Bible reading: Matthew 20:1-16.

I wonder how many of us knew that last Monday, September 18th, was “United Nations International Equal Pay Day”? No, nor did I! But in fact the principle of “Equal pay for equal work” has been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights right from its start in 1946. Article 23 of the Declaration states, in part, that “Everyone has the right to just and favourable conditions of work; the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring an existence worthy of human dignity for themself and their family; and has the right to equal pay for equal work”. Equal pay is a founding principle of the European Union and it has been a part of British employment law since 1970.

The slogan “Equal pay for equal work” has particular significance for women. Even today, the United Nations estimate that they only earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by man for work of equal value – with an even wider wage gap for women with children. In Britain this issue was brought to a head in 1968 when five female employees at Ford in Dagenham organized a strike. Although the women who stopped work formed only a tiny part of the workforce, they had the crucial job of sewing together the fabric of the car seats; by stopping work they brought production to a halt within a week. Ford’s managers were unsympathetic to the women’s cause and they were mocked in the media – but they persevered, marching several times to Westminster. Eventually Barbara Castle, the Minister for Employment, met with a small group of the women. Although their demands hadn’t been met entirely, they agreed to go back to work.

The workers in today’s story were, we assume, all men. Yet it’s clear that their hourly rates of pay varied hugely. For some were hired first thing in the morning and worked for a full day, others were hired at lunch time, yet others in the late afternoon. So some toiled away for eight or nine hours while others got off with just one hour of labour. Yet, when they were finally paid, they all received the same amount of money. It’s not surprising that the workers who had been working all day felt aggrieved: the situation was blatantly unfair – or was it?

Certainly the vineyard owner does seem to have behaved in a very odd way – indeed, this story has been called “the Parable of the Eccentric Employer”! We might ask why he kept taking on workers throughout the day, rather than hiring all the labourers he needed at dawn. We might wonder why he paid everyone the same amount, when he could have got away with paying those who started later considerably less. One scenario is that he panicked when he realised that he hadn’t hired enough men to pick all the grapes. As it became increasingly obvious that the job wasn’t going to be finished before nightfall, he employed more pickers and paid them handsomely as an incentive to work quickly. We can certainly see sense in paying the harvesters generously if that meant the proprietor wouldn’t lose a valuable crop.

That’s possible, but it’s not what the story suggests to me: it really seems to more about a work creation scheme. For think about what the vineyard owner does. He keeps going back to the marketplace – the local jobcentre where casual workers hang around hoping to be hired – every few hours and offers work to anyone who he sees waiting. One can’t help feeling that the vineyard is grossly over-manned by the time evening comes, and that the owner has paid over the odds to get the job done. But that’s not what is important: the point is that people who might have received no pay have been given a full day’s wage; and that men who would have been standing around idle have been given proper work to do – although they might have had their suspicions as to what is going on!

I wonder if you’ve ever heard of McCaig’s Folly? It’s a replica of the Colosseum in Rome which stands on the hill above Oban in Scotland. It was built in 1897 by a local banker, John Stuart McCaig, at a cost of £5,000. Although, I have to say, it was intended to be a monument to the man, with statues of his ancestors in the apertures, it was also intended to create jobs at a time of high local unemployment. Closer to home, it’s been suggested that job creation – especially for artists and artisans – was one the factors that induced John Crichton-Stuart to rebuild Castell Coch. For he and his son spent vast sums of money on a property which they rarely used; indeed Crichton-Stuart died ten years before the castle was completed. Yes, they were fabulously rich because they happened to own the land under which so much coal was to be found – but might this have been a way of giving at least a small payback to some ordinary workers? Who knows?

Let’s get back to the parable! If my interpretation is correct, we might think that the men who started earlier in the day should be grateful rather than angry for the extra help they’re getting: presumably they can take things more and more easily as time wears on. And they should definitely be regarding their employer in a favourable light, as he is clearly a generous man who is governed more by compassion than by hard-headed business acumen. And this is where the story suddenly “clicks” with the people listening to Jesus. For it isn’t really about labour relations or fair pay (although Christians should be concerned about these important issues); it’s about God’s grace and his desire to reach out in love to as many people as possible.

