Fair Wages and Gospel Lessons
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, March 15, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the twentieth chapter, verses 1-16.
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, 4 and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. 5 When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. 6 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?’ 7 They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ 8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ 9 When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received a denarius. 10 Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. 11 And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12 saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ 13 But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? 14 Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ 16 So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Introduction
There is a moment in this parable where the math stops working.
You can feel it coming. The landowner goes out at dawn, hires workers, agrees on a wage. Fine. He goes out again at nine, at noon, at three, and a five. Each time he hires workers and sends them into the vineyard. Then evening comes, and he tells his manager to pay everyone the same, starting with the last hired, and everything we thought we understood about fairness quietly tips over.
The workers who bore the heat of the day do the math in their heads. They do it fast. And the number they arrive at is more. They are about to receive more. They can feel it. Right? If the people hired last get the same wage they were promised, then it only makes sense that they would get more.
But they don’t get more. They get exactly what they were promised. They’re furious. And they have every reason to be furious, right? If you worked all day and got paid the same as someone who only worked a few hours you’d be furious too or you’d be lying.
The Parable on Its Own Terms
Before we go any further, let’s take the parable on its own terms. We need to be careful to remember that this is a parable. Parables are stories that convey deeper meanings and are used to great effect by Jesus throughout the Gospels. But we always need to careful to separate Jesus from his characters in the parables. Sometimes what people do in Jesus’ parables, and the truth Jesus is trying to communicate to us are different. This parable is one example.
A landowner goes out at dawn to hire workers for his vineyard. This type of work arrangement was typical for the time. Men, people we would call unskilled laborers, would wait in a public place until merchants and landowners arrived seeking workers. The earlier you arrived, the better the jobs and the better the workers you could find. Workers would look for employers they knew would pay them well and employers would look for the workers they knew and trusted. I doubt any of us have ever experienced this kind of day labor economy, but it was standard in Jesus’ time and until the beginning of the mass deportation campaign could still be found in places in the United States with large migrant worker populations.
So, the landowner in our parable tonight finds workers at dawn and he agrees with them on the usual daily wage, a denarius, a Roman coin worth about three grams of silver and equal to about two-thirds of what a basic Roman soldier made in a day. One denarius was the standard wage for a day laborer.
The landowner goes back out to the public space at nine in the morning and finds more people standing idle in the marketplace. He hires them too. Same at noon. Same at three in the afternoon. And then, at five, one hour before the end of the workday, he goes out again, finds people still standing there, and hires them.
Now, we should notice something here. The people standing in the marketplace at five o’clock weren’t necessarily lazy. They weren’t choosing leisure over work. The text tells us no one had hired them. They might have been there all day. They wanted to work. In the ancient world, day laborers had no guaranteed income, no safety net, no employer who owed them anything. They stood in the marketplace hoping someone would pick them. And some days, nobody did.
We don’t know who these people are that weren’t hired until five o’clock. They might have been there all day and were passed over by the system.
So, the landowner hires them and when evening comes and it’s time to pay, he does something extraordinary. He starts with the last hired. And he pays them a full denarius. A full day’s wage. For one hour of work.
And the ones who worked all day see this. And they think: well, if they got a full day’s wage, surely, we’re getting more. Surely the math works in our favor now.
It doesn’t.
They get a denarius too.
And they are furious. “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”
And the landowner says: “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
And then Jesus lands it: “So, the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
The Fairness We’ve Been Taught
Here’s the thing: the all-day workers aren’t wrong. By every rule of earthly economics, they have a legitimate grievance. They worked more. They should earn more. That’s not greed, that’s the logic that organizes most of human civilization. Work hard, get ahead. Put in more hours, get more pay. Your labor has value proportional to the time you put in and your output.
We have built entire societies on this logic. And parts of it are good and true. But parts of it have also been used to justify enormous cruelty.
Because that same logic, that your compensation should match your output, has been used for generations to pay women less than men for the same work. It’s been used to classify workers as contractors, so employers don’t have to pay benefits and personnel taxes. It’s been used to argue that people who work minimum wage jobs somehow deserve minimum wage lives. It’s been used to create a reality known as the “working poor” and then to make that working poor class feel that their poverty is a personal moral failure rather than the predictable result of a system designed to keep labor cheap and ownership profitable.
There are entire economic theories and, disgustingly, theologies built on the idea that if you only work harder, longer, and better you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots to begin with.
The earthly economy of fairness has a shadow side. It’s deeply embedded in racism, misogyny, and heterosexism. It’s the system that claims that the President Trump’s nominee for US Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, a plumber by trade with virtually no homeland security or military experience is a merit hire, but calls Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a lawyer and jurist with more than 30 years of experience, a “DEI hire.”
When the all-day workers grumble that the landowner has ‘made them equal’ to the latecomers, they’re not just complaining about wages. They’re complaining about dignity. They’ve internalized a hierarchy that tells them that they’re worth more, that they’ve earned more, that they deserve a distinction that marks their superiority. And when that distinction collapses, it feels like injustice.
When you’ve always known privilege, any assault on that privilege feels like injustice, even if it means justice for other people.
The hierarchy has always been the problem.
Bob Dylan captured this hierarchy in his song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game:”
“The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ’neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.”
