Equal Pay?

Don: The parable of the vineyard workers reflects poor labor policy and a bad business model. It is utterly contrary to the principle of cause and effect and the concept of fairness, which is so important to us in Western civilization.

It is certain that the parable is linked to the question posed by the Rich Young Ruler: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” because it is bounded by the statement that the last shall be first and the first shall be last (Matthew 19:30, at the end of the story of the Rich Young Ruler; and Matthew 20:16).

Jesus linked the story to the kingdom of heaven. The cast of characters includes a landowner, a foreman, and early, middling late, and very late workers. The early workers have a labor agreement establishing the pay for a day’s labor. The Greek word used in this passage to mean “agreement” has the same root as the word for “profitable” or “better” or “expedient”. So it seems the agreement was a profitable one for the workers.

It seems likely that the early workers would have been the cream of the crop—the strongest, most eager to work, most likely to be successful in their work. It is thus puzzling that the landowner would need to return to the marketplace to hire more workers, but he did—several times through the day. Did he underestimate his manpower need? Did the earlier laborers fail to live up to his expectations? It appears that the working conditions were not easy. They had to work through the heat of a scorching day and carry heavy burdens. Perhaps that’s why he needed more workers. But it doesn’t fully explain why he needed to keep going back, at the sixth, ninth, and eleventh hours to hire yet more workers.

The landowner’s interaction is different with the early workers than with the late workers. The former have their agreement; the latter get a covenant: The landlord agrees to give them what is “right”, “righteous,” or “just”: “dikaion” [δίκαιον] in Greek. Thus, in keeping with Psalm 89:14, the passage tells us that the righteousness and justness of God are his grace, mercy, and lovingkindness.

The justness of God is emphasized in his firm, bounded, cause-and-effect contract with the early workers. His mercy, grace, and unmerited favor—all effects without a cause—are emphasized in his covenant with the late workers.

The concept of fairness is so deeply rooted within us that we tend to balk at asking for special favors or privileges. Instead, we ask only for a level playing field in the belief that a life lived in fairness will give us a chance to succeed. We often attribute our failures to some unfair disadvantage or other. We can be sure that by the eleventh hour, the workers left available to the landowner would have been a sorry bunch: Weak, small, of ill repute. The bottom of the barrel; those whom no other landowner would hire.

When the landowner asked them: “Why have you been standing around idle [the Greek for idle shares its root with “barrenness”] all day?” they replied not that there was no work but that nobody would hire them. It strongly implied that they had some impediment, that they were unfit for work. And yet, this landowner hired them anyway.

At the end of the day’s work, the landowner was deliberate in seeing to it that the early workers would see that the late workers received the same wages as them. He could easily have paid them all in such a way that they would not have known what each was paid. The landowner’s response to the inevitable grumbling by the early workers—“Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?”—takes us all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Another way to read this passage would be: “Is your eye evil because I am good?” The word “generous” is the same word for “good” that the Rich Young Ruler used when he first addressed Jesus: “Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responded: “No-one is good except God.” The concept that God’s goodness is being questioned by Man is reiterated here. Faced with the opportunity to discriminate between good and evil, Man falls short. For the early workers, equal pay for unequal effort was evil, unfair, unjust, wrong. But for God, dispensing grace was righteous and just, and was both his prerogative and in keeping with his character. It is a further reminder that God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts.

What is the role of work in this story? It is interestingly juxtaposed with grace. God (the landowner) did not just drive up in a Cadillac and shower money on the latecomers. He still sent them to work, so even though the amount of work they did would have been inconsequential, it was important nevertheless. Who benefits from the work? It wasn’t simply a free giveaway. What is the significance of the equality of pay? Is God unfair?

Jay: As a school principal, I can attest that the fairness question arises a lot in class. It is particularly salient in special ed, but crops up all the time with struggling students in general. We encourage teachers to go above and beyond what might be considered “normal” efforts, in order to give students their very best shot at success. An obstacle often arises when a teacher says: “I can’t do this for that student because it would not be fair to another student.” Every spec ed student has a personalized, custom-tailored program of “accommodations and modifications” that teachers must undertake. For instance, one student might have the number of choices reduced from 4 to 3 in a multiple-choice-answer test. Sometimes a teacher will do it grudgingly because it treats students unequally and therefore seems unfair. But equality is not the same as fairness. In order to achieve equality, fairness has to be sacrificed.

This parable is saying that in the kingdom of heaven, or at the point of entry to it, all people will be equal but how they get to that point will be extraordinarily different in a way that some would view as unfair. A person who has labored all life long for the Lord will not be happy to receive the same reward as the thief on the cross, who came to Jesus only in his dying minutes. The lives of these two individuals are radically different, yet their reward is equal. The parable teaches us that equality and fairness are not the same thing, and to treat people equally is God’s prerogative.

