That All May Eat--September 22, 2026

That All May Eat--September 22, 2026

[Jesus said to the disciples:] “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard....’"  (Matthew 20:1-7)

Like most of Jesus' stories, this parable, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, is meant to be a glimpse of how God runs things.  It is a sketch of how the particular God we know in Jesus operates: what values are most important to God, which policies are priorities for God's agenda, and what means God uses to accomplish those things. We sometimes sing a song in worship that draws inspiration from the parables of Jesus, and each verse begins with a recurring question: "What is the world like where God's will is done?"  Something like that is what Jesus intends with his frequent opening line to his parables, "The kingdom of heaven is like..."  This is another snapshot meant to give us an impression of God's character, and of how the world operates when it is in line with that character.

So... what is God's Reign like, according to the story?  Well, we'll take a look at the opening of the story today, and then follow up with the table-turning plot-twist at the end tomorrow.  But for starters, Jesus asks us to imagine a scene familiar to the people in Jesus' audience (and Matthew's audience, too): a landowner looking to hire day-laborers to do farm work.  Like the migrant workers today who still depend on finding work in a farmer's field to be able to provide for their families, these people are living day to day, working today for the pay that will buy tomorrow's food.  They understand all too well what Jesus means when he teaches us to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," because they too have to go out with each new sunrise to find a way to bring home something to feed their families.  These are the people Jesus has already announced are among the "blessed" in Luke's version of the Beatitudes ["Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled," he says]. And these are the ones he will identify himself with by the end of the Gospel, ["I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat... when you did it for one of the least of these, you did it to me"].  Jesus says that the Reign of God has to do the likes of these people, not just the well-heeled folks with financial security and plentiful savings.  God's kingdom has to do with those who struggle to make ends meet, and those who provide for them, not just the prosperous and the comfortable.

In Jesus' story, the landowner goes to hire people to work for the day in the vineyard, and he promises them a fair deal.  A denarius was a coin that was a standard day's pay for a subsistence worker--think of it as a promise to give minimum wage for their day's work.  It's not a fortune, but it would be enough to feed their families at the end of the day.  And that was the goal: make enough at work that you could feed your family tomorrow, and then tomorrow you go out and do it all over again hoping to get hired for the day in order to earn the next day's bread.  If you are a day-laborer, of course, just getting hired is at least something of a relief: it means that you will bring some money home at the end of the day, which means there will be food on the table tomorrow.  Don't get hired, and when the sun comes up tomorrow, someone in your family will go hungry.  So even this crew that is hired at the very start of the workday might feel lucky to know that they will not have to go back home at day's end hanging their heads in shame and sorrow that there will not be enough to go around.

So far this story has just been a day-in-the-life of a farm at harvest time, with a landowner hiring workers for the day.  But this landowner does something strange: he keeps going out over the course of the day looking for more and more workers, but Jesus doesn't give us any indication that the farmer himself has a particularly pressing reason for needing them.  He doesn't say, "The landowner needed to get the grapes harvested by the end of the day, so he really needed extra help," or "There was a clear deadline that justified these extra shifts of workers."  Jesus, of course, lives in the mild and Mediterranean climate of Galilee and Judea, where it rarely gets below freezing, so the grapes are not going to be ruined by an unexpected cold snap--at least Jesus gives us no reason to think so.  

But if the landowner doesn't need to get these extra workers because of his own interests or some urgent viticultural necessity, then why does he go out repeatedly to the marketplace looking for additional workers--and why does he keep sending them out into his vineyard?  Why not find the guys who hadn't been hired and say, "Hey, the early bird gets the worm. Sorry about your luck not getting hired today, but if you're here first thing in the morning I might hire you tomorrow for tomorrow's harvest work"? Why keep adding more and more workers in the labor force, especially when it is becoming painfully clear how little time is left in the work day?

I have a hunch that this is the beginning of Jesus showing his hand.  Even before the great and glorious plot twist that is in store that will put the last first and the first last, Jesus' landowner is starting to act... curiously.  It's almost like he's not primarily (or at least exclusively) interested in maximizing his profits, and more like he cares about what those guys standing around unhired will do to feed their families if nobody else comes along and hires them.  It's almost like he is deliberately going out to the marketplace... and maybe the parking lot of the local Big Box hardware store, too... looking for workers who need to get hired in order to pay for the food their children will need to eat tomorrow.  It's almost like this landowner is going out, not because the grapes so urgently need to be picked right now, but because he wants to make sure everybody in town gets to feed their families when the day is over.  He is already modeling a different kind of economy: one that is centered on everybody having enough, rather than just on his own narrow self-interest.  And it really will point your head in a different direction if you are not just concerned to make a bigger profit, but rather are concerned that all may eat.

And here already I think we are beginning to get a sense of how God's ordering of things is different from what passes for "conventional wisdom" in our economy.  Jesus describes this landowner (who, according to Jesus, is somehow what "the kingdom of heaven is like") as someone who sees the world from a different perspective compared to just about everybody else.  The conventional wisdom would say the landowner should only care about what will make him the biggest profits, and presumably what will cost him the least in business expenses.  The conventional wisdom would say you hire the minimum number of employees it would take to get the job done, because extra paychecks mean less cash in your bank accounts.  The conventional wisdom says that it's the people standing around the marketplace who are to blame for not having gotten hired earlier, or not being more appealing as potential employees, or just not being "the right kind of people" to get the job.  But the landowner instead appears to be asking ahead of time, "What will happen to the children of the ones standing in the marketplace if they remain unhired?"  He seems to asking himself, "Who will go hungry if these workers do not make a living wage at the end of the day?"  And he already seems to be thinking that he is in a position to do something about their predicament ahead of time by hiring people, even with a mere hour left in the workday.  Jesus seems to be telling us that from the perspective of God's Reign, we are no longer satisfied merely to ask, "What is most profitable for me?" but instead to ask, "What can I do so that everybody gets to eat?"  Like Dr. King famously suggested of the parable we call the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite pass the man lying in the road because they ask, "What might happen to me if I stop to help him?" while the foreigner comes to his aid because he has been asking himself, "What might happen to this man if I do not stop to help him?"  That is a decidedly different perspective--and that is precisely the point.

To see the world through the lens of what matters to God will change how we view every part of our lives, every interaction, and every choice we make.  To focus on "the kingdom of heaven" is not to become obsessed with pearly gates, streets of gold, or angel harps, but rather to see the whole world from the perspective of the God who gives daily bread to all.  It means we will see other people and not merely ask, "What can I get out of this person?" but also, "What can I give to this person?"  It means we will see all of our choices, actions, and priorities through the eyes of love, rather than greed... or efficiency... or a "Me and My Group First" mindset.

How might our vision be changed today by taking even just the first half of this parable seriously?  Where have we been reducing the world down to "What's in it for me?" calculations when God has been inviting us into an expansive, "How can we be mindful of the good of all?"  What choices would we make differently if our driving concern was not simply getting or keeping more money for ourselves, but making sure that everybody around gets to eat?  Already you can begin to see how subversive Jesus' stories really are--they intend to turn our old priorities upside down, and to take these inward-bent hardened hearts of ours and pull them right-side-out.

May we be people who see the world through such eyes today.  May we see every face, every choice, and every action through the lens of God's own goodness.

Lord God, teach us to see the world as you do, and to act in the world in light of your generosity.