A Different Economy
What Jesus’s describing in this parable is not a lesson in labor law or ethics. He says so at the outset: “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner.” He’s not telling us how to run a business. He’s telling us something about the character of God and the shape of the world God is making.
And in that world, the measure of what someone receives is not calibrated by what they produced, how hard they worked, or how long they worked. It’s calibrated by what they need.
Think about the workers hired at five o’clock. One hour of wages would not feed a family. It would be a major blow to paying for rent. The landowner doesn’t pay them what they earned by strict accounting. The landowner pays them what they need to live. What a family needs to make it through the night.
This is the logic that runs underneath the whole of Scripture. The manna in the wilderness, where everyone gathered exactly what they needed and no more. The gleaning laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, where farmers were commanded to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so the poor could eat. The Jubilee, where debts were cancelled, land returned, and slaves were freed, because greed and accumulation without limit was never God’s intention.
The feeding of the five thousand, where there is somehow enough, more than enough in fact, when the resources are shared rather than hoarded.
There is a divine logic that doesn’t work like our logic. It’s not that hard work doesn’t matter. It’s not that education, training, and experience aren’t important. It’s that human need is not a competition. That dignity is not a prize distributed to winners. Abundance, real abundance, the abundance of God, doesn’t run out when it is shared.
The all-day workers assumed the pie was fixed. If those latecomers got a full slice, then there were only two options: they must be getting more or there was less for them and that option was intolerable. But that’s scarcity logic. That’s empire logic. That’s the logic of a world where there is never enough, and so we must protect what we’ve earned and resent what others receive.
Jesus is offering us another way of seeing.
What This Does to Us
Here is the uncomfortable question this parable is asking us: Which group of workers do you identify with?
Most of us, if we’re being honest, identify with the all-day workers. We’re the ones who showed up early. We’re the ones who follow the rules, who do the work, who have the receipts to prove our effort. And when we see someone else receive what we feel we’ve earned, particularly if it’s through less effort, through what feels like luck or mercy or someone’s generous whim, something in us bristles.
We should pay attention to that bristling and ask ourselves why we’re feeling it, because it tells us something about what we actually believe about how the world should work. About whom deserves what. About whether we want a world of equity or a world of hierarchy dressed up as fairness.
Here’s the thing: the denarius was always sufficient. The all-day workers got exactly what they were promised (in fact, if you read the parable carefully, they were only group promised a set wage). They weren’t cheated. What they lost was their sense of superiority. And they couldn’t bear it.
There is something in us, something deeply human, that would rather have a little more than someone else than have enough alongside everyone. We would rather be ahead than be equal. And we call that fairness.
The Kin-dom of God calls it something else.
The Kin-dom of God asks, what if everyone had enough?
What if the question wasn’t who deserves more, but what does each person need to live with dignity?
What if we stopped organizing human worth around education, knowledge, productivity, and time?
What if we started judging human worth around the simple fact that each person is made in the image of God?
Good News for the Latecomers
There’s profound good news in this parable. And I don’t want to rush past it.
For everyone who has ever felt like they showed up too late, to faith, to healing, to a sense of their own worth, this parable is for you.
For everyone who has spent their life standing in the marketplace, passed over, not chosen, wondering if today is the day someone will finally see them, this parable is for you.
The landowner goes back. Again and again, he goes back. At nine. At noon. At three. At five. He doesn’t stop looking.
That is who God is in this story. Not a boss running the tightest operation. Not an efficiency expert maximizing output. A savior who keeps going back to the marketplace to find who’s still standing there. Who refuses to leave anyone out. Who looks at the ones the economy forgot and says: come, there is still work to do, and there is a place for you, and you will not go home empty-handed.
That is the Gospel. That is the scandalous, unreasonable, wildly impractical good news of Jesus Christ.
And it’s not even that the wage is the same. The wage doesn’t matter. What matters is God’s abundance, and everyone has enough.
Conclusion: What Do We Do With This?
This parable isn’t supposed to leave us comfortable.
It asks us to examine where we have confused our social arrangements with divine justice. Where we have called something “fair” because it benefits us, or because we have always accepted it as the way things work. Where we have participated in systems that pay some people less than what they need, not because those people are worth less than us, but because we have grown accustomed to an economy built on that fiction.
It asks us to look at the workers still standing in the marketplace. The ones who are working full days and still can’t pay rent. The ones doing the same job as their colleague and taking home less. The ones working full time at minimum wage and still in need of assistance to make ends meet. The ones the system passed over not because of their effort but because of their gender, their zip code, their immigration status, their gender identity, or the color of their skin.
And it demands we ask: is this the Kin-dom? Or is this empire? Is this divine abundance? Or is this scarcity logic with a religious veneer?
Jesus doesn’t give us an economic policy in this parable. But he does something more radical. He reorients us. He points us toward a world where what someone receives is tied not to what they produced but to what they need. He blows up the hierarchy of the deserving and undeserving. He says: the last will be first. And the first will be last.
Not as punishment. As grace.
Because in the Kin-dom of God, there is no last. There is no first. There is only the table, and the bread, and the God who keeps going back to the marketplace until everyone has a place.
May we have the courage to want that world. May we have the imagination to work toward it. And may the grace that has found us, find everyone still standing in the square.
Amen.