Comparing Paychecks: Are you being Paid What You’re Worth?
Matthew 20:1-16
September 24th, 2006
Intro: This morning we’re going to turn our attention back to the book of Matthew. We’re drawing near to the end of the book and Jesus is stepping up His ministry and the teaching that He’s doing with His disciples to prepare them for the days ahead, when He will be taken from them and their faith will be tested like never before. We’ve seen a lot happen as we’ve gone through these first 20 chapters together. We looked at the genealogy of Christ and the way that Matthew used it to weave the two Testaments together so that we could see the plan of God as it unfolded throughout the pages of Scripture and we looked at the fact that He fulfilled all of the Messianic prophecies of what line the Savior would be born into. We looked at the ministry of John the Baptist and the way that he pointed to the coming ministry of Christ. We saw the baptism of Christ and the public affirmation of His identity that God made that day. We listened to the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus took everything that the people knew and turned it upside down showing them that they could not possibly find salvation through the law. We’ve read of his encounters with the Pharisees, those men who oppressed and intimidated the Jewish people into living a religious life that was impossible to maintain. Through all of these discourses, one thing became very clear, God was not impressed with the outside, the shell, He wanted the heart. All of the things that the Pharisees had made religion into were not what God desired. He wanted that outer change, but He wanted it to flow from a changed heart.
As Jesus’ ministry grew, we have seen his popularity grow as well. Now, wherever he goes, large crowds follow and wait expectantly for Him to do something or to say something. We’ve talked about His authority over nature, calming the sea and walking on water. We’ve seen His authority over the body, healing the sick, making the lame to walk and the blind to see, raising Lazarus from the dead, just to name a few! We’ve seen Him show authority in spiritual matters as well. He has driven out demons with a word and challenged the religious hierarchy of that day. We have read and listened to a lot of things in the last few months that give testimony to the uniqueness of this man, Jesus. They also back His claims that He is the Messiah and that He is the Son of the Living God who has come for the unrighteous, the sinner, and to set the captive free. That’s all good, but we haven’t even gotten to the best parts yet! As the crowds grew, Jesus continued to teach, but with a new twist. He began to teach the people in parables; Stories that were drawn from typical, everyday Jewish life that everyone could understand on some level. He taught this way to separate those who were simply looking for a show from those who were genuinely seeking an encounter with the Son of God. Those who were looking, would see a deeper spiritual meaning to the stories and their lives would be forever changed by the Truth. He talked about fishing and planting, about treasures and sheep. As we come to our text this morning, Jesus has used many parables with the crowds and with His disciples and he teaches them once more using a story.
We’re going to be looking at chapter 20 this morning and the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. It’s important, before we begin, to take a quick look back at what’s just happened. The chapter starts with the word “for.” This means that the story hinges upon what just happened or what was just discussed. At the end of chapter 19, we have the story of the rich young man. He has just walked away from Jesus after Christ commanded him to sell all that he had and give it to the poor. The point being, not that money is bad or that wealth is evil, but that nothing should stand in the way or take higher priority in life than the call of Christ. Jesus cut right to the heart and asked the man to give up that which was most important to him, his wealth. He was promised treasure in heaven but the rich young man could only walk away sadly, unwilling to follow Christ at so great a cost.
This exchange sparks a conversation with the disciples and reveals how far Peter still needs to go in his understanding of the Kingdom that he has pledged his life to. The disciples ask about salvation and rewards and Peter says this:
MT 19:27 Peter answered him, "We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?"
He sounds like a little kid! Peter wants to know that he is going to be well compensated, taken care of, for the sacrifices that he and the other disciples have made. After seeing the rich man leave, he says, what about us? We’ve made the ultimate sacrifices. We’ve given up everything, we’ve left jobs and family, what will there be for us? It looks like Peter is in it for the rewards and at that point he may still have been. You would expect Jesus to rebuke him as he has in the past when Peter showed a lack of understanding, but Jesus doesn’t.
