Introduction
We have four weeks of parables ahead of us: the laborers in the vineyard, the two sons, the wicked tenants, and the wedding banquet. But the lectionary is doing some jumping around. This week, Jesus is still on the way to Jerusalem. Next week, Palm Sunday will already have happened, Jesus will have overturned tables in the temple, and religious leaders will be demanding to know who gave him the authority to do any of this. Quite a bit will have happened between Sundays.
If we do not fill in those gaps, we can easily find ourselves preaching an argument Jesus is not actually having. This week, for instance, we might spend the whole sermon debating whether it is fair to pay someone for twelve hours of work when they only worked one. It is an understandable place to go. But Jesus did not tell this story because someone asked him to settle a payroll dispute. He told it after Peter asked what the disciples would receive for leaving everything to follow him.
That changes where we begin. Before we start deciding which workers deserve what, we need to hear the disciple who wants to know whether his sacrifice counts. We also need to hear Jesus promise that it does—and then tell a story that complicates what Peter might expect that promise to mean.
We have entered a new section of Matthew, and the lectionary has skipped chapter 19 to get us here. Let’s back up a little.
Narrative Context
For the past two weeks, we have been in Matthew 18, hearing Jesus teach about conflict, reconciliation, and forgiveness. These are questions about how a community stays together: Who is being pushed away? How do we address harm? What does it mean to regain a sibling? How often do we have to do this?
At the beginning of chapter 19, Jesus leaves Galilee and enters Judea. The teaching about life together has not been left behind, but the setting is changing. Jesus is moving toward Jerusalem and the cross. The disciples will have to carry this ministry forward, and their conversations with Jesus keep revealing how much they still need to work through.
First comes a dispute about divorce from Pharisees to test him, followed by the disciples’ uneasy response to Jesus’ teaching about marriage. Jesus then speaks about eunuchs, bringing into the conversation people whose lives do not fit the expected patterns of marriage and family. Next, people bring children to Jesus, and the disciples try to stop them. Jesus tells them to let the children come. The kingdom belongs to such as these.
The disciples are still learning whom to welcome. Apparently, that lesson does not stick after one conversation.
Then a rich young man asks Jesus what good deed he must do to have eternal life. He has kept the commandments. But when Jesus tells him to sell his possessions, give to the poor, and follow, he goes away grieving. Following Jesus sounds good until it means letting go of what has made his life secure.
Jesus speaks about the difficulty of the rich entering the kingdom, and the disciples are astounded. If even this man cannot manage it, who can be saved? Jesus directs them toward what God can do, rather than what human beings can accomplish.
That is when Peter speaks up: “Look, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” (19:27, NRSVUE).
You have to appreciate Peter asking the question. The disciples have done what the rich man could not. They really have left their livelihoods, their families, and their familiar lives. This has cost them something. Peter wants to know what comes of it.
We do not need to make him sound greedy to hear the danger in the question. Peter can be genuinely faithful, genuinely tired, and genuinely hopeful that his sacrifice means something. Those things can also sit right alongside the expectation that he has earned a special place. Most of us do not have to work very hard to understand that combination.
And Jesus does not brush him off. He promises the twelve a place in the renewal of all things, sitting on twelve thrones and judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Those who have left homes, family, or fields for his name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life. This is a substantial promise, rooted in the hope of Israel’s restoration. Jesus is not telling Peter that his faithfulness does not matter.
But before Peter gets too comfortable picturing his throne, Jesus adds: “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (19:30).
Then comes our parable. Matthew 20 begins with “For.” Jesus is still answering Peter.
A landowner hires workers early in the morning and agrees to pay them a denarius. He returns to the marketplace at nine, noon, three, and finally five o’clock, bringing more workers into the vineyard throughout the day. When he asks the last group why they have been standing there all day, they answer, “Because no one has hired us.”
That is all we are told. They do not say they overslept. They do not say they were unwilling to work. Whatever else we might imagine about them, Jesus gives us people who are still waiting because no one has hired them.
