Peter had just asked Jesus what the disciples could expect in return for what they had given up. "Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?"1 Jesus answered with a promise of great reward, and then added a warning that reshapes the question before it can be asked again: "But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first."2 The parable that follows is the explanation of that reversal, told to correct an assumption Peter's own question had revealed, the assumption that longer or costlier service should command a larger wage.
The Hiring Throughout the Day
"For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard."3 A denarius, the penny of the text, was the ordinary day's wage for a laborer, and the first men hired settled on that wage by agreement before a single hour of work was done. Day labor of this kind was common in an agricultural economy, and grape harvest in particular could not wait; ripened fruit spoiled quickly, and a landowner with more ground than hands often went back to the marketplace more than once in a single day to find more of them.
"And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive."4 The Jewish working day began near sunrise, so that the third hour fell near nine in the morning, the sixth at noon, the ninth at midafternoon, and the eleventh only an hour before the close of the day. The men found idle at that last hour had not refused work earlier. They had been standing all day with no one to hire them, and they went into the vineyard on nothing firmer than the householder's word that whatever was right would be given them.
The Payment and the Complaint
"So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny."5 The order of payment was deliberate. Paying the last first meant that the men hired at daybreak stood and watched what the eleventh hour workers were given before their own wages were counted out.
"But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day."6 Their complaint is worth reading closely, because it is not a complaint about being cheated. They received exactly the penny they had agreed to that morning. What provoked the murmuring was the discovery that the householder had also given a full day's wage to men who had worked a single hour, and the equality itself, not any shortfall in their own pay, is what they could not accept.
The Landowner’s Defense
"But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee."7 The householder does not deny the contrast the workers had noticed. He affirms it, and he affirms in the same breath that no injustice has been done to the men who bargained for a wage and received it. Justice was satisfied at the moment of agreement. What angered the workers was never a matter of justice at all.
"Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen."8 An evil eye was the ordinary idiom for envy, a grudge held against another man's good fortune precisely because it was good and came without the length of labor the grudging man had put in. The householder's goodness to the latecomers is what exposed the grumbling of the ones hired first. Their trouble was never that they had too little. It was that someone else had, in their reckoning, too much for too little work.
Grace, Not Wages
Paul states the principle behind the parable in its bluntest form when he takes up the question of God's mercy to Israel. "What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy."9 The householder's freedom to pay the last as he pleased, without owing an explanation to the first, rests on the same ground as God's freedom to show mercy where He chooses. Neither freedom is arbitrary cruelty. Both are simply mercy operating outside the terms of a wage.
Paul draws the conclusion for salvation itself in Ephesians. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast."10 A gift and a wage cannot be measured by the same scale, and the parable's entire force depends on keeping the two apart. The workers hired at daybreak tried to convert a gift into a wage after the fact, reasoning from their own hours of labor to a claim on a larger share, and the householder's answer refused the conversion at every point.
The parable ends where it began, with a wage that was never in dispute and a grace that never asked to be measured against it. Those who labored from the first hour lost nothing by the generosity shown to those who came at the eleventh. What they lost, they lost by resenting a gift they had already been given in full, and by measuring their own reward against a scale meant for someone else's.
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