The Workers in the Vineyard: A Fair Wage? (13 of 26)

The complaint at the end sounds reasonable, which is why the parable works.

Twelve hours of labour and one hour of labour receive the same pay. Anyone who has run a payroll feels the objection. Bailey’s treatment turns on a question nobody usually asks about the story: why does the owner keep going to the market himself?

What Was Day Labour Actually Like?

A market, a crowd of unemployed men, and a shrinking chance as the day went on.

A denarius was the known living wage for a day. The men in the market had no work, no savings, and families expecting them to bring something home.

Bailey notices a detail in how they wait. When the owner returns mid-morning he finds men standing rather than sitting. Standing is the posture of someone still hopeful, positioned like a runner waiting for a start, ready to step into the street the moment an employer appears.

By late afternoon the ones still there face going home in the dark to an anxious wife and hungry children with nothing. Their answer when asked why they are still standing is not an excuse. Nobody has hired us. Meaning they are willing, able, and refusing to give up.

Why Does the Owner Go Himself?

That is the question the parable is built around and it is answered at the end by the owner.

He could have sent his manager. He has one. Instead he makes the trip repeatedly, through the hottest part of the day, when everyone else is resting.

The grumbling workers complain that they bore the burden and the scorching heat. Bailey’s reading of the reply is that the owner was in the heat too, on the road, going back for men nobody else wanted.

That reframes the whole dispute. The first workers think the argument is about wages. The owner tells them it is about what each of them chose to spend the day doing.

Why Does He Not Simply Give Them Money?

Because that would have finished what the market started.

He could have handed each man a denarius and told him to go feed his family. It would have solved the same practical problem and cost him the same amount.

He does not, and Bailey reads the refusal as the most humane thing in the story. Putting them on relief would have completed their humiliation. What they wanted was not a coin, it was work, and he gives them the one thing that preserves what the day had been stripping away.

Notice that the last group is hired without any wage being named. There is no promise at all, and they go anyway. They had watched him come back to that market all day and had worked out what he was doing.

Is the Owner Being Unjust?

Not on the terms he agreed, and the parable is careful about it.

The first group negotiated a denarius and received a denarius. Nobody is underpaid. The later groups were told he would pay what was right, and they trusted him.

The complaint is not that someone was cheated. It is that someone else was treated generously, which is a different grievance and a much less respectable one.

Bailey’s summary is that justice here is more than the equal application of a rule. It includes the dignity of people in need and a real concern for whether they can survive.

What Is the Owner’s Actual Answer?

That the grumblers are trying to control his generosity.

Stripped down, his reply is that he has kept his agreement, that the money is his, and that their objection is to his goodness rather than to any wrong done them.

Bailey pushes the reading further into what the exchange implies. The workers wanted to end the day richer. The owner chose to end it poorer. They are angry at a decision that cost them nothing and cost him a great deal.

Then the dismissal. Take what is yours and go.

Why Does the Parable of the Workers End Without an Answer?

Because it does not finish, and Bailey treats the missing ending as deliberate.

We are never told what the grumbling workers do. They are told to leave and the story stops on that note, with no report of whether they accepted it, argued further, or understood.

That gap is where the listener is put. The parable reaches a decision point and hands it over, which is why it closes with the line about the first being last.

Anyone reading it who has felt the objection has already answered the question the parable is asking.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the Pharisee and the tax collector, which handles the same instinct from the other direction.

Footnotes2

1. The owner making the journey himself, repeatedly, in the heat, when a manager was available, is the detail that carries the parable and it is almost never mentioned. Once it is in view the closing exchange stops being an argument about payroll and becomes an argument about how two parties spent the same day.
2. That the last group accepts work with no wage named is easy to read past. They have no agreement and no guarantee. What they have is a day's worth of watching a man come back for people nobody else would take, and they judged from that.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 28. Supports the reading of the standing posture as hope, the account of what the last workers faced, the owner's refusal to give relief instead of work, the significance of his going to the market himself rather than sending a manager, the definition of justice as including dignity, and the treatment of the missing ending as deliberate. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 20:1-16 and Luke 12:13-21.

Where the sourcing stops: the reconstruction of what the grumbling workers would have understood by the owner's reply is Bailey's expansion of a terse exchange, and it is presented here as his reading rather than as the text's own wording.