Parable 14 - Laborers in the Vineyard
When we were students in Los Angeles we used to go down to the beach with friends for a BBQ
• at the time the big rage in drinks was wine-coolers
• Being Australian and a little ignorant of brands in California, one day we bought a cheap bottle of wine from the Gallo vineyard to mix with our 7Up
• Well that was a mistake. Although it is one of the biggest wine brands in the world, this particular ones claim to fame was based on price not quality
• Fortunately or unfortunately, there was a street person hanging around looking lustfully at our half finished bottle
• He didn’t really care about the quality and gladly accepted it
In contrast to the Gallo brand, there is another major wine producer in California, Robert Mondavi
• It is much better quality
• I’m about to read you a story where these two brands are mentioned
Before we do I need to make a couple of points
• so far as we have gone through the Parables of Jesus, we have looked at his Parables of the Kingdom, the Parables of Grace and now we turn our attention to the Parables of Judgment
• unfortunately, these Parables of Judgment which usually end up with someone being cast into outer darkness, have been misused as a club to motivate Christians to toe the line or else
• For instance Sermons on the Parable of the separation of the Sheep from the Goats has made many misbehaving kids sit up in church and take notice
• But we should not forget that the same Jesus who told these Parables of Judgment also told the Parables of grace
So before we launch into the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, we need to say a few worlds about Judgment
• everyone loves John 3:16, but the rest of the passage deserves more attention than it gets
• John 3:17 (NKJV) 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
• John 12:47, For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it"
• John 1:29 "The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!
• Contrary to what we may have been taught, God is not mad at the world, as v.16 says, For God so loved the world
• God loves all his children and wants to save every last one of us.
• Anyone who would give the life of his Son for us is serious about how much He loves us
• The truth is Jesus doesn’t need to judge us, the law has already done that, this is the same law Jesus said he came to uphold
• The purpose of the law is to magnifies our sin – Paul, Rom 7:7 What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "Do not covet."
• Sinners need a Savior so the law becomes our schoolmaster, takes us by the hand and leads us to the one we need for salvation
• But scripture clearly tells us Jesus has lifted the curse of the law and given us a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light
• However if we insist on standing on what the law demands rather than Christ’s righteousness, we remain under the judgment of the law and will be condemned
• Gal 5:11 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. 2Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. 3Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. 4You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.
• So the predominant theme that comes through each of these parables is a loving God leaning over backwards to save rather than a God ready to condemn
A second theme that comes through these parables is one of inclusion before exclusion
• In other words Jesus is at pains to show that no one is ever kicked out into outer darkness who wasn’t already included
• Parable of the King’s son wedding Matt 22:1-14, not having the wedding garment, already invited
• Parable of the 10 virgins Matt 25:1-13, five foolish were just as much a part of the wedding banquet as the wise
• Parable of the talents Matt 25:14-30, all who received talents were in the master’s favour
• judgment is never administered until after acceptance
• The difference between the blessed and the cursed is one thing and one thing only; the Blessed accept their acceptance and the cursed reject it; but the acceptance is already in place for both groups before either does anything about it
• to put it another way, the kingdom of God is populated by nothing but forgiven sinners and hell is populated by nothing but forgiven sinners
• The difference between heaven and hell is simply that those in heaven accept the forgiveness of a loving God, while those in hell reject it
The third theme that comes up in the parables is the one of how difficult it is for "the spiritually superior" to enter the kingdom of God
• As we have seen in some of the other parables, the Pharisee and the Publican, the elder brother in the story of the Prodigal Son, those who are rebuked are those who see "grace" as simply being too unfair, to unjust, and it allows "loser" and "sinners" into the kingdom of God
• these are the spiritually proud who look down on others as being less righteous than themselves
• the only ones left outside the heavenly party are those who think that grace is simply too magnanimous - these others don’t deserve to be here
• So as we go through these Parables of Judgment, we will see good news, not bad; Grace, not law; vindication, not vindictiveness
The Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16)
• Going to do something different for this parable – I going to read you the account written by Robert Farrah Capon from his book, Kingdom, Grace and Judgment
• So sit back relax and enjoy the story – well you will that is, if you are not spiritually superior
There was a man who owned a vineyard. His operation was not on the scale of E & J Gallo, but it was quite respectable: let us put him in the Robert Mondavi class. We first see this gentleman on the evening of the second Sunday in October. September has been a perfect month – hot and dry, bringing the grapes to 20º Brix – but his meteorological service tells him that the weather is about to turn into cold soup. So what does out friend Robert do? He gets up first thing Monday morning, goes down to what passes for the local hiring hall and contracts for as much day labor as he can pick up. Unfortunately, every other grower in the neighborhood uses the same weather reports, so he has to promise higher pay to attract the workers he needs: $120 for the day is the figure that finally guarantees him a crew.
