30 - Chapter 30
CHAPTER XXX THE WORKERS IN THE VINEYARD
Mat 20:1-16. THE citizen of the Kingdom, then, is a steward, dedicating his money, his possessions, his physical, intellectual and spiritual endowments to the service of God, his neighbour, and the community to which he belongs, a steward who is never at liberty to make things more comfortable for himself by lowering his Master’s claims. In Matthew’s Talents, the honest servants make an equally good use of a different equipment; in Luke’s Pounds, they make a different use of the same equipment; in any case differences of achievement arise. In the world these differences would be reflected in a corresponding distinction of rewards; does the same rule hold good in the Kingdom? The ’ Workers in the Vineyard “ supplies the answer.
Though the moral which “ Matthew ’ finds in the parable (Mat 20:16) does not really apply, the context in which he places the story is appropriate. People like the rich ruler refused to pay the price of discipleship. Peter reminded Jesus that he and his fellow-disciples had paid the price in full; what reward, then, were they to have? Clearly he expected that bigger sacrifices would meet with bigger reward (Mat 19:27). The sons of Zebedee (their mother on their behalf in Matthew’s version) wanted to steal a march on the other disciples, to get above them (Mat 20:21). But Jesus was thinking in terms other than those of earthly glory and reward; he was thinking of his death (Mat 20:17-19). At such a time teaching like that of the Workers in the Vineyard was called for. Our Lord had watched the steward on a big farm paying the labourers at the end of the day, had noted how the wage varied according to the number of hours worked.
“ Suppose,” said Jesus, “ the steward were to pay them ail the same rate of wage; that is how God deals with His workers.” The toilers of this parable are men who accept the conditions of the world, who will labour all day if anyone will hire them; but in no other parable is the urgency of the work so great, in the later hours so feverish. Truly, the harvest is great but the labourers are few; the haste is as that in the mission of the seventy. Our Lord as usual makes straight for his goal; but, because he makes no comment on it we are not entitled to assume that he felt no pity and no indignation at the haphazard system which left willing men waiting hour after hour for the work that so often did not come, work the absence of which meant starving wives and children. For generations, with the Gospel of Christ in our hands, we have looked at those bands of eager, despairing men standing all day idle in the market-place for no better reason than that no man had hired them. Are there any other wrongs waiting to be remedied till the sufferer refuses to suffer any longer? Are there any other groups of men or women whom till now we have regarded as a feature of the landscape or at worst a disconcerting by-product of our system, waiting till at last a beam of light from the Gospels is shed upon them, revealing to us people like ourselves, victims of our injustice? In this parable, then, our Lord would have the disciples remember that all questions of reward may be safely left to God. Later on (Mat 20:25-28) he will try to give a loftier range to their whole thought of reward, which as yet is moving on a low level. Meantime he asks them to have faith that the Judge of all the earth will do right. In the parable, those who drove a bargain with the farmer got as much as they were legally entitled to; the farmer kept his promise. All the others, those who simply trusted the farmer and made no stipulation about wages, received far more than they could legally claim. Jesus never wearied of insisting that God does not deal with us according to our sins or even according to our good deeds; that God gives good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. The early-morning workers had no fault to find with their own pay, until they saw how generously the other workers were being treated.
If all had been paid according to the number of hours worked, they would have made no complaint. It was the good fortune of their fellow-workers that roused their ire. Employers of labour have tried various systems of assessing wages: “ time wages “ that ignore the difference between the industrious workman and the lazy, “ piecework wages ’ that fail to distinguish between men working with up-to-date appliances and those supplied only with primitive tools or machines, and “ efficiency wages ’ that try to apportion the wage to the effort. The workmen of our day have demanded, and successfully demanded, the application of another principle, the very principle of the employer in the parable, what we might call “ willingness wages,” that those who are ready to work but whom no one hires must have their share in the product with those who toil all the day. Our passion for spiritualizing may blind us to the elementary lesson that is on the surface of a parable. The annals of our treatment of the unemployed would have been less terrible than they are if followers of Jesus had been more willing to believe that the parables had a meaning as stories before they had a meaning as sermons. The denarius that those first hired received as their day’s wage was evidently the recognized day’s wage of an agricultural labourer, presumably little more than enough to supply the workman and his wife and family with the necessities of life. Half of this amount, still more one twelfth, would have been utterly inadequate. Yet the early-morning workers would have been quite satisfied to see all wages paid in proportion to the hours worked, since that would have meant that the demands of the multiplication table were being met, trade union regulations maintained, old customs kept up and justice done. As they had the legal view of the wages, so they took a purely commercial view of the work.