We see this with our kids all the time. They will behave extremely well, or they will do something selfless or they’ll make a big show of hugging each other and then look at Erin and I with the expectation that they’re going to be rewarded. It kind of defeats the whole purpose. I can remember doing the same thing when I was little. Our school would give out these little slips of paper called POPS passes. I don’t remember what they stood for but if a teacher saw you putting in extra effort in class or helping another student, any time that you were “caught” being good, you would get a POPS pass. At the end of each month, all of the students who had received a POPS pass got out of class and got to go to an assembly where they played games and had drawings for prizes. So, to an elementary school kid, this was a big deal. I tried so hard to get one. I held the door open for other kids coming in from recess, I answered every question I could in class, I had a friend walk by and knock a girl’s books off of her desk so I could pick them up! I was a great kid, but I always had my eye on the reward. Doing good and serving was not my motivation and the teachers could see that. That’s a little like the attitude we see from Peter, but instead of reprimanding him and lecturing him on the finer points of sacrifice, service, and selflessness, Jesus tells him that he will indeed be rewarded. In fact, the disciples would sit on thrones and judge the tribes of Israel! They would be highly honored. But before they could get big heads, Jesus continues and says that they won’t be the only ones honored, anyone who has sacrificed for the kingdom, anyone who has done kingdom work and served Christ would be honored as well! In fact, many who are last, an afterthought, here on Earth would be first in God’s kingdom.
I’m sure the disciples liked that they would indeed be rewarded but it had to chafe a little that everyone else, people who had not given nearly as much as them, would be rewarded in like manner. To drive home his point, Jesus tells this story.
I. The Players.
Read Verses 1 -7
This would have been a typical work situation in Israel. The marketplace was like a primitive employment agency. Unskilled laborers would hang around the marketplace and wait for someone with a job to show up and hire them. These workers were not very high up on the social totem pole and often the jobs they did only lasted a short time so there was never any guarantee of money coming in on a regular basis. We had places like this in Nyack where you could go if you needed someone to work for you. The roofer I worked for would pick guys up every once in a while if we had a huge job. We’d stop, say we needed 6 guys, point six of them out, and drive away with them in the back of the truck. That’s what we see happening here.
The first group of workers that the owner calls to work agree to work for a denarius. Now, you need to keep this in mind as we continue on. A denarius was the daily wage of a Roman soldier. A soldier was far higher up the social and economic ladder than a day laborer, so the price would have been more than generous and the men would have jumped at the opportunity to make that kind of money, about $50 by today’s standards. The owner repeats this process several times. The Jewish workday began at 6AM, this would be the first hour. So the third hour and the sixth hour and the ninth hour would be 9 AM, 12 noon and 3 PM. The last group that he hires, because obviously the work had not yet been completed, is hired at the 11th hour, or 5 PM, an hour before quitting time. This group of workers probably had given up any hope of being called to work, but the owner sends them into the fields as well. The owner does not agree to a price with these last 4 groups of men, agreeing only to pay them what is right and they trust him and willingly join the first group in the fields. So there you have the players in the story. Let me tell you what each one represents.
The landowner is God. The workers are those He calls, Christians. The field is the earth that God created and the work is the work of the Kingdom, those good works that God prepared in advance for us to do as Ephesians 2:10 teaches us. The wage in the parable, represented by a denarius, is our salvation, eternity with God, it’s heaven. So, there you have the basics of the parable up to this point. Now, it takes a twist. I want to move from the parable basics to the problem, the conflict that arises that Christ uses to make His point.
II. The Problem.
This is where the passage gets rough for many people. This is not a passage that I’ve heard preached on before because it deals with the wonderful and impossible to comprehend subject of grace, freely given forgiveness and love given to all who ask no matter what they’ve done or what they may deserve. We are born with a sense of what is and isn’t fair. Go on a long car trip with children in the backseat and what do you hear. “Mom, Ethan got two more fish crackers than I did.” Dad, Catie has two books and won’t give me one, it’s not fair!” They count everything that we give them to make sure that it’s even. If I give Ethan 4 dimes and Catherine 3 quarters, she loses it because he got more coins than her, never mind the fact that she has more money! We all want life to be fair. Most of us, by now, understand that life is not fair but that doesn’t change the fact that we think it should be. For many people, this carries over into their relationship with God and the concept of the same grace given freely to all is a tough one to take.