Chris: In the background are the workers’ commitment, and their efforts. The early, able-bodies workers would have had little difficulty doing the work. The late workers probably had all sorts of problems that would make the work extremely difficult for them. On balance, both early and late workers probably expended about the same amount of effort.

Ghada: It’s interesting that God (the landowner) keeps coming back to look for the willing. It’s the individual’s willingness to work that seems to matter to the landowner.

Charles: It seems to me important to keep in several principles in mind: First, that the intent of God is that all should be saved—and “all” is a big, inclusive word; second, that whenever scripture references the Kingdom of Heaven it is reference to the end times. The Kingdom of Heaven (“thy kingdom come”) will extend on to eternity future, but it begins at the conclusion of the story of Salvation.   Finally, that the entire story (from eternity past to eternity future) is the story of the creature’s (man’s) wickedness apart from God and God’s infinite redemptive love.  The story of Jesus Christ.

Another frame of reference to interpret this particular parable could be that Jesus intended to emphasize just how unimportant “works” are in God’s eyes.  That God’s grace is not transactional.  From man’s willful separation in the Garden—the fall being analogous to willful disobedience and the loss of faith—the entire story of Salvation history is about reconciliation with God—restoration of perfect faith. The parable shows that reconciliation with God in the Kingdom of Heaven is not transactional.  God’s redemptive love cannot be purchased through works.  Rather, salvation and eternal life is a gift that we receive through faith in Jesus.  God’s will is that all can be saved by faith in Jesus Christ; the hope of salvation lies in the fact that it is not something that depends upon our good works.  Rather, good works are the result of faith.

The parable might also be analyzed temporally as pertaining to historical periods in the story of Salvation: The early workers representing the chosen people of the first covenant—the Jews; the middle workers representing the time of the Christian church; and the late workers representing those converted at the end times, the Great Tribulation, and final judgment.

Ultimately, Salvation is God’s prerogative, and all he asks of us is faith, not works.  Without God, man is not capable of good works because goodness comes from God.  In that sense, good works can be seen as the result of faith.   In my experience, those with the most faith tend also to be the ones who are the most self-less in service of their fellow man.

Jay: Salvation becomes not a matter of measuring up—not a matter of some metric—but something else. But as people we want to measure our progress, and works appear to be a metric by which to measure progress toward salvation. Works are accountable, tangible, visible, measurable. Faith, in contrast, lacks measurable substance. In terms of works, the parable makes no sense because the work is measurable yet the reward does not relate to it. But it makes sense in terms of faith.

David: As in all his teaching, it seems to me that in this parable Jesus was not talking about earthly life but about spiritual life; about life in the kingdom of heaven, not life on earth. The parable makes no sense and is irrelevant in terms of life on earth, and in my mind raises the question of the relevance of the Bible as a whole as a guide to life on earth versus a guide to spiritual life.

In earthly terms, the landowner’s business and labor practice is a recipe for disaster. His farm will be out of business in a year or two, as competing farmers adopt more prudent business models. And what happens to the workers then, when the only “good” farm is no more?

Yes, the human view of fairness is different from God’s, but on earth the human view of fairness—Man’s will, if you like—must prevail or else there will be a global catastrophe. The Lord’s Prayer prays that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, but if that were to happen, would it not be an earthly mess? If the world were run the way the landowner in the parable ran his farm, it would not survive. Market economics and social unrest would destroy it. Obviously, this does not apply to heaven, where terrestrial constraints on resources do not apply; where there is an eternal spring of resources to meet every need. If God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, the earth will be destroyed.

Charles: In this case, Jesus’ contemporary audience would have had the same reaction about the unfairness of “same pay for unequal work”. But the parable seems designed to show that applying our earthly “transactional” view of fairness misses the point. Rather, this is a lesson about how different things are in Kingdom of God.  In the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s will, not man’s will, be done.  God’s thoughts (will) are not man’s thoughts (will).   In the Kingdom of Heaven there is perfect faith, there will be no prideful separation from God’s will.  In the Kingdom of God, reborn man will not think in transactional terms.  Rather reborn man will think (and act) in the image and likeness of God.

Rimon: From the human point of view, the lesson I see in the parable is that we are not to envy others but rather to celebrate others’ good fortune. It teaches that we should not hold grudges, but instead be pure of heart in our relationship with others.

Don: That might be easier said than done!

David: At Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Memorial service marking what the rest of us call Good Friday, speakers (the JWs do not have a clergy but use speakers drawn from the congregation to give what are essentially sermons loaded with scriptural quotations) routinely talk about the 144,000 people who are chosen to go to heaven to help God organize and govern the new Earth after the judgment, which is to be populated by the rest of saved humanity—the kingdom of heaven on Earth.