Of course we today don’t hear this parable directly from Jesus; we read it in a Gospel. And we must remember that the Gospels were put together for the early Church – the style and content of Matthew’s telling us that it was targeted at Jewish Christians. I therefore think that this story was included because those Jewish Christians had a tendency to look down on their Gentile counterparts: for hadn’t the Jews been God’s “chosen people” for centuries, with a rich tradition, heritage and understanding of God? It was hard for them to accept that God could regard coarse Gentile Christian converts as their equals. For surely these were “johnnies-come-lately”, second-class he with no right to God’s best: it was outrageous to think that God would not merely admit Gentiles to the Jewish members-only club, but allow them to sit anywhere. Yet Jesus is saying, “Listen! God includes all of us on exactly the same footing: his grace alone. Just as no-one could tell the vineyard owner how to run his farm, so you have no right whatsoever to lay down the rules by which God operates. He makes his own decisions; and those decisions are always just ones”.

That’s all fine, but we’re not first-century Christians! So what can this parable say to us? Well, let’s think of two people. One is a good church-goer, a believer since childhood who has always done their very best to follow Christ and do what is right. They have given money to missionary work and to other charitable causes, they have served on the Diaconate, had a regular spot on the coffee rota, taken part in the homeless folks’ soup run, and done their stint as a Sunday School teacher. In fact, they have given a great deal of their time, money and energy to their Christian life. Many of us can identify with them.

The second person has always done exactly what they pleased. They have enjoyed every pleasure that has come their way, they’ve indulged themselves without any moral qualms, they’ve splashed their cash right, left and centre, their lifestyle has been notorious. And then, suddenly, during their final illness (and in the best traditions of Victorian melodrama), the scales have fallen from their eyes, they have had a miraculous conversion complete with tears of repentance – and then, just a few days later, they have died.

So the question that the long-time churchgoer might be asking is this: is it really just that both these people get to glory as equals? If nothing else, surely the devoted Christian should get a front-row seat in the worship around God’s throne, while the other guy is tucked away in a back seat, behind a pillar, in heaven’s Upper Circle.

But it doesn’t work like that! For we need to remember that not one of us actually deserves salvation, that every single Christian gains it, not through their own diligent efforts, but because of God’s generous largesse and grace. And the whole point of grace is that it is a free gift which God can bestow on people just as he wishes, without us having any grounds for complaint. So, if he decides that every person who believes – whether they have done so for 50 years or 5 minutes – can enter his Kingdom, so be it. Even if someone jumps onto the salvation train just as the barrier is closing, he or she will arrive at the same destination as someone who has been on it for years. After all, didn’t Jesus say to the repentant thief dying alongside him at Calvary, “today you will be with me in paradise”? And he was a criminal.

Another way in which this parable might speak to us today is to think how communities might relate to folk who have only recently joined them. It’s very easy for old-established members of any community to say, “We’ve been here a long time, we know how things work, we have our rights”. Although incomers may receive a warm welcome, there can still be, deep down, a feeling that “they’re new, we don’t have to take notice of what they say, they’re not really one of us”. The result is that they get subtly sidelined. This can happen in a local community, even though everyone has the same rights to peace, light and Council Services. It can also happen in churches where new folk, possibly with a different cultural or racial background, get frozen out by the long-standing majority who may feel challenged by their enthusiasm and new ideas. Yet all Christians stand on a level playing field before God. He values newcomers just as much as old-timers – newcomers who may be bringing a refreshing word, inspired by God’s Spirit.

So Jesus’ parable doesn’t really have anything to do with labourers and vineyards at all. It is certainly not about exploitative and unjust employers who take advantage of some workers at the expense of others. Instead, it is about God’s generosity in bestowing his free gift of salvation upon anyone who calls, whether they are old or young, whether they have used their life well or selfishly, whether they come from a long line of saints or from the most dissolute of backgrounds. To use the language of St. Paul, every single one of us is sinful, disqualified from God’s Kingdom by reason of that sin; the only recompense we genuinely deserve is exclusion and death.

But God has reversed that situation. He offers us the free gift of life, made possible through the death of Jesus. It is up to us whether we want to humbly accept that gift; but the contract is made with every one of us as an individual and we certainly have no right to complain about the mercy that God shows to anyone else. For we can never work our way to heaven; there is no way that we can ever earn enough spiritual credit to get there. Unlike the dockers all those years ago, we can never argue our case for better conditions or pay. All we can do is cast ourselves upon the mercy of a God who, graciously, gives us the spiritual wages we never, ever deserved.