The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

September 18, 2011; 14 Pentecost, Proper 20, Year A, Track 1

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Matthew 20:1-16) – Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers 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 laborers 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."

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There is a traditional way to interpret the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, often using allegory.  The owner of the vineyard is God; the reward for the laborers, the denarius, is salvation; the first hired are God’s first people, the Jews; the last hired, the Gentiles or recent converts.  A generous God gives to the latecomers the same free, gift of salvation that God gives to the first faithful.  There are several versions of that theme.  And it’s a fine interpretation.  I’ve preached that way.  We hear that interpretation every Easter Vigil when we repeat the famous Easter Eve sermon of St. John Chrysostom. 

But I don’t think that’s the original meaning as Jesus told the parable.  Let’s see if we can reconstruct how his first listeners might have heard this story. [i]  A heads up.  It’s complicated.  And because of that, this will be a longer sermon than I usually preach.  Sorry.

The characters are familiar ones to Jesus’ listeners.  Day laborers were the poorest, most vulnerable strata of society.  Scholars call them the “expendables.”  They hired themselves for agrarian day-work, primarily during planting and harvest time.  Most of the rest of the year they begged, often in the urban centers.  Life expectancy for someone who fell into day labor was short, five to seven years at most.  Their circumstance was worse than slave.  A slave had some protection as an owner’s investment.  Many expendables saw their best option being to join an outlaw band, even though such bands were eventually hunted down and destroyed.  Historical evidence points to growing numbers of outlaw bands and growing numbers of expendables during the decades around Jesus’ life.

Normally expendables were 5 to 10 percent of the population, but in times of high unemployment, the numbers could go up to 15 percent. 

How does someone become an expendable, a day laborer?  Two ways, primarily.   First:  Excess children in peasant households.  Landowning peasants had small plots that would be held together in the family by passing them on intact to the eldest son.  There wasn’t enough production or land to support an expanding family, so excess children were sent off to fend for themselves.  They became expendables.

There is a fascinating word to describe the second way people became expendables – latifundialization.  Latifundialization is the process of land accumulation in the hands of a few wealthy elite to the deprivation of the peasantry.  A wealthy landowner would contract with a peasant landowner for delivery of a set amount of produce.  If crops failed, the patron might arrange for a loan so the farmer could continue.  Through high interest rates and some market manipulation, the peasant would eventually default on the loan, and the land be foreclosed.  The small peasant plots dedicated to food, to grains like barley and wheat, were then combined into large estates and converted into cash crops for export, often vineyards for luxury items like wine.  The peasants who formerly owned their own land, would then become day laborers, expendables.  The decades around Jesus’ life were decades of considerable latifundialization, increasing numbers of day laborers.

The story of day laborers waiting in the market to be hired would be a familiar scenario to Jesus’ listeners.  But here’s the twist in Jesus’ parable, the note of genius in his storytelling.  For his tale, Jesus has the landowner go to the market himself to hire the laborers.  In real life that would never happen.  Only the manager would do the hiring.  These manager-stewards who worked directly with the hired help were an object of hatred and occasional retaliation from the peasants.  By having the owner go to the market, Jesus makes the invisible oppressor visible.  He exposes the collusion between the distant elites and their familiar retainers.  Jesus creates a confrontation that could never happen in real life, between two social classes that were utterly separated.  It’s like a first century political cartoon.

So, let’s look at the situation.  The landowner comes to the market.  He has unilateral and absolute power.  He doesn’t need to bargain.  He can say, “Take it or leave it – a denarius for a day’s work.”  They take it.  Later in the day he goes back.  He’s even more arbitrary, “I will pay you whatever is right,” and he is the one who will say what is right.  The workers have no standing, no leverage.  They go to work.

Note that the market is filled with laborers at all hours – a sign of high unemployment.  Yet the harvest is great.  The owner initially underestimates how many workers he needs, so he returns to the market to find more workers. 

It was a common strategy of Roman landowners to hire only for a day at a time.  The Roman statesman Cato said, “[One] must not hire the same day labourer or servant or caretaker for longer than a day.” [ii]  It was a strategy to keep the workers less empowered.

The landowner promises the first-hired the wage of a denarius.  It is hard to know with confidence how much a denarius represented, but the best educated guess is that it was a subsistence wage.  A denarius could buy a day’s food.  “Give us this day our daily bread,” Jesus prayed.  That was a poignant prayer.  No wage, no food that day.

