Poem for Sunday, September 20, 2026

September 20, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 20:1-16



Children have fierce notions of fairness. It’s fairly common for children with siblings to wonder which one is the favored one. If we’re lucky, we have parents who insist that all children are loved equally. My mom went so far as to make sure my sister and I had the exact same amount of Christmas presents to unwrap, so that we wouldn’t read anything into the pile of gifts.


Today’s parable explores the issue of fairness: that everyone should be treated fairly. But today’s Gospel asks us to consider what fairness means. Is it complete equity? Is it proportional? Needs based? Yield based equity? Is it promise based, or is it contractual justice?


Obviously, we’re not reading a capitalist management textbook. The householder pays all the workers equally, no matter how much work they’ve done. For most of us, we’d see this as a quick route to bankruptcy—by way of spending all of our cash, or the slower route to bankruptcy, by way of demoralizing your most dependable workers, the ones who show up to do a day’s work for a day’s pay, not the ones standing idle.


The workers standing idle might tempt us to a different reading of the parable, 2 different readings, depending on our relationship to work and depending on the translation of the text. If we read the words as “standing idle,” we might see these workers as lazy, people who could be working but are not—and they are rewarded for their laziness, paid just the same as those who have been working all day.


The Greek word is “argos.” It can mean “at leisure.” It can mean “free from work.” It can mean “lazy.”. It can mean what the late hired laborers offer as a reason for their idleness: “because no one has hired us.”


If we’re tempted to see Jesus teaching us a lesson about the value of capitalism and bosses and workers, you’d be about to hear a different sermon that frankly does not seem to be supported by the majority of Christ’s teaching.


It’s also tempting to see this parable as about God’s relationship to Jews and Christians, and while it’s one standard interpretation, it poses dangers. Throughout the Scriptures, a garden is often used as a way of talking about God’s relationship to people of the Covenant, and in today’s parable, the garden is not only for the Jewish people. From there, some interpreters see this text as showing a shift in God’s favor from Jewish people to Christians, but that interpretation isn’t supported by the text.


It’s much more likely that this parable isn’t about the workers at all. It’s much more likely that Jesus is trying to show us how God is generous in ways that humans are rarely generous, particularly humans who are in charge of workforces, of land, and policy decisions about justice and fairness. Consider that the landowner hires people and offers to pay them. He makes every laborer the same offer. Those of us who have been in charge of workplaces know how rare this generosity is. I’ve been part of the hiring process from both sides, and it is just exhausting, this measuring of worth, and it starts even before the worker is hired, with paperwork and evidence of past education, training, and work.


The landowner isn’t having any of it. He has work that needs to be done, and there are workers waiting to be hired. He makes every one of them the same generous offer.


And how do the workers respond to this generosity? We don’t know about the workers hired later in the day, but we do know how the ones hired in the morning feel: envious and exploited. They worked longer hours, and they are paid the same amount of money as the ones who only worked an hour???? Outrageous. Shouldn’t the ones who worked longer now get more pay? Ten day’s wages, surely, if we do the math.


The vineyard owner doesn’t engage. He says that they made an agreement, and both sides kept the terms, and thus, the workers have been treated fairly. You can almost hear the vineyard owner saying, “If you want fairness next time, I can do that, but you won’t like that as much as you think you will.”


Again and again, Jesus shows us that our legalistic approach to life will not serve us very well. And much more importantly, Jesus reminds us that it’s humans who have this mind set, not God. It’s humans who stretch their clenched hands wanting more—but with this clenched hand mindset, we can’t open our hands so that God can fill them. A clenched mindset means we can’t open our hearts, our minds, our boundaries of what’s acceptable in an alternate approach to justice.


Instead of seeing this reading as a parable about workers, it’s much more useful to ask what this parable tells us about God. God doesn’t make contracts—God makes covenants. God isn’t a boss rewarding us only for merit—and thank goodness! And the covenant isn’t dependent on human behavior—what a relief, because we all fall short. God isn’t keeping a ledger sheet; Luther would remind us that we can’t be redeemed by our works, but only by God’s grace.


God doesn’t bestow grace on us because we deserve it. We don’t get privileged treatment because we were early to say yes to God. We don’t get payment because we worked hard and had a higher yield than others.


On the contrary, God’s generosity extends everyone, from those dependable workers that labor long, to the ones hired last, the ones that have been waiting because it seems that no one will ever call upon them. In the business world, we’d say that there must be a reason that no one has hired them, and we’d avoid hiring them too. But the vineyard owner hires these laborers, at the close of the working day, for the same rate, when he could have hired them for far less. It’s no way to run a business.


Praise be to God—God is not running a business. God is tending a vineyard in ways we won’t always understand, but God will always invite us to be part of this creating. We can react to God’s generosity in any number of ways, and today’s parable shows what happens when we respond with envy.


A far better response is to release all of the tight and clenched parts of our lives and say yes to God’s invitation. A far better response is to open our hands and respond to God’s generosity with gratitude. And let us always remember to say daily prayers of thanks to our triune God who gives us so much, each and every day.