some of you heard God’s call later in life, maybe later in childhood or as an adult; you heard the good news of our promised reward in Jesus Christ and came to believe in it by the power of the Spirit. And there are still others whom God calls at the eleventh hour: the ungodly, wicked; the hardened sinner; the thief on the cross; the elderly man in the nursing home who had never been to church, but who overheard the pastor’s devotions when he came to give communion to his roommate.
He calls out to all of us with His Word, saying, “Come and work in my vineyard, and whatever is right you will receive.” “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Who knows what that reward—that rest—will be like? Yet we believe it anyway, by the Spirit’s power.
Our God is good! He doesn’t give us what we deserve, but instead mercifully calls people time and again. In fact, He’s even better than that. God’s goodness isn’t just seen in the fact that He mercifully calls, but also in that He graciously rewards.
- He graciously rewards.
If mercy is not giving someone the evil they deserve, then grace is giving a gift that is not deserved. When it came time to pay the workers, the landowner instructed his foreman to begin with those who were hired last. So those eleventh hour hires came first and the foreman put into each of their hands a denarius—a whole day’s wage. Now the ones hired first were getting excited. “He’s certainly going to pay us more; we’ve been here all day long.” But when they got to the foreman, and they opened their hands to see what they were paid, they each found the same denarius—the same day’s wage—that everyone else had been paid (vv. 8-10).
And those workers grumbled. They gave the landowner the “stink-eye”. “You mean you’re going to treat us—we who have been here all day, offering our blood, sweat and tears in your vineyard—the same as those losers who have only been working here an hour?” Everyone in the vineyard gets the same reward, no matter how long they’ve been working. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
And yet, the landowner reminds them, they were told what they were going to get right from the start. It wasn’t that they were being treated unfairly—but they were jealous of the others. Their “eye was evil”—because the landowner, in His grace, in giving people what they did not deserve, was good (vv. 13-15).
And that’s the tough part for us too. We get jealous. “Why am I no different from an eleventh hour convert, Lord? I’ve been in church every week; I’ve given up career opportunities to remain faithful to You. I never cheated on my spouse; I did my best to proclaim Your truth. Look at all that I’ve sacrificed—I’ve borne the burden of the labor and the heat of the day. And this person—who’s lived a sinful, unbelieving life up to now—I’m going to get the same heaven that this person gets? Lord, why can’t you just be fair?!”
And yet, when we get to that point, we’ve really forgotten about what fairness for God would really mean. Fairness—justice—for God would mean giving us what we deserve. It would mean instead of calling us into His vineyard in the first place, He would leave us out in the cold to starve and suffer for all eternity. We’re sinners; we’re bums.
No, by earthly standards, our God is not fair. Our God is good! Was our God being fair when He sent His Son to the cross to the pay the price for all of our sins? Not by human standards. But our God is good! Jesus died and rose again so that we could receive the gift of everlasting life. And by that same grace, God grants those who enter His kingdom last the same eternal life as those who enter His kingdom first. “The last will be first and the first will be last” (v. 16). And that grace is still there for you. Even though you’ve been jealous of the blessings of others, even though at times you wished God was fair instead of good, our God is still good! Your sins are forgiven!
He has called you into His kingdom and placed a wonderful gift into your hands—a gift that you didn’t deserve, a gift that was paid for with holy, precious blood. The gift of His love, His forgiveness, His eternal life. Revel in God’s goodness! Enjoy it! Appreciate it for the gift that it is!
We’re not always going to understand the works of God. As the heavens are higher than the earth so are His ways higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). Yet even in our lack of understanding we can always trust that His works are full of mercy and grace. That the last will be first and the first will be last—it’s a comfort whether you’re first or last. Whether you're first or last, you're with Him. Our God is good. Hallelujah. Amen.