Message (Matthew 20:1-16).

The working conditions of the London dock labourers 140 years ago were appalling. The men and their families lived in overcrowded and insanitary slums and their life was a constant struggle against heavy odds. At the root of this was the casual and uncertain nature of dock labour which produced bitterness and desperation.

For nobody had guaranteed employment. Every day the workers gathered at the dock gates hoping for work. Several times each morning – if times were good – the men would be called up to a small barred window and given a ticket to work in that day. They had to push and fight to be at the front of the line; their behaviour was likened to that of hungry wolves, seeking to get their share of the prey. The men who did not manage to catch the foreman’s eye at one call would simply have to wait around, often in the cold and wet, hoping that they would be successful at the next opportunity. If times were bad, their wait would be in vain.

By the standards of the day, the dockers’ pay itself wasn’t too bad: about 2p (in today’s money) per hour: it was the uncertainty that was so hard to cope with. As Colonel Birt, the general manager of Millwall Docks, said to a Parliamentary committee: “The poor fellows are miserably clad, scarcely with a boot on their foot, in a most miserable state … There are men who come to work without having a bit of food in their stomachs, perhaps since the previous day; they have worked for only an hour and their hunger will not allow them to continue. But they take the hour’s pay in order that they may get food, perhaps the first food they have had for twenty-four hours”.

A trade depression in the mid-1880s forced the dock companies into fierce competition. They cut their rates to attract ships into their own docks rather than others. Of course, it was the dockers who suffered as the companies economised in manpower by pushing casualisation to its cruellest limits. By 1889 the dockers had had enough. A row erupted on August 13^th over a cut in the bonus to be paid to the men unloading the “Lady Armstrong”. 2,500 dockers in the basin where the ship lay walked out; on the following day they were joined by over 100,000 others.  Pickets were established at the dock gates, mass meetings were held on nearby Tower Hill, and marches were organised through the City of London.

The companies thought they could starve the dockers to death, but they were wrong. Socialist leaders such as Keir Hardie sought aid for them. Christian groups, notably led by Cardinal Manning, the head of the British Roman Catholic Church, rallied to the dockers’ cause. £30,000 was sent by Trade Union members in Australia. Five weeks after the strike began, the dock companies gave in to virtually all the men’s demands. It was a notable victory in the history of workers’ rights and Trade Unionism. Perhaps emboldened by the Londoners’ example, dockers in Cardiff went on strike two years later, although the issues involved here were rather different.

Employment law has moved on since then; yet pay is still a huge issue. Workers in the public sector see their pay awards limited to a few percentage points while the bosses of the water companies receive huge bonuses even though sewage seems to flow almost unchecked. Many migrant workers are paid less than the legal minimum wage while some big-name law firms allegedly make young people work for nothing during their first year simply so they can gain a toe-hold in the business. And Premier League footballers earn six-figure salaries – weekly – while some of the staff at their clubs are working for the minimum wage.

It is clearly true that some jobs involve more responsibility than others. But many people feel that these huge disparities are unjust. And, even within companies, there are inequalities, especially if you are a woman. There must be lots of folk looking over their shoulders and muttering, “It’s just not fair. I know I’m getting paid the same as him yet I’m doing three times as much work”. It isn’t considered the done thing to talk about salaries, yet I’m sure many people in all kinds of jobs are making that kind of comment and value judgement every day.

The story we read earlier is often called “The parable of the labourers in the vineyard”. But we could equally call it “The Eccentric Employer”. For here is a man who calls several groups of workers to come and pick grapes; some labour from morning while others only work in the late afternoon, yet all are paid exactly the same wage at the end of the day. On a first reading it all seems blatantly unfair – but everyone receives the wage they’ve been promised. It is, I suppose, possible that the vineyard owner panicked as he realised that the work wouldn’t be completed by nightfall so was prepared to pay a premium in order to get the job done. But it’s also been suggested that what we see here is “the behaviour of a large-hearted man who is full of sympathy for the poor”: he takes on people without work late in the day out of sheer compassion, so they can buy food and retain their dignity. This puts a different complexion on both the owner and the workers who complained of his unfairness.

Of course, Matthew’s parable doesn’t really have anything to do with wages at all. It is not meant to reflect normal employment practice nor act as a model for good labour relations. I must say, though, that these are things that Christians should certainly be concerned about, whether here in this country, in African coffee plantations or in the Bangladeshi clothing sweatshops. It’s been suggested that Jesus, who put justice for the oppressed and freedom from the downtrodden at the heart of his manifesto, told this parable to raise awareness of the inequalities and injustices of his day, where the rich called the shots and the powerless poor not only had to accept what they were given but had to be grateful for it. It certainly would have rung bells in the minds of his hearers, and we too need to hear this interpretation of what Jesus said. We so easily forget the plight of our fellow-human beings and think only of ourselves.

