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Matthew 20:1-16 (NIV)
Early one morning a man went out to hire some workers for his vineyard. After he had agreed to pay them the usual amount for a day’s work, he sent them off to his vineyard. About nine that morning, the man saw some other people standing in the market with nothing to do. He said he would pay them what was fair, if they would work in his vineyard. So they went.  

At noon and again about three in the afternoon he returned to the market. And each time he made the same agreement with others who were loafing around with nothing to do.  

Finally, about five in the afternoon the man went back and found some others standing there. He asked them, “Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?”  

“Because no one has hired us,” they answered. Then he told them to go work in his vineyard.

That evening the owner of the vineyard told the man in charge of the workers to call them in and give them their money. He also told the man to begin with the ones who were hired last. ⁹ When the workers arrived, the ones who had been hired at five in the afternoon were given a full day’s pay.

The workers who had been hired first thought they would be given more than the others. But when they were given the same, they began complaining to the owner of the vineyard. They said, “The ones who were hired last worked for only one hour. But you paid them the same that you did us. And we worked in the hot sun all day long!”

The owner answered one of them, “Friend, I didn’t cheat you. I paid you exactly what we agreed on. Take your money now and go! What business is it of yours if I want to pay them the same that I paid you? Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Why should you be jealous, if I want to be generous?”  

Jesus then said, “So it is. Everyone who is now first will be last, and everyone who is last will be first.”

—

This passage is often called “The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard,” but that label causes problems. It’s not the wrong title, but it’s not the correct title, either.

You might know that, except for the Psalms, every heading you see in the Bible is arbitrary. Original manuscripts of the letters and stories that would eventually become the Bible don’t have titles or chapters and verses. These things were all added much later to make referencing specific sections of scripture easier.

Complicating matters, while most English translations of the Bible have headings, they differ between translations.

For example, Genesis 1 begins with the headline: “The beginning” in the New International Version; “The Account of Creation” in the New Living Translation, and there’s no designation at all in the King James Version.

We tend to gloss over the Bible’s section headers, but they’re important to recognize because they subtly influence the way we interpret what we’re going to read.

Remember, we live in the age of headline news.

Think about the way you surf the Internet or do a Google search. You pick the results you want based on the short headline that comes up, right? How about choosing a book, article, TV show, or movie?

Headlines influence the content we choose to consume because they are supposed to tell us what we’re going to read or watch. If we go to see Jurassic Park, we better see a lot of dinosaurs, not a documentary about a parking lot in Jurassic, Idaho. The title isn’t wrong, but once the movie started, we’d be surprised. And probably disappointed. Unless the parking lot was dinosaur-themed.

So, when we read a headline like The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, we expect to read a story about the relationship between workers and employers. If I were reading it back in the 1^st Century, CE, when it was written, I would also consider the source (Jesus) and expect a lesson about labor relations, fair wages, slave exploitation, etc. and what those things look like in the “Kingdom of Heaven” that Jesus and his followers were always ranting about.

Jesus wants us to know that God accepts us all equally, no matter when or where we finally come to God, no matter what we call ourselves or what we believe. The first person to God doesn’t get more God than the last person in the universe to ever come to God, because coming to God is about living in a new world that changes everything forever. In this parable, interestingly, the stand-in for God is not the landowner, but the denarius. Everybody gets one, no matter when they arrive. That’s God, too. Nobody is denied God.

As a message about God’s universal acceptance of all people, that’s powerful.

I imagine that after Jesus told this tale, one of the disciples mentioned that the story begs the question, “If we’re all getting paid the same, why not just wait to work until sunset? Why work all day when you can work an hour for the same price? Like, how easy do you think it was to hire workers the next morning? Boss shows up at 7 AM,  there’s no one waiting for work, or the ones who are say  “No, we’re  good. See you at 4.”

Those questions probably never came up because the story we read today is not the story the disciples heard. There is a contextual translation problem that prevents us from fully understanding what Jesus was talking about 2000 years ago—although his point is still painfully relevant.

The Problem With Translations

In the earliest Greek versions of this parable, the word translated as “landowner” is oikodespotes (oy-kod-es-pot’-ace),  a compound word from Oikos, which means “house” and despotes, which means “master” (and is also the origin of the word despot). So while “landowner” is a viable translation, it implies a certain social stature that is inappropriate for Jesus’ lesson.

The main character in this parable is not the estate’s owner, but the housemaster. The difference is significant because, in the ancient world, the housemaster would have been a slave.

Let that sink in a minute as you consider that the title of this passage should be “The Parable of the Housemaster.”

The standard interpretation of this parable is that the landowner is God—master of masters. But the word is horribly mistranslated, and in fact, it’s the only place in the Bible oikodespotes is translated as ‘landowner’. Everywhere else, oikodespotes is translated as ‘master of the house’.

That’s right! In the ancient world, it was not at all unusual for the person who ran the house—the master of the house, who hired all the servants and managed all the affairs—to be a slave. In fact, it would have been extremely unusual for the person who owned the property to go to the market to hire workers.

Think about “Upstairs, Downstairs” or “Downtown Abbey.” A landowner was much more likely to send their manager—the housemaster, to hire others. And more often than not, that housemaster was a slave.

The parable’s historically poor translation insinuates that the owner was the one hiring the workers, and only toward the end does he involve a manager, who appears out of nowhere,  to bring the workers in for payment. This creates massive confusion for we, the readers.

So, now, what do you think Jesus is trying to tell us in this story? If the master of the house—the person hiring all the workers and paying all of them the same wage, whether they worked all day long or just a few hour -is a slave, then what’s the message?  

I have a suggestion: This story is about work. Jesus entices us to think differently about our job and the way we think about the purpose of working. This is not a parable about heaven or salvation, it’s about doing the work on Earth that brings us closer to God.

Since everyone in this parable is paid a denarius no matter how long they work, Jesus makes a point about not placing a commercial value on our work. We don’t work for money. Remember I said the denarius in this story represents God? We work for God.

We come to the vineyard because we want to work in the vineyard. Working there satisfies our souls and fuels our sense of responsibility to one another. We all receive one Denarius because all we ever need is Oneness with God.

Our payment for working is Oneness with God. Awakening. Christ-Consciousness. We labor to sow God’s seeds of love and to grow into God’s hands and feet. That being the case, why wouldn’t we want to get to work as early as possible, rather than waiting until the last minute? Don’t you want to spend every possible minute working with God, for God, in God, as God on Earth?

And isn’t it just like Jesus to tell a story that makes us think we’re hearing about masters and slaves, only to turn everything on its head and instead, urge us to create a classless society where everyone serves only one master, and all of us worker for nothing more—and nothing less- than God’s unconditional love? 

Amen.

Question:  How does your work (any type of labor, not necessarily just employment) help you experience the realm of God?