At the Memorial I attended last week, the speaker was one of the anointed 144,000. He knew he was anointed because when the cup of wine and plate of bread (“emblems” of Christ’s blood and body) were handed from person to person in the congregation, he drank from the cup and ate from the plate. Only the anointed will do this; everyone else simply hands the emblems to their neighbor.

The anointed speaker was at great pains in his talk to affirm that there was no inequality to worry about in this division between the anointed and the rest; that the rest also had a perfect and wonderful future in front of them.

Michael: The contract with the early workers and covenant with the late workers is very reminiscent of Paul’s writing about the Jews and the Gentiles.

Don: Is it possible that in life on earth today “the first shall be last and the last shall be first”?

David: It’s the Marxist ideal. It could just conceivably work if each and every one of us loved our neighbor that much. It might be possible to run a farm on that basis. But if one farmer out of the millions of farmers decided to take advantage of everyone’s else’s good nature by only hiring the best workers and leaving the poor workers to his neighbors, he would make a killing and put the other farms out of business. We would end up with an earth owned and ruled by one bad farmer! Isn’t it better to let Man’s will be done rather than forlornly try to get God’s will working on earth, so that we have an earth much like that we already have—one that is far from being perfectly evil?

On earth, there has to be a differential in labor, resource availability, and so on, for economics to work at all. There have to be some people who are richer than others. (How much richer is of course the big political point.) Heaven can afford to dispense with any difference because there is by definition never a shortage of anything. There are no sacred economics, only mundane economics.

Jay: The governance and economics of heaven are God’s, and therefor drastically different from human earthly governance and economics—so much so that they are potentially beyond our ability to comprehend. Jesus did warn us, from time to time, not to even try to understand certain things.

Chris: At the very end of the parable, the landowner (God) essentially asserts that he can do whatever he likes with his resources. He demonstrates that his resource is grace, and what he likes is to give grace to all of us, no matter whether we are at the beginning or end of our lives, no matter whether we are among the early workers or the latecomers. He gave his grace to the early workers wrapped up in a contract. He gave it to the late workers in the form of a covenant. Either way, it was his grace, and all ought to be grateful for it rather than whine about unfairness and try to control what God does with his grace.

Charles: That “the first shall be last” is one of those phrases in scripture so compelling that they force one to wrestle with them before we can move forward. This phrase can be considered from so many perspectives but in the end it boils down to this: If you are thinking about God, grace, and the kingdom of heaven from the perspective of a fleshy, earthly human then you may miss the whole point. We put things we can measure in physical terms—wealth, number of friends, social standing, etc.—first. But that kind of metric is last in the kingdom of heaven. The more we acknowledge and live by that understanding, the more spiritual we are on the material–spiritual continuum and the closer we are to God.

The parable is a reminder of how different God and the Kingdom of Heaven are from our suppositions, and how different is the reconciled sinner from where we are at in our lives. This has not changed a whole lot since man’s Fall in the Garden! We need to have a change of heart, a change of emphasis, a change in perspective, to start to see things from the perspective of God and his will as opposed to Man and Man’s will.

Ghada: In the kingdom of heaven there are no lines, therefore there can be no first and no last!

David: If the Bible and the teachings of Jesus are taken as guides to living life on Earth then we are missing the point that they teach about spiritual life, life after death, life in the kingdom of heaven. They are not step-by-step “How to” guides for life on earth. They teach a triumphal but utterly simple one-step program: Have faith in God’s grace.

The difference between the human kingdom on Earth and God’s kingdom of Heaven was illustrated by the scriptural passage (beloved by the JWs and quoted at Memorial) about the lion laying down with the lamb. In the kingdom of heaven, by all means let your toddler crawl into the cobra pit or the lion’s den to play. But don’t try it here.

Charles: There’s always a problem in treating certain passages in scripture as literal rather than illustrative. The lion and the lamb of scripture are creatures of the new world, not the present world. This is why I say we cannot begin to understand the kingdom of God, grace, forgiveness, and so on from our human perspective based upon the world we currently live in.

Don: In the kingdom of heaven, most of the laws we live by on earth are suspended—social laws, physical laws, economic laws. It’s fair to ask to what extent we must or should embrace these laws in order to live here and now. We do it extremely imperfectly.

Charles: But the exercise of asking is worthwhile if only to remind us that we are imperfect law-abiders. Indeed, there is tremendous hope that the gift of salvation is received through faith rather than through obedience to the law.

Don: There is a sense in which the asking has personal value. Not as a condition for salvation—nothing can be clearer than that; but asking takes work, takes effort, and it has value as such. I think this parable teaches us that it has value but it not the value that we think. Its value is not that it will make us more favorable in the eyes of God! Its value may be something psychological, something that will benefit us or is at least necessary for our sanity, aside from our relationship with God.

Gaada: Perhaps the key is in the willingness to work rather than in the work itself.

Don: Yes, there seems to be value just in showing up in the job marketplace. We will discuss this further next week.

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