Bible Text: Matthew 20:1-16 | Preacher: Pastor Andrew Richard | Series: Gesima 2022 | In Matthew 19, a chapter before today’s Gospel reading, Jesus spoke with a rich young man. The young man asked, “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?” Well, if it’s a question of good deeds then the answer is God’s Law. Jesus referred him to the Ten Commandments. The young man supposed that he had kept all of them, so Jesus said, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Jesus went after the young man’s idol: his mammon. “When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”
Jesus then speaks to his disciples, and in the course of conversation Peter says, “See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” Peter asks this innocently enough. He didn’t follow Jesus so that he could have an eternal yacht in heaven to replace the fishing boat he walked away from on earth. He followed Jesus because by his grace Jesus said, “Follow me.” But Peter understands that there’s a certain compensation for everything we lose for Christ’s sake. There are rewards for faithfulness.
And he’s right. “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, in the regeneration, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’” That’s a word specifically for the twelve apostles. But Jesus continues with a word for all of us, “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my names’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.” But this word comes with a warning, lest we become too focused on earning eternal rewards: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
After speaking those words Jesus immediately tells today’s parable to explain what they mean. “For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.” With this opening line Jesus turns our eyes from ourselves and our work to him and his work. Jesus is the master of the house who went out from his holy habitation, became man, and founded the vineyard of his Church. He removed the devil’s stones and cast out demons. He ripped up the world’s weeds and exposed their vain roots. He tilled the soil, fertilizing the earth with the sweat of his brow and with drops of his blood. He planted himself as the choice vine and bore the fruit we so desperately needed. On the winepress of the cross the life-juice was squeezed out of him and he provided his very blood to drink for the forgiveness of sins.
Jesus lives, and the true vine is also the Lord of the vineyard. He has gone out into the marketplace of the world and by the call of the Gospel he brings people into the vineyard of his Church. All of this is included in the first line of the parable. Everything that follows was begun by the grace of Jesus and can only continue by his continued grace.
Through the first half of the parable the master of the house hires laborers into his vineyard at various hours of the day. The hours of the day correspond to various points in human life. Those who are hired early are those who were baptized as infants and have known no other life than life in the Church. Those hired at the eleventh hour are those who lived many years in unbelief and in whom the Gospel took root late in life. The most extreme eleventh-hour hire is the death-bed convert.
Now we can ask the question: Is there any advantage to being hired early in life? Should we prefer to be the baptized infant instead of the death-bed convert? After all, life in the vineyard sounds like a great deal of work. It is. We strain to keep God’s commandments, exerting ourselves in a way the world doesn’t. Our backs ache from resisting temptation. Our arms are sore from wrestling with our sinful flesh. Our knees are bruised from constant prayer. Our hands are calloused from loving and serving our neighbors. Our skin is tanned from the scorching heat of persecution and tribulation. We exercise patient endurance and mingle our sweat and blood with that of our Lord. We bear the fruit of the Spirit, and the world hates us for it.
But we shouldn’t want to be eleventh-hour workers. Life in the vineyard isn’t all drudgery. Life in the vineyard is life that revolves around the vine, that is, Jesus. He is not idle in his vineyard. He constantly washes the dirt from us and feeds us from his table. He speaks his Word, by which he forgives our sins and strengthens us with his Spirit. His commandments provide much-needed order to life, and are good for us. The work is good work, too. We could compare much of it with the work Adam was given to do in the Garden of Eden, work that’s not a result of sin, but a natural part of life with God and fellow man.
The benefits of the vineyard are especially clear when we compare the vineyard to the marketplace. The marketplace in the parable is the unbelieving world. The marketplace is characterized by one thing: “he saw others standing idle in the marketplace.” This word “idle” does not mean motionless. There might be much activity. But the activity is useless and futile and confused and chaotic and destructive and self-defeating. Think of the world’s riots and insubordinate rallies if you’d like a examples of people standing idle in the marketplace. Life in the market is not a life of receiving gracious care or earning rewards. Life in the market is life under the devil’s whip, life being blown about by the passions of the flesh. Life in the market is life for sale, the life of a slave. It is a life marked by the emptiness of cheap thrills and the use and abuse of others for the sake of pleasure, power, and fame. It is a life of false gods chewing on their worshipers. The eleventh-hour workers will wish they had belonged to the Church their entire earthly lives. At whatever hour they’re called, we’re simply glad to have them with us.
So there is no particular advantage to a death-bed conversion, other than the fact that it’s better than no conversion. On the other hand, there is much benefit in being a lifelong Christian. But there is a certain temptation that belongs to those who have been in the vineyard for a long time. Peter’s question, “What then will we have?” prompted Jesus to speak about it. Indeed, the main point of the parable is to address this temptation; we’ll call it the Temptation of the Early Hires.
This temptation has two parts. The first part of the temptation is to let thanksgiving for grace give way to a sense of entitlement. Grumbling inevitably follows, as it did with the Israelites in the wilderness. They forgot about the grace of God, the exodus, the salvation through the Red Sea, and they could do nothing but murmur and whine. In their eyes God became an enemy who wasn’t treating them the way he should. Now if we want to talk about “should,” then we “should” have all drowned with the Egyptians. It was only by God’s grace that we didn’t. But the mind that forgets grace overlooks this fact.
That’s the first part of the Temptation of the Early Hires: to let thanksgiving give way to entitlement. The second part of the temptation is the desire that God would deal with us according to how we compare with others, instead of dealing with us according to his Word. We see this quite clearly in the parable. Jesus pays the eleventh-hour hires the wage for a whole day. “When those hired first came, they thought they would receive more,” but no. Jesus gave them exactly what he said he would. And “they grumbled at the master of the house, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’”
Again this second part of the temptation has to do with a loss of memory. The early hires have forgotten the Lord who called them. They have forgotten that Jesus did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, though he is God. They have forgotten that Jesus emptied himself for their sake and made himself equal to the lowest slave. They have forgotten that if Jesus were perfectly fair they would have died as slaves in the marketplace and gone down to their fiery graves in tears. They have forgotten that life in the vineyard is given by grace.
And so, although they spent their whole lives in the vineyard, some of the first end in unbelief. Jesus says to them, “Take what is yours and depart.” “If you’ve received some benefit from life in the vineyard, great. You can savor those memories while you burn in hell. But you can’t stay here.” Thus some of those baptized as infants will go to eternal death, while the death-bed converts go to eternal life. “So the last will be first, and the first last.”
“What then will we have?” That was the question that prompted the parable. We will have a hundredfold compensation for anything lost for Christ’s sake. That does mean varying rewards in the vineyard, both earthly rewards and eternal rewards. What those rewards will look like, I can’t really say, especially not concerning eternal rewards in heaven. The best practice is not to speculate about the rewards or seek to determine some sort of pecking order in the Church. We act toward each other in humility, not in pride. There’s the head and the body. There’s Christ and there are us sinners. We need no more distinction than that. The best course is to follow Christ’s words in Luke 17:10, “When you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have only done our duty.’” We deserve neither the vineyard, nor any reward for working in it.
And so by this parable Jesus keeps us in our place, which is not oppressive on his part, but is for our good. By nature we want to take the place of earning something from him. That’s a harmful place to be, because there is but one thing man can earn from God, and that is a dismissal. So Jesus keeps us in our place, and that place is the place of receiving from him. He is the Lord of the vineyard, he is the vine, and he nourishes us, his branches. What then will we have? His eternal life. To him be the honor and the glory forever. Amen.