{"id":9744,"date":"2022-11-26T00:00:49","date_gmt":"2022-11-25T14:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/?p=9744"},"modified":"2022-11-26T05:28:34","modified_gmt":"2022-11-25T19:28:34","slug":"working-for-fair-wages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/2022\/11\/26\/working-for-fair-wages\/","title":{"rendered":"Working for Fair Wages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew 20:1-7\u00a01<\/sup>\u201cFor the kingdom of heaven is like a man, the master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2<\/sup>And after agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. 3<\/sup>And after going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, 4<\/sup>and to them he said, \u2018You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is fair I will give you.\u2019 5<\/sup>So they went. And after going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. <\/em>6<\/sup>And after going out about the eleventh hour he found others standing. And he said to them, \u2018Why do you stand here idle all day?\u2019 7<\/sup>They said to him, \u2018Because no one has hired us.\u2019 He said to them, \u2018You also go into the vineyard.\u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

This parable is connected to the previous passage with the transition for<\/em> and\u00a0illustrates the points Jesus just made that the the first will be last and the last will be first. This idea is repeated again in verse 15. The story may be in response to Peter’s\u00a0question of 19:27. It builds on the theme that our commitment to Jesus is important, but God acts out of grace. The parable has two parts to it. The first part emphasizes the call to work in the master’s vineyard.<\/p>\n

The kingdom is compared to a\u00a0householder or landowner, basically a wealthy farmer with sufficient funds to hire day laborers. The primary crop of this farmer were grapes. The story indicates that it was harvest time, and so the master needed help to bring in the crop. He began his search early in the\u00a0morning so he could get a full day\u2019s work done. The workmen would have been agricultural \u00a0day laborers, similar to the migrant workers in many parts of the world today. Verse 2 indicates that\u00a0he found some workers and agreed to pay them the normal daily wages of a\u00a0denarius. This was a fair transaction: a day\u2019s wage for a day\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Apparently the master needed more workers and around 9 am went out to get more (verse 3). One quarter of the day was already gone.\u00a0He found the workers standing around in the marketplace doing nothing. The master gives an invitation to work at a fair wage (verse 4), which implies that they would get three-quarters of a denarius since they started late. As the day went on, the master needed more workers, and so he went out about noon and 3 pm.\u00a0Each of these\u00a0workers would receive the appropriate pay for how long they worked.\u00a0Like most desperate people, they would be happy for the work and pay they received. The point of the story is not that the\u00a0farmer did not know what he was doing in hiring people, or rather, the people to be hired\u00a0showed up late in the marketplace and missed out on the earlier hire (there may be a message\u00a0in this: people come later to the kingdom than others). The point rather is the wage and\u00a0timing of the hire.<\/p>\n

Verse 6 is a surprise shift in the parable. The literary pattern of the previous verses is broken, which should grab the attention of the careful listener. It was getting near to the end of the day, the equivalent to 5 pm. Those who were standing around tell the master that no one had hired them. One might almost conclude that they were being lazy, but that is not the point of this parable and nothing is said about their work ethic. They emphasis is on the fact that the master still hired them to work even though they only had an hour of daylight left. The compassion of the farmer is evident by giving the workers a\u00a0chance to work for at least one hour. Some money is better than no money. At this point in the parable, the expectation is that each of the workers will earn the appropriate fraction of a denarius fro the amount of work they have done. What will the master do?<\/p>\n

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Matthew 20:1-7\u00a01\u201cFor the kingdom of heaven is like a man, the master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2And after agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. 3And after going out about the third hour he saw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devotions","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9744"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9785,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9744\/revisions\/9785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}