Otherwise they would have seen that they were the most fortunate of all the labourers, since all through the day they had the joy of exercising the talents God had given them, of helping the earth to yield her fruits, of entering into their master’s joy. In the parables it is the disagreeable people who compare themselves with others. The Pharisee looked down from his towering height upon the tax-collector; the elder brother could not understand the fuss that was being made about his younger brother; the wealthy debtor, just delivered from fear of a debtors’ gaol, thought it a favourable opportunity for putting the screw on his debtor a few rungs further down the social scale; the labourers who had earned their shilling thought themselves much finer men than those who got it without earning it.
What did the parable mean on the lips of Jesus? The great majority of those to whom the message of Jesus came were neither invited nor expected to become followers in the literal sense; they were to become disciples in their own homes. Caste feeling, then, would naturally arise, those who had forsaken all being the Brahmins. So Peter, speaking for the twelve, asked: “What shall we have?’ while James and John put in their special claim. If completely wrong relations were not to arise among the various circles of followers, teaching like this was necessary. Our Lord’s call in itself constitutes all the honour we need. When we depreciate our neighbour’s task, we are not only exhibiting a repulsive conceit; we are going beyond what we know. It may well be that our neighbour would be only too delighted to have our opportunity. In any case, we are all needed, the ninth- and the eleventh-hour workers as well as those who join at break of day. We are taking part in an organic whole; in his own good time the Master will call for all the service that he needs. If we work for our wage and with our eye on the clock, our neighbour, coming in at the last hour and working with a will because at last he has had his chance, may make a contribution that will bear no unworthy comparison with our own. It is a foolish and vain calculation to try to apportion the praise for the successful execution of any enterprise; nor, if we have the spirit of the Kingdom, shall we wish to do so in any Christian enterprise. To be ready when the call comes, that is the finest service we can render, that is all the Master asks. The generation that gave us the Gospels must have felt in a still more acute form the temptation against which the parable warns.
We know that those who had been with Jesus from the Baptism to Gethsemane expected and received a pre-eminence in the Church over those who joined the disciple circle later. The Jewish Christians who had been followers from the beginning considered themselves the true Church in comparison with the Gentile converts whose very presence in the Church was regarded as an after-thought of God. Some of the most eloquent passages in Paul’s epistles are those in which he records the sufferings he endured for the sake of the Gospel. Paul himself was too deeply imbued with the spirit of Christ to imagine that his pre-eminence in toil and suffering was due to any merit of his own, or gave him any title to rank in the Kingdom. But there were other Christians who had toiled and endured, yet who had not Paul’s fine Christian intuitions, his self-suppression and willingness to look on the things of others. To them this parable must have brought the reminder that we are but servants; our service and our suffering are but the fulfilment of our stewardship; our neighbour’s toil and tribulation and our neighbour’s reward are in God’s hands. In our own day the parable has even wider applications. From 1914 till 1918 to hundreds of thousands of young men the call came to leave all, even life itself, in the cause of honour and of country. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them; yet we do not believe, nor would they ask us to believe, that had the same call come to the youth of other generations they would not have been ready. In some communities, among the caste Hindus of India for example, in the early days of missions the call to leave all and to follow Jesus has an even more terrible meaning than it had to his followers in Palestine. All honour to the men without whose splendid courage and patient self-sacrifice the history of our religion in their community would never have been written. Yet among the ninth- and eleventh-hour Christians, among those who follow in later and easier days, we know there are many who, in the same circumstances, would have shown the same grit. Our own experience confirms the justice of the rebuke conveyed in this parable to the early-morning claimants to pre-eminence. We have known men and women who seemed to be essentially common-place, living hum-drum lives, with nothing to distinguish them from ten thousand of their fellows; and then a sudden call came: a painful task that meant the abandonment of all their ambitions, financial ruin, a disabling illness, a call for unremitting attention to a loved one continued through long years; and they patiently took up the burden. Those we had thought to be average people showed themselves heroes or heroines. They had only been waiting for their chance, and when the call came it found them ready.