The Denarius and the Day: Purpose in the Vineyard Parable (Matthew 20)
In chapter 20 of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a group of hired workers who could have been called the “denarius crew.”
In the story, a landowner hiring laborers for his vineyard goes out early and promises the workers he finds a denarius for a day of work. They accept. But the landowner continues to seek laborers throughout the day. He goes out again and again, later and later, recruiting workers at 9:00 am, noon, 3:00 pm, and 5:00 pm.
Then comes 6:00 pm, quitting time for everyone. The landowner pays out the wages, and—surprise!—no distinction is made between different workers. Each of the workers gets a denarius, no matter when in the day that worker had begun.
Cries of protest arise from the workers who had been hired at the start of the day. They believe the late-arriving workers should receive less. But the landowner replies, essentially, “Did I not give you what I promised you?”
Jesus explains that this is how the kingdom of heaven works.
The complete story can be read in Matthew 20:1-16. I will quote some lines from it below.
One brilliant feature of this story is the way it uses money as a symbol for what cannot be valued in money. The payment conveys the way in which what we find in eternal life differs from what we seek, want, and expect in this life. Because belonging to the kingdom of heaven is eternal, there is no way to score or rank this belonging according to any measure of valuation calibrated to this finite life. Anyone who wants redemption and election to be weighted or prorated for the extent of one’s efforts or commitment in this world is simply way too oriented toward this world. Grace is infinite, and therefore infinitely vast alongside any earthly achievement or effort. In a sense, all of us are overpaid. The earliest workers have no basis for grumbling over the extent of grace the landowner might have decided to give someone else.
In short, the parable is about eternal life.
That much might be fairly clear.
Yet the parable also has something to say about our finite life, our life in this world. And this is worth seeing and exploring.
“No One Hired Us”
The denarius crew members hired in the early morning are angry because they perceive they were given exactly the same as those hired late. Is this accurate?
A difference in what they received can be drawn from Jesus’ story. For the workers hired early, more of the day was shaped by and given to something—given to purpose—in place of the day being shaped by and given to living without it.
We see this in the comparison of the early workers’ experience to the workers who waited to be hired at 5:00 pm. Here is Matthew 20:6-7:
“Then at about five, [the landowner] went and found others standing around, and said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day doing nothing?’
“‘Because no one hired us,’ they said to him.”
Because no one hired us. Meaning: They would not have waited if they had a choice in the matter. God, the landowner in this parable, did not call to them, did not give them the situation in which the role he had for them was clear. Or he did not do this until late in the day.
To be sure, coming to faith does not entail receiving instruction in the same clear way as in this parable. We do not know our purposes in the same way the workers knew what to prune and harvest in the vineyard. Yet knowing God comes with knowing God is working a plan, and we are in it. I don’t argue that this knowledge is necessarily a comfort. But the recognition of an eternal realm or kingdom reorients our sense of who and where we are, and what we find ourselves called to carry. This sense of purpose is bigger than we are, it comes from beyond, and those who lack it cannot find a substitute by simply self-selecting the seeming best way to spend their time and talents in this world. Those who believe and those who do not are ultimately both working out God’s plan, but some potentially get the peace (or not) of knowing that the calling and the burden are greater than the self, since only the Creator truly knows the self and knows how it all fits together.
The workers who were waiting could not simply hire themselves into a place of active belonging within this plan.
I referred to the “peace” of knowing, but perhaps this is not quite the right word. The early-hired workers griped. The experience of faith and purpose are not always reassuringly peaceful.
The Burden of the Day
The workers hired early griped because they believed the workers hired late had it easy. In a sense, they did. In Matthew 20:12, we learn how the late-hired workers spent most of the day through the slanted perspective of the crew members who complained. Here are the objectors’ words:
“‘These last men put in one hour, and you made them equal to us who bore the burden of the day and the burning heat!’”
The burden of the day and the burning heat. What this complaint fails to recognize is that everyone in the parable encountered these things.
Everyone faced the burden of the day. Which is to say: Everyone in life faces the burden of living a life.
The complaint suggests that the late-hired workers must have sought to escape the burden somehow. They fled the heat by finding shade. They might have passed the day lounging there. But if they did, then they were trapped there: caged by their own comfort and fear of the heat.
The early workers instead bore the burden, just as they said. They did so because they said yes to the landowner, who put them to work where he chose. In submitting, in bearing the burden, they saw that they could bear it. And—no small bonus—they also had the pruned or harvested rows of a vineyard at the end of the day to show them what they had done.
Again, they had purpose. Purpose itself is a burden, but burdenlessness is not an option available to any. This is the fallacy in the crew members’ complaint. The burden of purpose was pitted against the burden of the day. The burden of purpose is pitted against the burden of idleness, meaning the inactive idleness of huddling in the shade or the busy idleness of effort spent on distraction.
Is it purpose or idleness that makes the burden of the day, the burden of a life, more bearable?
In our hearts, I think we know the answer. In a different part of our hearts, I think we have a hard time feeling the answer.
The early-employed workers were caught up in the fallacy that time in the shade was easier. That the day for the idlers was fun. At times it was! But in some ways, comfort and pleasure are the most demanding pursuits. Pleasure ever recedes from pursuit and comfort brings constraints. The early denarius crew members grumbled out of a feeling that the burden of the day made them less free, but freedom is absent for one who has determined he must remain in the shade.
Another way to look at this, and an idea I’ve written about elsewhere, is that happiness and joy are different. The early workers got a call toward joy, even if the day of following in it was not always happy. It is the late-hired workers who seemingly are better able to see this. The words of the late workers suggest that if they could have been hired early, then they would have let go of shade, fun, and some happiness for the sake of going into the vineyard too.
Seen in this light, the denarius for everyone is fair. The redemptive grace of God could only work this way: redeeming the entire day. Redeeming, that is, a whole life.
The late-hired workers had no control over how long they waited, struggling to fill each moment with their restless selves. The day was a burden for them as well, until at long last the landowner came to pick them. Purpose finally found them. The denarius was a gift rather than a wage.