Jesus told this parable in the temple courts during His final week in Jerusalem, in the middle of a direct confrontation with the chief priests and elders. They had challenged His authority, He had answered with a question about John the Baptist that they refused to answer, and this parable, the first of three told in succession, was His reply to men who wanted the appearance of an argument without submitting to its conclusion.
The Two Sons’ Responses
"But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went."1 The vineyard was not a neutral setting. It had long stood as a figure for Israel and for the work God had entrusted to His people, and the prophet had already sung of a vineyard planted, fenced, and cared for by its owner, only to bring forth wild grapes instead of the fruit He looked for.2 The son's flat refusal was a real refusal, unsoftened by any excuse, and it stood as an act of open disrespect toward his father's request. What followed the refusal was a change of mind that led to his feet actually carrying him into the vineyard.
"And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not."3 The second son's answer was everything the first son's was not: prompt, respectful, and correctly worded. It was also empty. The word given cost him nothing because he never intended to redeem it, and the vineyard never saw him.
A father's request in that culture carried weight beyond ordinary courtesy. The law commanded, "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee,"4 and a household in which sons worked the family vineyard treated that commandment as the framework for daily life rather than a rule reserved for special occasions. Measured against that framework, the first son's opening word was a real breach, spoken to his father's face and not softened by any excuse offered alongside it. The second son's answer was the one an onlooker would have called honorable at the moment it was given, and that is exactly the difficulty the parable sets before its hearers. Honor measured by a word spoken at the gate and honor measured by labor performed in the field are not the same thing, and only one of them left a vineyard tended at the end of the day.
Which Son Did the Father’s Will
"Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The first."5 The chief priests and elders answered correctly, because the question as put admits only one honest answer. A son's word is not the measure of his obedience. What he actually does in the vineyard is the only measure that counts, and by that measure the son who said no and then went outranks the son who said yes and stayed home.
"Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you."6 The verdict the leaders had just pronounced on the two sons in the story turned immediately into a verdict on themselves. Publicans, who collected taxes for Rome and were widely regarded as traitors to their own people, and harlots, who had broken the plainest moral law, were named as the ones entering the kingdom ahead of the very men whose lives were built around religious observance. The men being addressed had said all the right words about God for years. The outcasts they despised were the ones actually walking into the vineyard.
The Application to John the Baptist
"For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him."7 John's ministry called Israel to repentance in preparation for the one coming after him, and the response to that call divided the nation exactly as the parable divides the two sons. The tax collectors and the prostitutes heard John, believed him, and changed course, standing in the place of the first son whose initial answer had been wrong. The religious leaders refused John from the outset, and having refused him, they were given a second occasion to reconsider: they watched the very people they despised repent and believe, and even that spectacle produced no change in them. Their hardness was not an absence of evidence. It persisted in spite of evidence placed directly before them.
Obedience Measured by the Vineyard, Not by the Answer Given at the Gate
James states as a general rule what this parable illustrates in one family. "But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was."8 The second son heard the request as clearly as the first. He answered it correctly and then forgot it the moment he turned away, exactly as James describes a man who studies his own reflection and walks off without remembering what he saw.
Jesus makes the same point elsewhere in terms that fall on anyone tempted to substitute the right words for the work itself. "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."9 The second son's polished answer, "I go, sir," is precisely this kind of speech, correctly addressed and completely unaccompanied by the will it claimed to submit to. John had already warned the crowds who came to him not to rest on their standing rather than on a changed direction of life. "Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham."10 Descent, standing, and the right words were never the fruit John asked for, and they are not the fruit this parable asks for either. John the apostle states the same principle for the life of the church: "My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth."11
The parable does not commend the first son's original refusal, and it gives no license to treat rebellion as a stage on the way to something better. What it commends is the change of mind that reversed the refusal and put the son to work in the vineyard he had first declined to enter. Between an ugly answer that ends in obedience and a gracious answer that ends in nothing, the parable names the first as the one that did the father's will, and it leaves the second son's polite promise standing as a warning to everyone content to have said the right thing at the gate.
The two sons were not weighed against each other on the strength of a single day's exchange. Each answer was tested by what came after it, over however long it took the first son to change his mind and walk to the vineyard, and over however long the second son managed to avoid it. A father asking his son to work does not measure the request in a single sentence, and neither does the parable measure the sons by the words spoken at the moment the request was made. The chief priests and elders had spent their lives producing the second son's answer on cue, correct in form and never followed by the labor it promised, and the parable was told in their hearing precisely so that they would recognize which son they had been playing all along.
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