At the end of the day the laborers are paid.  In Jesus parable the last is paid first.  That’s not the common practice.  In fact, such a method of payment would have been a deliberate act of shaming.  Paying the first-hired last, and giving him an equal wage, communicated a message – “You mean no more to me than the one-hour workers.”  The employer shames their daylong work in the hot sun.  Employers often sought ways to degrade workers, to keep them humiliated and under thumb, to feed their helplessness and even their self-hatred, so they would feel dependent and unempowered.

It was a deliberate provocation.  If all you have is your physical labor, and if the employer acts as though that is worthless, paying you as he paid the others for nearly nothing.  He is saying you are nothing.  Sometimes, though, when a person’s subsistence and honor is threatened, it does provoke a reaction. 

Here’s where Jesus’ genius shows.  Those workers who have borne the heat of the sun working all day long confront not the manager who pays them, but the landowner, the elite.  In Jesus’ story they can accuse one who is normally invisible, the power behind and above their oppression.

Jesus then shows how the powerful know how to use power.  The landowner picks out the leader to make an example of him.  He will punish the whistleblower.  That will intimidate the rest of them.

“Friend,” he addresses the complainer.  The term he uses is not a friendly term.  In Greek, it is a condescending address, serving to emphasize the social gulf between them, the power difference.  “Friend, I am doing you no wrong.”  [“Friend, I am not cheating you.  I am not defrauding you.”]  “Did you not agree with me for a denarius?”  As if they could agree?  How could any of these laborers agree?  They have no bargaining power, no leverage to negotiate.

The owner continues his speech in the elite language of the honor code.  “Take what belongs to you and go.”  That word “go” means the complainant is dismissed, banned, shunned, blacklisted.  He will find no more work in that community.  The owner is not saying, “Go in peace.”  The owner is giving him a fatal dismissal.

But there is a bit more insult left.  “I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.”  The owner sheds the pretense of paying the laborers for what they have truly earned by the sweat of their honest work.  “I choose,” he says.  “It is my gift to you.”  Like charity.  He robs the worker of his sense of honor.

“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”  Imagine.  What if this land actually used to belong to some of these very laborers.  That’s not unlikely.  If it is so, he is rubbing salt into open wounds.

And when the landowner says he can do what he chooses with “what belongs to me,” he speaks blasphemy.  For the Torah declares that the land belongs to God.  In the Bible the Torah provided for a jubilee year every fifty years to redistribute the land to its original equal distribution.  The Torah provided for the cancellation of debts every seven years during the sabbatical year, to reduce economic inequality. 

The Bible declares that God owns the land, and entrusts it to the people in order that it might be a blessing to them and might provide an abundance for all.  The blessings from the land are an extension of the story we heard in our first lesson, the story of God feeding the people in the wilderness with Manna and Quail.  The promised land would be a land flowing with milk and honey, abundance for all.  God will continue to feed God’s people.

But this landowner in his hubris and pride, in his religious arrogance and blasphemy, has dispossessed the peasants from their land, paid them a less-than-subsistence wage, and made a mockery of the Torah.  He is a living symbol of covetous greed.

Jesus brings home the point with the landowner’s final pronouncement, “Or are you envious because I am generous.”  In that word, the greedy oppressor inverts the Biblical values with a classic misstatement that has the effect of blaming the victim.

How do you blame a victim?  First, identify a social problem.  Then study those affected by the problem and discover how they are different from the rest of us as a consequence of their deprivation and injustice.  Then define the differences as the cause of the social problem itself.  So the greedy landowner victimizes the powerless laborers who complain, telling them they are covetous and envy-ridden. 

Jesus has openly dramatized a true story of the exploiter and the exploited.  He sets up an impossible confrontation, the meeting between the elite and the expendable, and he openly reveals how the powerful exploit them.  He shines a light on their greed and blasphemy.  It is the kind of story that made him enemies among the powerful.

Let me close with two statistics, and a question.

In the economy of Jesus’ day, the top two percent of the population controlled between 50 and 67 percent of the annual wealth. 

In the United States today, the net worth of the Forbes 400 is greater than the net worth of the bottom 60 percent of American households.  Four hundred people have more wealth than 100 million households.

A question: 

I wonder what parable Jesus might speak to us today?

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[i] this interpretation draws from William R. Herzog, II, Parables as Subversive Speech, Wesminster/John Knox Press, 1994, especially his study of this parable in chapter 5.

[ii] Herzog, p. 86, quoting from Luise Shottroff, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1984. Homan Solidarity and the Goodness of God, p. 129-47

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