Which is Harder…Worrying or Working?

In Matthew 20 we have one of my favorite parables in the Bible. It is my favorite for a few reasons; one of which I will share with you. The parable is in the first 16 verses of the chapter and you really need to read it. In summary, a landowner hires five different shifts of workers to work in his vineyard. At the end of the day, each shift gets the same wage. Not surprisingly, the ones who worked the longest complained that they didn’t get more. Now, they got exactly what they agreed to work for; but the ones who worked far fewer hours got the same wage. The landowner then chastises them for their anger over his grace and generosity. But there’s another angle to this parable that I think is important to think about. In the day this parable was told, most people needed to work each day in order to eat. A laborer would earn his day’s wage and use it to buy food to eat for that day. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. So, it would have been a great advantage for the first group to be selected. They knew from the beginning of the day that they would receive a wage. But the other four groups, even the ones who were chosen last, had to bear the burden, not of working, but of worrying. There is nothing in the text to teach us that these later groups didn’t want to work, they just weren’t selected…and had to face the uncertainty of no food, some for many hours.

Does that put a different slant on this for you like it does for me? The ones who worked all day were actually blessed because they knew they were going to eat. The ones who only had to work for an hour had to worry for eleven hours….and I think that worrying was likely harder than working.

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