Work in the vineyard, a modern view

In my love affair with the Bible, I find myself returning to very familiar passages to find new and clearer applications for our modern world. I am haunted by the peril of not modernizing Jesus. I return over and over again to the parables of Jesus for new insights. The story of the laborers in the vineyard is such a challenge.

The story is found in the 20th chapter of the Matthew Gospel. This is a parable found only in Matthew. The key characters are an owner, a foreman and a large body of expendable street people, who were desperate for work. (If the reader is not familiar with the parable, I suggest you stop for a moment and read the story.)

Matthew wrote his version of the story two generations after it was told as a key part of Jesus’ teaching ministry. Matthew used the story to illustrate a simple statement. “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” He introduced the story by saying that it was a parable of the Kingdom of Heaven. Today the best of critical scholarship says that neither the introduction nor the conclusion was a part of the story as first told by Jesus.

For Matthew, the vineyard was Israel (or the church); the owner was God; the denarius was salvation; the first workers were Israelites; and the last hired were Gentiles. Matthew gave the parable a theological interpretation, devoid of any recognition of the social and economic dynamics that existed at the time when Jesus first told the story.

Over the centuries, theologians in general have jumped on the Matthew interpretation bandwagon. Tens of thousands of sermons have been preached about the gracious generosity of the owner who paid a full day’s wage to people who worked only one hour. But what if scholarship has now shown that a denarius was not a generous day’s pay? What if a denarius was something below a subsistence wage, barely kept a single man from starving, and was a wage set by a very wealthy and greedy owner who knew low wages meant larger profits for himself?

This clue alone is enough for a reassessment of Matthew’s use of the story compared to the intent of Jesus, the original storyteller.

What was the setting in which Jesus told the story?

Jesus lived during a radical reorganization of the structure of wealth and power. At the highest level, Roman Emperors removed wealth from the far reaches of their empire and transferred it to Rome. On a local level, wealth and power left the countryside and moved to the city. Those who controlled wealth and power developed systematic ways of taking products from the countryside and transferring them to the city for consumption by the wealthy. The subsistence farmer disappeared. Absentee ownership became the rule. Displaced farmers became day laborers.

In Galilee, where Jesus lived, vineyards replaced grain crops. Only men of wealth could afford to spend the money to go through the five year process of developing a producing vineyard. Owners visited their vineyards only occasionally. They hired stewards to act as foremen and enforcers of the needed workmen. Owners paid day laborers absolutely as little as possible. There was no shortage of such day laborers. They would work for whatever they could get.

In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, as Jesus taught it, the owner was not God, but a man of great wealth who lived miles away in a mansion in the city. The steward was not a servant of God, but a hired enforcer, who despised his work crew. The workers were not men of dignity being paid a living wage, but desperate men who would work for whatever a rich, powerful man would pay.

The final tragedy was that the anger of the workers was turned on one another, and the guilty owner claimed immunity from the fray because, after all, he was the owner. He could do as he pleased.

Jesus taught in rural areas. His audiences were made up of the poorest of the poor. As is typical, those who are abused shrink back in silence. Jesus was the advocate for those who had no advocate.

My understanding of Jesus is that he loved discussion and grew up in the synagogue tradition of arguing about the true meaning of Torah (the will of God). If I am somewhere close to understanding what Jesus was about, after every story that he told, there would be discussion and debate. Out of the debate about this particular story, the abused day laborers began to understand what was happening to them. Collectively they could regain their dignity.

Does this remind us of Cesar Chavez and grape pickers in 1965 in California? Does this speak to us about all the minimum wage workers in America who work without health and retirement benefits?

I too have a theological understanding of Jesus from Nazareth, the one I call “Lord of my life.” However, if we do not recognize him as the radical advocate for the poor and bring him center stage in 2009, we have done him and the world a huge disservice.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.