Do you know someone that gets paid more than you for the same work, or less work? That is a pretty lousy feeling, it just doesn’t seem fair. When I moved back to Syracuse after seminary didn’t work out, I had a tough time finding work. I had a dual undergrad degree in Psychology and pastoral ministries which qualified me to be a salesman. I sold generators for several months. I had no clue how the generators worked or what the difference was between models or what kilowatts or any other technical terms meant, but it was right before Y2K so none of that mattered, I sold a lot of generators. From there I moved into cell phones. Because I had sales experience, a new cell phone company hired me and gave me a decent hourly rate plus fairly good commissions and health benefits. I joined a group of 4 other salesmen and women who had been with the company for about a year. What I didn’t know was that the company had only hired temps up to that point. They were earning considerably less than I was with no benefits and no commission. They had to meet a monthly quota three months running to get hired full time and be an actual employee of the cell phone company. The problem was that our product was lousy and our stores were both in extremely low traffic areas. None of us ever came close to the quotas. They found out that my salary and everything were different and they were very upset, probably rightly so. I had been there less than them, sold the same or less than them and yet I was being compensated far above any of them. It made it tough to go to work because no one would talk to me. Each of them had a sense of what was right and fair and this certainly didn’t qualify. We see the same thing happening here.
Read 8-16
Now, this part of the parable translates into any culture. We can certainly understand why the workers who had been hired first would be upset. The temperature during the grape harvest would have been well over 100 degrees and they had slaves in the hot sun for 12 hours, a good honest day’s work. Here were these men that had worked a fraction of the time that they had and they were being paid the same! And the owner made sure that those hired first were paid last so that they could see exactly what the others had received. In Jewish culture, workers were paid on a daily basis so that they could buy food and provide for their families. It was a first come, first served system. If you were hired first, you were paid first, that’s the way it always worked. But not here, here the first were to be the last. The original workers must have gotten very excited to see that even those hired at the 11th hour received a denarius, surely they would be paid accordingly. It didn’t matter at that point what they had agreed on, they were thinking only in terms of fairness. But remember, a denarius was far above what they deserved or would have normally earned for their work, just like heaven is far above what we deserve. But they weren’t paid the same and that wage, which once looked so good, now seems like an insult and they complain to the owner. The owner replies simply that they received what they had agreed to and it was his prerogative to be generous and to dispense his wealth in any way that he saw fit. What they saw as unfairness, the owner describes as generosity, as grace.
So, the problem in this parable is that our sense of fairness, that all of us have, tells us that those who work harder and longer deserve more. We translate that into God’s kingdom and His work, just as Peter had which prompted the telling of this parable, and we have trouble wrapping our minds around the equality of the wage. We don’t necessarily mind that those who come later get to go to heaven, but we think that maybe we should be treated a little better or they should get a different, slightly lower heaven than we get. The problem is that it’s not fair, it’s grace and that makes little sense to us.
So, what can we take from this passage? There are certain principles that we need to draw from this story.
III. The Principles.
The first principle I want you to see is an easy one to miss.
a. God, Himself Calls the Workers.
This is an interesting part of the story and one that someone in that culture would have picked up on immediately. Here you have a very wealthy landowner who has a foreman at his disposal. One of the jobs of the foreman would have been to secure laborers. The parable, however, tells us that the owner went out into the marketplace himself, repeatedly, and personally called workers to the harvest. So what. What’s the big deal about that? Jesus has taken an opportunity to give us a glimpse of the loving God that we serve. Though He owns all and is above all, still He seeks us out. He meets us where we are and calls us into a relationship with Him and then equips us and sends us into the fields to serve. Without this fact about God, no one would be saved.
John 6:44 "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
He is actively drawing His creation towards the knowledge of Him. He pursues us! Did you get that? God is not indifferent, God is not distant and unknowable, He pursues us, drawing us into His presence and guaranteeing a wage and a reward to each who accept His call.
