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A Brief Comment
on
Matthew 20:1-16
From the Adult Sunday
School Class on the Kingdom of God – November 20
In Matthew 20:1-16, Jesus gives
the parable of the laborers
in the vineyard. Jesus uses this parable
to answer Peter’s question about the disciples’ reward for having left
everything to follow Jesus (Matthew 19:27).
Unlike other parables we have been examining, the audience here is the
disciples.
The parable begins
with a landowner going out early in the
morning to hire workers for that day. A
denarius was the agreed-upon wage for the workers. A denarius was the
average
wage at the time for hired laborers. Workers at that time were paid at
the end
of each day, rather than weekly or monthly like today. The Expositor’s
Bible
Commentary states that the typical workday was about 10 hours, not
including
breaks. The workweek would have also usually been six days per week,
with
Saturdays off for the Sabbath.
The landowner went again at the
third hour to hire more
workers. The third hour was about 9 AM,
the sixth hour was noon and
the ninth
hour was 3 PM. In verse 4,
there
wasn’t an agreed wage. The landowner simply said “Whatever is right I
will give
you.” The same thing happened at noon
and 3 PM. He hired more
workers at 5 PM because no
one had hired them. Again,
there was no stated wage.
When the time came for the
workers to be paid, the workers
who had been hired at 5 PM
were given
a denarius for their work. The other workers who had been hired earlier
must
surely have been thinking that they would be paid much more than a
denarius.
However, the workers who had been hired earlier in the day were paid
the same amount.
The Expositor’s Bible Commentary states that “Jesus deliberately and
cleverly
led his listeners along by degrees until they understood that if God’s
generosity was to be represented by a man, such a man would be
different from
any man ever encountered.”
The workers who had been hired
earlier in the day were upset
by the fact that those who had been hired at the end of the day were
paid the
same amount, even though they had work only a short time. The landowner
pointed
out that they had agreed to work for a denarius, and the landowner was
paying
them what he had promised. The landowner also points out that he is
entitled to
do as he wishes with what belongs to him.
Although this violates our sense
of fairness and certainly frustrated
the workers who had been working all day, Jesus uses the parable to
illustrate
God’s generosity. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary points out here that
the
workers were upset because the landowner had been generous to others
and only fair
to them. It also states the point of the parable is not that all will
receive
the same reward but that all rewards depend on God’s sovereign grace.
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