The Leaflet Distributors is based on Matthew 20: 1-16
The Original Setting
Nowadays, there are very few situations where someone would wait all day in a public place to be hired. Employers find employees by job ads, by advertising with an agency, by putting it their vacancy on an app.
The parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is a ‘kingdom of heaven’ parable. Not only is it introduced as one, ‘Come and work for me in my vineyard’ is quite blatantly building on the Old Testament’s frequent use of ‘vineyard’ as a metaphor for ‘Israel’. That metaphor is partly why I decided to change the job to ‘leafleting’; it’s quite common in mission work to go out leafleting. The other reason is that there are relatively few commercial vineyards in the UK; most of them are located in the South East of the country, where the climate is marginally suitable for grapes.
Things That Stay the Same
Leafleting is often casual labour, paid by the hour or by the number of leaflets delivered. Leafleting jobs could easily be advertised on the day through a jobs app. In addition, leafleting jobs often go on through the early evening – so it would be perfectly reasonable for job hunters to keep asking for work through the day.
Furthermore, leafleting can be hard work, especially on a hot day, with lots of walking in the hot sun. It’s sometimes still paid cash-in-hand, so it wouldn’t be impossible for all the distributors to see everyone else getting their wages. As well, the earliest distributors might well be happy to agree a daily rate.
The Landowner
In Jesus’ day, someone who owned a vineyard was well-off. Grapes and wine were both luxury crops; only a prosperous farmer could afford to take land away from subsistence crops like grain. However, our landowner is not extravagantly wealthy; he needs to go himself to hire the day labourers, rather than leaving it to a steward. He’s an employer who lives on the profits from his business, not an extremely wealthy man who owns large estates.
The Labourers
The labourers are some of the poorest people in Jesus’ society. They’re day labourers, without a regular job and with no equivalent of the ‘safety net’ that wealthy societies provide. They’re not slaves, they are free – but their freedom includes the freedom to starve. If modern workers live from wage packet to wage packet, these day workers are living from daily pay to daily pay. When the landowner/employer pays them as soon as the work stops, he’s living by good Old Testament practice. These labourers need that money.
That’s why there are still people waiting in the marketplace at the very last hour of daylight. Any work, at any wages, would help them survive.
The Wages
In Jesus’ day, as in ours, it was expected that people would be paid according to the hours worked. The wage offered to the first workers was a standard daily wage – a single man could probably survive on 200 denarii a year. I’ve probably increased that daily wage a bit – at the moment, £75 would be the equivalent. But these workers would have worked for ten hours (or more!), so £100 would be a fair wage to agree for ten hours of hard work. £10 an hour (which is what the first labourers got) is slightly above minimum wage. On the other hand, £100 an hour (which is what the last labourers got) is an incredible wage for leafleting.
The Kingdom of Heaven
I have a distinct tendency to use ‘God’s Nation’ instead of ‘Kingdom of Heaven’. It’s mainly because our modern interpretation of ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ tends to concentrate on the ‘Heaven’ part, and largely ignores the ‘Kingdom’. When we do that, we often begin to interpret sayings and parables as if Jesus is telling us what it’s like in ‘Heaven’, or ‘how to get to Heaven’. But, very often, Jesus is telling us what things would be like if God ruled.
In this case, things would be weird- not just to our modern ears, but to the ears of the people hearing the original parable. Everyone is paid the same, whether they started work at 6 am or at 4 pm. One common ‘heaven’ interpretation is that this parable represents God’s grace – all of us sinners are forgiven alike and we get to Heaven whether we repented early or late – but the whole point about grace is that it comes to us when we don’t deserve it. This parable isn’t about undeserving people; it’s about labourers who either worked all day or who were willing to.
The Final Verse
This was partly why I left out the final verse in my modernised version of the parable. It directs us to the order the workers were paid, to the order in which they turned up to work. We consider the denarius each worker was paid as the symbol of ‘everyone gets the same’.
But a denarius was also roughly what each labourer needs to earn to be able to survive. One of the things Jesus told us was to pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ The final labourers were willing to work, desperate enough to get work that they stayed in the market – but by the point of 4 pm, they must have realised they weren’t likely to earn their daily bread.
Until the landowner came along, gave them an hour’s work they were happy to get – and generously paid them a ‘daily bread’ wage.
The Kingdom of Heaven is like this – just, because the first labourers were paid the agreed wage. Generous, because the later workers were paid what they needed to live, even though they hadn’t worked long enough to ‘deserve’ it. In God’s Kingdom, everyone willing to work for the Kingdom gets what they need to live. God’s Kingdom is not ‘fair’. But it is just, and it is generous – even if that seems to us like a topsy-turvy world where the first are last and the last first.
Previous parable: The Persistent Widow (Luke 18: 2-8)
Next parable: Churchwarden and Salesman (Luke 18: 10-14)
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