The second principle that we can pull from this parable is that:
b. The Call is the Same, the Timing is Different
The call that the landowner gave to each worker was the same, go into the fields and work towards the harvest. That call remains constant for each and every believer. What is different is the timing and when people respond. There are some who will never respond and therefore will miss out when the wages are given to the workers. There are others, like many in this room, who hear Gods call early in our lives and we accept it and enter the fields. We may not always be working, there are times when we allow distractions to pull us away from what needs to be done but we have accepted God’s offer and the terms and conditions and have been working for His kingdom for a large part of our lives. Others may hear the call for years and decide that they don’t want to work, only to change their hearts later and follow God. Then there are those who cry out to God in the final hour, in the 11th hour. They have lived life for themselves and put off God’s call to work until the very last minute and have a deathbed conversion. This parable tells us that their call is no different then any of ours, the only difference is the timing of the response. God can use the trials and the sins that are in the past of someone who has come to Him later in life for His glory. Have you ever wished you had a better testimony? I remember listening to a group from Teen Challenge talk about their drug addiction and the way that God freed them and the difference he made in their lives. They were amazing stories! I remember thinking, I wish I had stories like that. I wish I was a horrible sinner that God saved. The reality is that I am a horrible sinner that God has changed, I am no different from any of those men who shared. For whatever reason, by His grace and blessing, He spared me some of the hardships that others have faced and called me to service at a young age. But those who answer that same call later in life, at the 3rd hour or the sixth, ninth, or even 11th hour, can still have an incredible impact on the kingdom of God as He uses their past for His glory.
The Call is the same, but the timing of the response will be different for each of us.
The final principle that I want to pull out of this is that:
c. The Wage is Equal
Each worker received a full day’s wage. God welcomes each and every sinner who calls on His name into the same heaven to spend the same eternity with Him. The Bible says that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Whether they are 10, 40, or 100, God’s grace covers them. As Christians, we should rejoice in the privilege of service to the King and not worry about what those around us are doing. If a lost one is found late in life we should rejoice that they will share our inheritance and not worry that they never had to sacrifice as much or never had to work as hard, rejoice because a lost one has been found. Understand this: The wage is the same, and it’s more than any of us deserve! All who believe will inherit the kingdom of heaven, that gift has nothing to do with your worth or merit or what you have accomplished for God, it is only by God’s grace.
Now, our work for the Lord is certainly not in vain. We will be rewarded for the works we do on Earth.
1 Cor 3:12 If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. 14 If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15 If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.
If we build on God’s foundation and work towards the growth of the kingdom, scripture teaches in several places that we will receive our reward in heaven and Jesus said the same thing to Peter at the end of chapter 19. But heaven is our common wage and when we get there, our rewards will not be important to us, there will be no contests to see who got more, all will be laid at the feet of our Savior. There will be no contests to see who was more worthy of their wage, of God’s grace, because then, when we see the splendor and holiness of God, we will finally realize just how unworthy each one of us truly is.
So here’s the point.
IV. The Point.
The temptation with parables is to try to overanalyze every detail and find hidden meaning where none was intended and in doing so to miss the point that Christ was trying to make. This parable was to teach one thing to the disciples. They would be rewarded for their service with grace, but because God loves each of us, he would extend that same grace to all who called on His name, regardless of length of service, or kingdom accomplishments. Like the old hymn says, “The vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives!” The name of the hymn sums up the point of this parable, “To God be the Glory!” It’s not about fairness, it’s about grace. Unbelievable, irresistible, undeserved grace. The grace that called a tax collector to follow, the grace that touched the skin of a leper, the grace that ate with prostitutes and sinners, the grace that hung Jesus on the cross, that grace is the same grace that allows us to be called sons and daughters of God and it’s the same grace He offers to all. Praise God. So, if we get tempted to compare paychecks and look at the work that we’ve done and compare it with others we need to stop and ask ourselves one question, “Are we being paid what we’re worth?” The answer is a resounding “NO.” We have received grace above and beyond what we deserve and we need to trust that God is Sovereign and will dispense that grace as He sees fit. We work not for the reward but out of gratitude to God and to hear those words “well done” come from the father’s mouth. And whether someone has served God with their whole life or calls out to Him on their deathbed, we need to rejoice in the wage, equal to all, and thank God for His wonderful grace.