However I can’t think that wage justice is the main point of this parable – after all, Jesus’ parables were always object lessons about something more abstract. So what is it about? I think that there are two, related, answers to this: it’s about both the generosity and grace of God, and the reaction of different groups of people to that grace.

As I’ve said many times before, we must always look at the setting of a Bible passage if we’re going to work out its correct meaning. In the case of the parables, this means finding out who Jesus was telling them to. The problem here is that we’re not told; however, informed guesswork suggests that he was talking to the Jewish leaders who could trace their ancestry back to the time of David or even Moses. If so, the question which the parable was asking was this, “Does someone who comes to God now have the same spiritual benefits as someone from a family who have been good Jews for centuries? And, if they do, is that really fair?”

That was a good question, and we can understand how these leaders felt: how could it be right that recent converts or proselytes with Greek ancestry, Gentiles who were Johnnies-come-lately to God’s Kingdom, should be regarded by God in exactly the same way as they were? Surely a just God had to reward folk who had a healthy spiritual pedigree; if not, was there any point in following him at all?

We today might want to put the issue in a different way. We could think of two people. One is a good churchgoer who has been a believer since their childhood and who has always done their best to follow Christ and do what is right. They have given money to missionary work and other charitable causes, they have served on the Diaconate, taken a regular turn on the coffee rota, helped with the homeless folks’ soup run and done their stint teaching Sunday School. In fact, they have given up a great deal of their time, energy and money as part of their Christian life.

The second person has always done exactly what they pleased. They’ve enjoyed every pleasure that’s come their way, they’ve indulged themselves with no moral qualms whatsoever, they’ve squandered their money right, left and centre, their lifestyle has been notorious. Then, suddenly, during their last illness (and in the best traditions of Victorian melodrama), the scales have fallen from their eyes, they have had a miraculous death-bed conversion complete with tears of sorrowful repentance – and then, just a few days later, they have died.

That’s the scenario; and the question the long-time churchgoer might be asking is this: is it just that both these people get to glory and meet God on an equal footing? If nothing else, surely the devoted Christian should get a front-row seat in the worship around God’s throne, while the other guy gets squeezed into an uncomfortable back row seat, behind a pillar, in heaven’s Upper Circle.

What we must remember is that none of us deserves God’s grace. Every Christian gains salvation, not through their diligent hard work, 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 as he wishes, without us having any grounds for complaint. It’s not like a pension fund that one builds up over years of contributing and then takes on retirement. If God has decided that every person who believes – irrespective of 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 and the doors are shutting, they will arrive at the destination in exactly the same way 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.

I wonder, though, if we should broaden this principle to other aspects of life? This parable says that all believers have the same status in the Kingdom of heaven, however long they have been its citizens. So to what extent should we be saying that all people should have the same status, or at least rights, in earthly kingdoms? I’m thinking particularly – and I know that this is controversial – of recent arrivals into Britain and other countries, of migrants (although, as we’ve seen just this week in the village of Piddington, that word has become heavily loaded with negative images). So: how long does someone have to live in a country, working and paying their taxes and generally contributing to society, before they can be regarded as the equal of a person who can trace their ancestry back to (make your choice) Queen Elizabeth I, Owain Glyndwr or Robert the Bruce? I wonder how people treated my own parents as they settled into British society during the 1940s? Did they say or think, “Well, of course they shouldn’t have the same rights as my family which has been living here for centuries”? I don’t know, and there certainly was a lot of sympathy for Germans who’d fled Hitler; but that’s the kind of rhetoric we often hear today. But is it worthy of Jesus, does it fit in with the ideals of God’s Kingdom? That’s something for us to think about.

Returning to Jesus’ parable, I don’t think it really has much to do with labourers and vineyards, although the people who first heard it may well have pricked up their ears at the way the proprietor seems to have taken advantage of some workers at the expense of others. It is really 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 St. Paul’s language, every one of us is sinful and so disqualified from God’s Kingdom. The only recompense we actually deserve is exclusion and death.

But God has reversed that situation. He offers us the gift of life, made possible through the death of Jesus, his sinless Son. It’s up to us whether we humbly accept the gift; but the contract God makes is with each one of us individually; we have no right to complain about the mercy that he 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 and generously, gives us the spiritual wages we never, ever deserved.