The Bible Commentaries and Others: Laborers in the Vineyard

Laborers in the Vineyard

LABORERS IN THE VINEYARD In Matt. 20:1–16, Jesus tells a parable concerning a householder who hires five groups of laborers—at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hours—to work in his vineyard. When at the end of the day everyone receives the same wages of one denarius (KJV “a penny”), the first group accuse the proprietor of unfair treatment. Although they agreed to work for a denarius, they feel that by bearing the burden and heat of the day they have earned more than the latecomers. The householder maintains that he may freely dispose of his property and that what seems an injustice done them actually is a sign of his goodness toward the others. The parable ends with the words, “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen” (v. 16; cf. Matt. 19:30; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30). Most modern interpreters see the parable as a defense of Jesus’ welcome of sinners into the kingdom of God.

In the early Church, the text was understood allegorically. St. Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 4.36.7) interprets the various hours at which the workers are called as periods of history: morning: Adam—Noah; third hour: Noah—Abraham; sixth hour: Abraham—Moses; ninth hour: Moses—Jesus; eleventh hour: Jesus—world’s end. Origen, by contrast, took the hours to signify the stages of human life: childhood, youth, adulthood, old age, extreme old age (In Matthaeum). These renderings were repeated and sometimes combined by later exegetes (e.g., St. Jerome, In Matthaeum; St. Gregory, Hom.in Evangelia, 19; the Venerable Bede, In Matthaei Evangelium Expositio; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 58.8). The workers were often understood as representing the clergy, and the vineyard the Church (e.g., Gregory, Bede), while the denarius, paid equally to all, was generally thought to signify eternal life (Tertullian, De monogamia; St. Augustine, De sancta virginitate and Sermons on New Testament Lessons) or the contemplation and enjoyment of God (Aquinas). The “burden and heat of the day” (v. 12) in such readings was sometimes seen as the knowledge that divine retribution at the end of the world is still far away (Aquinas, In Matthaeum), or the heat of the flesh during the greater part of one’s life (Gregory).

Wyclif (In Omnes Novi Testamenti Libros, 36c–37a) still holds to Irenaeus’s reading, while Luther dismisses it as “idle talk.” For the latter, the first workers signify those who want to go to heaven proudly on account of their good works (the Jews and the clergy of Luther’s time), whereas those who are humble and do not look for pay may rejoice about God’s mercy (Fastenpostille, 1525 [WA 17.2]). Calvin concludes from the text that “men are created in order to do something” and that “according to the decree of God everybody is placed in his special province so that he sit not around idle” (Harmony of the Gospels).

For Latimer, the parable teaches “that all christian people are equal in all things appertaining to the kingdom of Christ” (Sermon 43). American Puritan Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, used the text to argue that the eat Awakening signaled God’s purpose to begin his renewal of the earth in America, the “utmost, meanest, youngest and weakest part of it” (Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion, 2.2).

Early English literature faithfully follows the dominant lines of patristic commentary. The laborers are identified as “prechoures” by Langland in Piers Plowman (B.15.491; cf. also 10.474). In the anonymous poem Pearl, the poet’s daughter, who died as an infant, appears to her father in a dream. When he wonders why she is made a queen in heaven, she retells the parable (501-76) and comments:

Wheþer welnygh now I con bygynne—

In euentyde into þ vyne I come—

Fyrst of my hyre my Lorde con mynne:

I watʒ ayed anon of al and sum.

The poem, for which this vineyard parable is a thematic crux, argues that blessedness in heaven is not quantified or calculated according to people’s meritorious actions, but that the “peny” of eternal life is given freely by God’s ace (cf. the ME play Wisdom [EETS o.s. 262], 127).

St. Thomas More’s Anthony in A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (2.5) warns those who procrastinate in turning to God: “Now he that in hope to be callid toward night, will slepe out the mornyng, & drinke out the day, ys full likely to pass at night vnspoken to / & than shall he with shrewid rest go souperlesse to bedd.” Shakespeare makes a more veiled reference to the parable by having Guiderius say in his dirge for the dead Cloten:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. (Cymbeline, 4.2.259-62)

In the 17th cent., the parable was often alluded to in discussions of predestination. Robert Burton quotes v. 16 in his Anatomy of Melancholy (3.4.2.6), where he warns against a fatalistic understanding of predestination and reminds the reader: “Thou mayest in the Lord’s good time be converted; some are called at the eleventh hour.” In Michael Wigglesworth’s apocalyptic poem The Day of Doom, God uses Matt. 20:15 to justify his unconditional election. The phrase “the chosen few” came to acquire proverbial status, evidenced by Lord Byron’s “Answer to Some Elegant Verses” (37), which applies it to those sensible lovers of his poetry who are “to feeling and to nature true” (for a similar reference cf. Wordsworth, “Written in a Blank Leaf of MacPherson’s ‘Ossian’“). In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (chap. 38), St. John Rivers, the stern missionary, is finally vindicated as one of those “who are called, and chosen, and faithful” (a description which also echoes Matt. 25:21).

While Christina Rossetti follows Origen’s exegesis in her poem “How long?” John Ruskin makes the “penny” a symbol of any wages and suggests it be convertible into bread, cloth, etc. (Fors Clavigera, 8.86.8; cf. also his use of vv. 13 and 14 as a motto for his essays on political economy, Unto This Last).

The traditional equation of laborers and clergy occurs in Mark Twain’s satire “Important Correspondence.” An avaricious and ambitious bishop, huny for money and fame, calls himself one of the “poor laborers in the vineyard” and refers to San Francisco as a “pleasant field for the honest to toil in.” Similar ironic (and often incidental) applications can be found in modern works such as Thornton Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination (chap. 7), where the obnoxious evangelist Dr. Bigelow has been “in the vineyard” for twenty-five years, does not belong to any church, but tries to help his “laboring brothers.” In Go Tell It on the Mountain James Baldwin applies the parable repeatedly to the situation in the “Temple of the Fire Baptized,” as when Gabriel and the elders are dining upstairs, and “the less-specialized workers in Christ’s vineyard” are being fed at a table downstairs.

Emily Dickinson (in poem 1720) draws a somewhat hedonistic conclusion from v. 16:

Had I known that the first was the last

I should have kept it longer.

Had I known that the last was the first

I should have drunk it stronger.

Edwin A. Robinson uses “Many Are Called” as a title for a poem on the inscrutability and the arbitrary ways of the “Lord Apollo.” The last oup of laborers becomes the Unemployed in T. S. Eliot’s choruses from The Rock. In having them complain: “In this land / No man has hired us,” Eliot expresses the plight of the jobless of Britain. At the same time he seems to give an answer in the chant of the workmen building a church: “Each man to his work.”