At the end of the day, the landowner pays the last workers first. They receive a denarius. The first workers see this, do a little quick math, and expect more. Of course they do. If one hour gets you that much, surely a whole day gets you something better.
But they receive the same amount. They grumble that the others worked only an hour, while they endured the whole day and its scorching heat. Then comes the line that, for me, opens up the parable: “You have made them equal to us” (20:12).
There it is. These first have received the agreed-upon wage. But now that they have seen what someone else received, the agreement no longer feels sufficient. Their longer labor has not secured the difference they expected.
Keep Peter within earshot as we hear that complaint. He has left everything. Jesus has promised him much. But what happens when people who have not traveled the same road receive the same welcome? Will Peter be able to rejoice in that? Or will he find himself saying, “You have made them equal to us”?
The parable ends where Jesus began: the last will be first, and the first will be last. It is a promise to those who have been left waiting, but it is also a word to the disciples about what they are following Jesus into.
Insight: “You Have Made Them Equal to Us”
What if we begin with everyone going home with what they need? Before we start calculating hours and comparing contributions, imagine the outcome: everyone who worked in the vineyard receives a day’s wage. Even those who spent most of the day waiting for someone to hire them have something to bring home.
That ought to be good news. And for the workers hired last, it surely is. But the first workers look at the same outcome and see something wrong.
“You have made them equal to us.”
The amount matters here. A denarius is a day’s wage, not an extravagant prize. We do not need to know precisely how much it could purchase to recognize what is at stake for someone dependent on daily labor. Receiving only a small fraction of that wage could mean going home unable to meet the household’s needs. Working for one hour does not mean your children are only one-twelfth as hungry.
This is where I think the parable should get under our skin. We can agree, in principle, that everyone should have enough. Food on the table. Water to drink. A place to live. But then someone receives those things without doing everything we had to do, and suddenly we want to talk about fairness.
I worked for what I have. I made sacrifices. Nobody handed it to me. Why should they get it so easily?
Those feelings can come from real hardship. The first workers really did bear the heat of the day. But what are we willing to let happen to our neighbors in order to have that hardship acknowledged? Would their going home with less make our day feel more worthwhile? Would an empty table in their house help us feel better about the food on ours?
The workers ask for more; they do not explicitly ask the landowner to send anyone home hungry. But when we carry their complaint into our own understanding of fairness, we need to reckon with where it can lead. If we insist that people should receive only what we believe they have earned, even when that leaves them without enough to live, then we have decided that preserving a distinction between us matters more than meeting their need.
Put plainly, we are willing to let someone else go without so that we can feel special. We would probably never describe it that way. We would call it responsibility, deservingness, or fairness. But the person going without food, water, or housing still goes without, however reasonable we make it sound.
That is why I hesitate to call this “unfair grace.” It can leave our understanding of fairness comfortably intact, with God making a generous exception. Perhaps Jesus is pressing harder than that. What is so fair about a world in which people willing to work are left waiting all day, then sent home without enough? Why does everyone receiving a day’s wage trouble us more than that possibility?
The landowner keeps his promise to the first workers. His generosity toward the last costs the first workers none of their agreed-upon pay. What they lose is the difference they expected to see between themselves and the others. And that difference matters enough to them that a day when everyone receives provision becomes a day of grievance.
Peter needs to hear this as someone who will carry Jesus’ ministry forward. His sacrifices matter. Jesus has already promised him that. But what will Peter do with the authority entrusted to him? Will he help others receive the goodness of God, or will he guard the distinctions that make his own place feel special?
The same question comes to the church. We proclaim a God who gives life, feeds the hungry, and welcomes those who have been left out. Yet when that generosity takes material form, we can find ourselves asking whether people have done enough to deserve it.
Jesus gives us a picture of everyone receiving, and asks us to face our objection. God’s care for our neighbor does not make us less beloved. Their having enough does not empty our lives of meaning. Our sacrifices can matter without someone else’s deprivation serving as the proof.
