The Lord and the Labourers

Does the parable The Lord and the Labourers reveal what the reign of God is like, or does it disclose what the reign of God is not? You can decide!

Reflect on this question and write about one page of your reflections on your understanding of the parable and how it relates to God’s reign.

Until now, I had understood the parable of The Lord and the Labourers to be an exhortation to accept whomever God called to be his disciples, regardless of whether they had always been religious (the first labourers) or whether they had come to faith later on (the late arrivals). I had equated the ‘wage’ with the ‘reward’ of salvation. I’m not sure where I got this interpretation, but it suited me because I had experienced some sense of inadequacy in the knowledge that I was baptised later than most, and had spent a number of years ‘standing idle all day’ – so if God wanted to be generous and include me in his work of salvation, anyone who wanted to point a finger or lodge an objection against me was being very mean spirited indeed. God is allowed to be generous. Especially to me!

However, my recent studies have challenged my thinking.

Some basic values of the Kingdom of God [clearly articulated by Fr Albert Nolan OP in his Biblical Spirituality booklet/lecture notes (April 1982)] are:

• sharing (as opposed to the pursuit of money and wealth creation for purely personal enrichment);
• human dignity (as opposed to the pursuit of status and prestige);
• human solidarity (as opposed to ‘clique’ selfishness) and
• service (as opposed to using power and authority to dominate and oppress others).

From this perspective, if the lord of the vineyard represents God, then I believe he would express these Kingdom values in his actions, and he would have:

• been equally generous with all of the labourers, not just a few;
• respected all of the labourer’s dignity by honouring the appropriate rate of pay for work done, instead of devaluing their hard work by paying everyone the same regardless of what they had accomplished;
• been sensitive to the fact that paying all of the labourers the same money for different volumes of work would rightly cause dissention and disunity by unfairly creating groups of ‘privileged’ workers within the workforce; and
• avoided at all costs making his authority felt by pulling rank on the labourers and reminding them that he was the one in authority and could do whatever he pleased, and he definitely would not have suggested that if the labourers were unhappy about his authoritarian actions it must be because there was some flaw in their character or some lack in their spirituality.

Since the lord of the vineyard’s behaviour did not model kingdom values, I don’t think he can reasonably be said to represent God. I think the more acceptable interpretation is that he represents the land-owning elite of agrarian Palestine! The labourers were right to protest unjust treatment!

The parable raises a number of important issues:

• the landowner tells the labourers “I will give you what is just” – so what constitutes a just wage?
• in defence of his actions the landowner says to the complainants “My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?” – how ethical is it for an employer to hold a worker to an agreement that was made without the worker having access to information about the employer’s intended remuneration policy?
• the way the landowner handles the remuneration issue shifts the focus away from the work and onto the wage, which implies that the primary purpose of work is for the worker to earn a wage – but where is the understanding of work as vocation or ministry? And where is the employer’s responsibility to use his authority as an employer to serve his workforce by creating opportunities that challenge and assist the workers to become more skilled and proficient in their work?
• the worker-as-wage-earner paradigm also contributes to the realisation of a worldly ‘commodity economy’ instead of a ‘gift economy’ that corresponds with the values of the Kingdom of God.