I see a hand up, Yes, Virginia? No, Virginia, $120 is not a ridiculous figure. A denarius was a day’s pay; I have simply taken the liberty of making it a good day’s pay. A penny a day may have been alright for the translators of the KJV, but this is 2000.
Anyway, Robert loads his crew into a couple of old school buses and puts them to work, chop-chop. Just before nine am, though, he gets another weather bulletin. They have moved the start of the three weeks of rain from Wednesday back to Tuesday: he has one day, not two, to get the harvest in. Out he goes at nine, therefore – and with increasing panic at noon and at three – to hire on still more hands. Each time he succeeds in rounding up all the available help, giving them the by now the practiced line that he is Robert Mondavi, the famous payer of top dollar who is also Mr. Fairness himself: whatever is right, they will get.
It’s a huge harvest, though, and with only one hour left before dark, Robert realizes he won’t get it in on time without still more help. So out he goes again, but the hiring hall is closed by now and the village square has only its usual crowd of up-to-the-minute losers hanging out in a haze of smoke. You know the types: lots of leather, some girls (and boyfriends) with more mousse than brains, six-packs everywhere, and music that ruptures eardrums. What the heck, Robert thinks in desperation: it’s worth at least a try. So he walks up to the group, ostentatiously switches off the offending ghetto-blaster, and goes into his spiel: he’s Robert Mondavi; he’s famous and he’s fair; they could probably use a buck; so what do they think? What they think, of course, is also, what the heck: whatever he wants them to do, it won’t take long; and whatever he pays, at least its a couple more six-packs for the night. Off they go.
Now then: run your mind over the story so far. I’m sure you know exactly what happens each time one of those new batches of workers gets dropped off at the vineyard. Before they pick even a single grape, they make sure they find out from the workers already on the job the exact per diem amount on which Robert Mondavi is basing his chances at the Guinness Book of World Records. And since they are – like the rest of the human race – inveterate bookkeepers, they take the $120 figure, divide it by twelve and multiply it by the number of hours they’ll be working. Then and only then do they lay hand to grape, secure in the knowledge that they will be getting, respectively, $100, $70, $40, and $10.
Robert, however, has a surprise for them. At the end of the day, he is a happy man. With his best and biggest harvest on its way to the stemmer-crusher, he feels expansive – and a little frisky. So he says to his foreman, “I have a wild idea. I’m going to fill the pay envelopes myself; but when you give them out, I want you to do it backwards, beginning with the last ones hired.”
Once again, I’m sure, you know what happens. When the first girl with purple hair gets her envelope and walks away opening it, she finds six crisp, new twenties inside. What does she do?
No Virginia, put your hand down. She does not go back and report the overage; she just keeps on walking – fast.
But when her shirt-open-to-the-waist boyfriends catch up with her and tells her they got $120, too … well, dear old human nature triumphs again: they cannot resist going back and telling everybody else what jerks they were for sweating a whole day in the hot sun when they could have made the same money for just an hour’s work.
The entail of Adam’s transgression being what it is, however, the workers who were on the job longer come up with yet another example of totally unoriginal sin. On hearing that Robert Mondavi is now famous for paying $120 an hour, they put their mental bookkeeping machinery into reverse and floor the pedal. And what do they then come up with? O frabjous joy! They conclude that they are now about to become the proud possessors of, in order, $480, or $840 or even – bless you, Robert Mondavi - $1,440.
But Robert, like God, is only crazy, not stupid. Like God, he has arranged for the recompense to be based only on the weird goodness he is most famous for, not on the just deserts they have infamously imagined for themselves: every last envelop, they find, has six (6) twenties in it; no more for those who worked all day, and no less for those who didn’t.
This, of course, goes down like Gatorade for the last bunch hired, like dishwater for the next-to-the-last, like vinegar for the almost-first, and like hot sulfuric acid for the first-of-all. Predictably, therefore – on the lame brained principle that those who are most outraged should argue the case for those who are less so (wisdom would have whispered to them, “Reply in anger and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret”) – the sweatiest and the most exhausted decide to give Robert a hard time. “Hey, man,” they say; “you call this a claim to fame? Those punks over there only worked one hour and we knocked ourselves out all day. How come you made them equal to us?”