Everyone goes home with a day’s wage. The question is why we would need anyone to go home with less.
Matthew’s Community: “After Everything We Have Been Through?”
Perhaps this is where the parable speaks into Matthew’s own community. Throughout this year, I have been reading Matthew as someone trying to hold together people deeply rooted in Israel’s tradition and people being welcomed into that story. We cannot know precisely how his congregation heard this parable, but I wonder whether some would have recognized more than a day’s labor in the complaint about bearing the burden and the heat.
Israel had carried this story for generations. Slavery in Egypt. The long wilderness journey. The destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by Babylon. Deportation and exile. The work of rebuilding a life together while holding onto promises that could sometimes seem painfully far from fulfillment.
For those who inherited this history, these were not simply things that happened to other people a long time ago. These were their people, their prayers, their grief, and their hope. They had learned who they were by remembering what God had brought them through.
And now others were being welcomed into the kingdom who did not share that ancestral history. They had not carried Israel’s particular burden. Yet here they were, receiving the promises of Israel’s God.
We might imagine the question: After everything our people have been through, they get to come in now and receive this too?
“You have made them equal to us.”
This is a possible resonance within the community, rather than a claim that the first workers simply represent all Jewish people. But it helps us hear how much could be at stake. The fear might be that equal welcome makes a long history of faithfulness and suffering count for less. Does anyone remember what it took to get here?
Matthew certainly remembers. He makes the Babylonian exile a turning point in Jesus’ genealogy. He tells Jesus’ story through Egypt, water, and wilderness. Jesus’ life is bound up with the life of Israel. Gentile inclusion does not require Israel’s history to disappear.
But remembering that history also raises a question: What has God taught us through it? What does having been delivered from suffering teach us to desire for someone else?
Israel’s own Scriptures already make that connection. In Deuteronomy 24, the memory of slavery and redemption grounds commands to protect the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. That same chapter requires prompt payment for poor laborers, including foreigners, because their livelihood depends on it. It also commands that something be left in the fields and vineyards for those who need food. Remembering Egypt is meant to shape how people treat the vulnerable now. (Deuteronomy 24:14–22, NRSVUE)
That gives Matthew a way to speak from within the tradition his community cherishes. The memory of suffering can become a reason to recognize another person’s need. We know what it is to be vulnerable. We know what it is to depend upon God’s provision. We know why someone should not be sent home empty-handed.
There is a painful alternative, though. We can remember what we endured and conclude that others ought to endure it too. We can begin treating suffering as the price of admission, as though someone receiving mercy without traveling our road somehow cheapens what happened to us.
Perhaps Matthew is asking his community whether they can welcome people who have not suffered as their ancestors suffered, without hearing that welcome as a dismissal of their history. God has not forgotten Egypt, the wilderness, or Babylon. The promise has not been withdrawn from those who carried it.
But must others first know the same deprivation before they can share in the deliverance? Must they endure hunger before they can be glad that all are fed?
Preaching Possibility
Some Guiding Questions
There is already more here than one sermon can hold, and preaching possibilities run throughout the commentary. Depending on the avenue taken, a few questions might help guide the sermon.
We might explore how quickly we assume we are the workers who arrived first. We know what our own lives have cost us, but considerably less about the person beside us. Whose relief have we been too busy judging to recognize as good news?
Or we might linger with the feeling, I had to go through it. Why shouldn’t they? That same memory could lead us to say, I know how hard that was. I don’t want you to endure it too. How might Christ turn what we have suffered into a reason to help someone else, rather than a requirement that they suffer too?
We might also stay with the material stakes of the parable: people going home with the means to live. What are we willing to let our neighbors go without in order to preserve our sense of fairness?
And alongside that conviction is a promise worth preaching: God’s generosity reaches us, too. We do not have to establish someone else’s lesser worth to secure our own. What becomes possible when we no longer need someone else to receive less in order to believe that we matter?
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Micah Krey 
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