Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

These parables over the last few Sundays are part of the “Five Discourses” of Jesus that help define the structure of Matthew’s gospel. The other discourses are The Sermon on the Mount, The Church, and the End Times.  Today’s parable is unique to Matthew’s gospel. 

Remember, parables were not so much moral lessons that we are familiar with in Western literature (i.e., Parable of the Tortoise and Hare, etc.). These parables were designed to convey a particular experience of our relationship with Christ/God. It isn’t so much striving to “get them” as letting them “get to us,” as theologian Robert Farrar Capon discusses in his book The Parables of Grace. Capon argues that the parables of Jesus are an icon of himself. They are “lights shining out of the house of faith itself, inviting us home” (3).

In today's parable, it seems that our landowner (God) is acting strangely in paying workers who were hired for a few hours for the same wage as those working a full day.  As in many of Jesus’ parables, there is something weird in the story. There isn’t anything particularly unusual about workers feeling as if they don’t get a just wage, but the rather strange practice of simply paying workers a full day’s wage for those working considerably less than a full day is strange indeed. Also, the landowner goes himself and hires workers towards the end of the day who everyone else has passed over; he is scraping the bottom of the barrel without seemingly needing to And what’s more puzzling is that he feels the need to entice these workers with a full day’s wage. I think it would be safe to say the landowner isn’t a very good businessman. And this gives us our first insight into the parable: The landowner’s actions are representative of God’s irrational generosity. Think of the Parable of the Sower, the farmer who broadcasts the precious commodity of seeds recklessly, with some of the seeds falling on good ground, some on rocky soil, and still others on hard dirt adjacent to the field; a pretty poor farmer!  God’s apparent foolishness is also on display as the father welcomes home his prodigal son with open arms and throws him an extravagant party after squandering his inheritance and turning his back on his family.

All of these parables tell us something essential about God, which Jesus highlights once again in today’s parable: God is hopelessly in love with his creation, evidenced by his divine dysfunctional behavior we call God’s mercy.  The common denominator in these parables, and especially in today’s parable, is God’s grace. A grace that pushes back at our notion of being able to justify receiving God’s love.

The really good news in our parable today is that the kingdom of heaven is not what you have achieved with your life’s work or how much of a failure to achieve moral goodness you have been; it's about where you are with your relationship with God right now. God never stops reaching for you; the moment you accept His embrace, you enter eternity.