Robert, however, has his speech in his pocket. “Look, Pal,” he says, (Incidentally, the Greek word in the parable is hetaíre which is a distinctly unfriendly word for “friend.” In three of its four uses in the New Testament – here, and to the man without the wedding garment in the King’s Son’s Wedding, and to Judas at the betrayal – it comes off sounding approximately like “Buster.”) “Look Pal,” he tells the spokesman for all the bookkeepers who have gagged on this parable for two thousand years, “Don’t give me agita. You agreed to $120 a day, I gave you $120 a day. Take it and get out of here before I call the cops. If I want to give some pot-head in Gucci loafers the same pay as you, so what? You’re telling me I can’t do what I want with my own money? I’m supposed to be a stinker because you got your nose out of joint? All I did was have a fun idea. I decided to put the last first and the first last to show you there are no insiders or outsiders here: when I’m happy, everybody’s happy, no matter what they did or didn’t do. I’m not asking you to like me, Buster; I’m telling you to enjoy me. If you want to mope that’s your business. But since the only thing it’ll get you is a lousy disposition, why don’t you just shut up and go into the tasting room and have yourself a free glass of Chardonnay? The choice is up to you, Friend: drink up, or get out; compliments of the house, or go to …. Take your pick.”
As we saw in earlier parables, Prodigal Son, Pharisee and the Publican, we see how outrageous God’s grace really is
• It is extended liberally to the undeserving
• The Prodigal was let off the hook despite his many sins
• The Publican was let off the hook despite his long list of sins
• Now we see those who only worked for an hour receiving the same reward as those who laboured all day
• So again it highlights just how much God loves all of His children
But just as surely as this is a Parable about the amazing Grace of God it also highlights the judgment that falls on those bookkeepers who continue to keep score
• They too think God’s grace is outrageous, but in a totally different sense
• Like the older brother in Prodigal story and the Pharisee in the Pharisee and the Publican story, they are outraged that grace is extended to those they consider to be unworthy and undeserving
• And just to highlight the point the Lord of the Vineyard cuts straight to the point and asks, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” NIV uses the word “envious”
• Why are you unhappy that I am so merciful and want to include all, even those you consider the dregs of society in the divine party
• Why aren’t you happy that God’s family is larger than you anticipated
Rev 20:11 Tells us there are two sets of books in heaven, the Book of Life and the Bookkeepers’ book
• For over 1000 years Israel lived under the curse of the bookkeepers book, the Law
• The point of course was to show that “No one was righteous, no not one” (Rom 3:10)
• So God gave up on Salvation by the Books and said, “I’ll do it for you”
• So he cancelled everyone’s record and nailed them to the cross
Colossians 2:13-15 And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, 14having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
• So the bookkeeping book was thrown away and replaced with the Book of Life
• Everyone can line up before the auditor Jesus Christ and get the full payment of eternal life
• The door of salvation is flung wide open, to Jews, Gentiles, prodigal sons, tax collectors, punk rockers, you name it…everyone is included in on the party
But some aren’t happy with this arrangement
• They want to revive a book that no longer exists
• They preferred the old system of rules and regulations, of keeping track
• And it to those that Jesus directs his judgment
• “If you want to live by those rules, and reject the gift of grace offered through my blood, then there is only one fate that awaits you
• Judgment falls not on the unacceptable but only on those who will not accept “acceptance”
• Losers are winners and winners are losers
• The last will be first and the first last
• “These guys come sliding in at the last second, and get the same reward!”
• You mean all these years of paying tithes, attending church, hours of prayer and Bible Study don’t count for anything?
• And the devastating, shattering answer is “that’s right, it doesn’t”
• You cannot earn salvation, you cannot pay for grace, it insults God when we try to and it says Jesus’ sacrifice is not enough
• But you can pay tithes, attend church, do your devotions for other reasons other than being a good little Christian
• But that a story for another Parable
But notice nobody is kicked out who wasn’t already included – all worked in the vineyard, all were entitled to received the reward
• But for some it was just too unfair
And this brings up the third theme mentioned at the beginning, and that is how difficult it is for "the spiritually superior" to enter the kingdom of God
• The outrageous Grace of God will drive bookkeepers crazy because it is just so unfair
• And it would appear, that this feeling of spiritual superiority will prevent some from ever entering the kingdom of heaven (Lazarus)
• God is determined to have his party, no one is excluded who wants to be there, but woe betide those who want to spoil the fun
• The Father will not tolerate party-poopers, He will hold them accountable according to the same rules as they judge
• Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you
Bottom line of this Parable - The gospel message is good news for sinners but its bad news for those spiritually superior bookkeepers who insist on keeping score
