Into the Vineyard: The Last will be First, and the First Last
Into the Vineyard: The Last will be First, and the First Last
Proper 20, Year A; Matthew 20:1-16
Parables are simple, but not easy. We have noted before how Jesus himself taught that parables are offered not to reveal, but to allow misunderstanding. It is not that they are complex; while parables do not require book-learning, they allow and expect willful or unacknowledged incomprehension. Misunderstanding is not failing to know the answer, but avoiding it.
One of the ways misunderstanding can manifest itself is in the confusion between the imagery and the message. Because parables involve a lively engagement with the world they conjure, we understandably engage with the characters and situations through our own experience of people and events. Interpretation is not passive after all, but a sort of conversation with the text. Our experience nevertheless does not make our interpretation correct; rather it reveals who we are, whether or not we hear the message. More generally, we may be able to tell as much about readers from their interpretations as about the parable itself. We still need to identify what lies at the heart of a parable, rather than stop at the resonances we find between its picture of life and our own.
The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard is a case in point. There are bizarre attempts by entities in the country where I am writing (I won’t dignify them by a link!) to make this parable into a vindication of capitalist labor and wage policies, partly because the owner says “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”( v.15). While the parable would actually work far better as a model of providing for the needs of all—a sort of guaranteed minimum income policy—this is not the point either. These arguments are like using the Sower to justify mediocre agriculture, or the Good Samaritan to adjudicate transport by donkey. The story is only ostensibly about vineyards and labor coins, but actually—as always—about the reign of God.
Still, understanding a bit more about vineyards and wages may help. Whereas the Israelite prophets had envisaged peace and prosperity with each sitting under their own vine and fig tree (Micah 4:4; Zech 3:10), Jesus speaks at a time when Roman and local elites were pushing small farmers off their subsistence-level holdings and creating large estates, using cheap labor in the forms both of slavery and of insecure day labor. Vast fig orchards and large vineyards made production and profit easier, at the expense of the small-holders. Such workers as Jesus evokes in the parable are probably understood to be the former small-holders, displaced and self-evidently insecure.
The translators of the NRSV tried to do us a service here by replacing “denarius”—already familiar to many readers of the Bible, and mentioned in last Sunday’s Gospel—with “usual daily wage.” This was a mistake, both for our world and the world of the text, even leaving aside the tedious effect of reading that phrase four times aloud. What, after all, is a “usual” daily wage, then or now? The Australian minimum wage is twice that Federally-mandated in the USA, and neither amount is a liveable income, without additional means of support. Average earnings are a very different matter, but our world and that of Jesus have massive inequality in common. The translators did us a disservice by fantasizing that either that society or this has a “usual” economic anything, or that there was anything usual about the plight of these parabolic workers.
Matthew actually says nothing about what was “usual,” but just gives the name of a coin, a denarius. The denarius was a small silver coin —very close to the size of a modern US penny (or an Australian 5 cent piece), but of real metallic silver, and so quite a lot more valuable—that was a basic unit of currency through the history of the Roman empire. It was regarded as a unit of daily pay for some—legionaries for instance, although they were given their provisions too, and they also had the security of year-round employment. These workers however are by definition insecure, working and receiving their reward, if any, from day to day. A denarius might have had to last a week. The Mishnah, the collection of Jewish law compiled shortly after Jesus’ time, suggested a person who had 200 denarii saved was not regarded as poor enough to draw on community relief, but we should hardly be imagining these workers as having savings on any significant level.
The denarius may have been a plausible amount for such work; in fact I imagine it sounded generous to the ancient hearers and readers. Workers who actually had a denarius every one of the 300+ working days of the year would not be in great need. Just last week in another parable we heard of a slave who owed someone 100 denarii—which the NRSV rendered literally—which would have been a substantial amount, close to half a year’s earnings for poor working people.
So the problem underlying the imagery of our parable was the insecurity of day labor, and the implication of dispossession, not just the amount itself, and this must be borne in mind when considering the reactions of the characters.
We know how the story unfolds, with the same amount—the denarius—given to each worker, regardless of the time they appeared, or the amount of work done in the vineyard (Let me add one other casualty of the NRSV update: the evocative “eleventh hour” (20:6), rendered flabbily as “five o’clock.” We know well which of these expressions gives a sense of how urgent and how late the business is being done). Those who worked all day complain, not merely because the generosity of the owner to the others but because of the implied false hope of additional income, when they do not know what tomorrow brings. Yet that element belongs to the drama of the story, not to the point being made.
The point? It is given in so many words, at the beginning (see 19: 30) and end of the parable. In fact this punchline—”the last will be first and the first last”—forms a hinge between the immediately preceding passage, the story of the rich young man (which the lectionary omits—Matthew 19 as a whole is omitted from the cycle altogether) and this parable, and is the lesson Jesus draws both from the real-life encounter with one wealthy man, and from the fictional responses of these many poor. Participation in God’s reign will not conform to our expectations or standards, and those who seem to have come “late,” or otherwise via unlikely means, are just as much a part of its life.
In the world of Matthew’s text, for those listening to Jesus this would have suggested the awkward inclusion in God’s reign at this eleventh hour of tax-collectors and sinners, an affront to the righteous who were there long before. In Matthew’s own community reading the story, the recent arrival of the gentile members of the Church was likely a challenge to the original Jewish believers who had likewise labored faithfully. Already then in the history of the Gospel the applications were multiple; the parallels for our own time await identification.
We are not members of God’s people because of our longevity in faith, or our good deeds, or our politics, or even our spirituality, all of which are things we might be tempted to attribute to ourselves. We are members of God’s people because we were called, whether in childhood or old age, whether in likely or unlikely ways, and whether we seemed deserving or not; for God has little interest in what we deserve, but—thankfully—much more in what we need.