Sunday 26 March 2017
The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard Really Is About Grace
A small matter perhaps, but a "professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School" has claimed that Matthew 20:1-16 is about economic justice:
This parable tells the story of a series of workers who come in at different points of the day, but the owner pays them all the same amount. The parable is sometimes read with an anti-Jewish lens, so that the first-hired are the "Jews" who resent the gentiles or the sinners entering into God's vineyard. Nonsense again.
"Jesus' first listeners heard not a parable about salvation in the afterlife but about economics in present. They heard a lesson about how the employed must speak on behalf of those who lack a daily wage."
This interpretation must be popular in some circles, because I once heard it preached in a sermon by a guest speaker. I was frustrated and mystified then, and now; I just don't see grounds for rejecting the traditional eschatalogical application, in which the landowner is God and the "denarius" is salvation. The parable's introduction says "The kingdom of heaven is like ..." and its conclusion says "So the last will be first, and the first will be last". The passage immediately leading up to the parable is even more clearly eschatalogical and ends with the same formula:
Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife[e] or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.
Even allowing for the likelihood that the text was arranged thematically rather than chronologically, clearly the writer thought the passages belonged together.
It's true that "the kingdom of heaven" sometimes refers to God's will being done on earth, but the context here is strongly against that. Furthermore, the traditional interpretation fits the text perfectly and aligns with Jesus' other teachings. God is absurdly generous while still being just; those thought to be most religious are on shaky ground; lost sheep are welcomed in. The traditional interpretation is not inherently anti-Jewish since it applies just as well to the Jewish undesirables ("tax collectors and sinners") beloved by Jesus as to Gentile converts.
Many Biblical passages extol economic justice. This isn't one of them.
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