The Wage Is Grace

The vineyard where the wage is grace (20:1–16)

A landowner hires men at dawn to pick his grapes, and keeps going back to the hiring square all day — at nine, at noon, at three, at five. At sundown he pays the man who worked one hour exactly what he pays the man who worked twelve. Nobody is cheated, and the men who worked twelve hours are furious.

That parable opens Matthew 20, which belongs to the last stretch of Jesus' journey up to Jerusalem, a few days before the Passover at which he is killed. After the vineyard come four more scenes: the third and fullest announcement of the cross (20:17–19), a mother's request for the two best seats in the kingdom (20:20–23), a lesson on greatness that ends in a ransom (20:24–28), and two blind beggars on the road out of Jericho (20:29–34). One question runs through all five. What counts as great in this kingdom, and what does it cost?

The parable is an answer before it is a story. At the end of the previous chapter Peter had asked what the disciples would get for having left everything (19:27), and Jesus replied with a promise and then a warning — "the last will be first, and the first last" (19:30). That same sentence closes the parable at 20:16. Everything between the two brackets is built to pry a certain arithmetic out of our hands.

The wage agreed at dawn is a dēnarion, a single day's pay — the exact coin that stood between a working man and a hungry household by nightfall. The men hired later are promised only "whatever is right," and they go on that. The last of them are not idle out of laziness. "Because no one has hired us," they say. They are the unchosen, still standing in the market at the eleventh hour because nobody wanted them.

It is tempting to make the master's five trips the point — grace going out again and again. D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is the modern voice most often at our elbow in this Gospel, warns us off that reading, and rightly: the story never says why the owner kept returning, so the repetition cannot be made to carry the meaning. What the parable is about is not the workers at all. "The parable is primarily not about the workers at all," he writes, but about the staggering generosity of the man who owns the field.^*

Watch the order of payment, because the whole scene turns on it. "Who gets paid first is crucial," Carson notes: it is only because the eleventh-hour men are handed a full day's wage in plain view that the dawn crew starts expecting more than they bargained for.^* They get exactly what they agreed to. And they are furious.

Read their grievance slowly, because it is ours. "You have made them equal to us." Not you have cheated us — the master shows he has not. "Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Didn't you agree with me for a denarius?" Nobody in that vineyard is underpaid. The first are paid in full justice. The last are paid in grace, far past anything they earned. The scandal is not that someone got too little. The scandal is that grace was spent on somebody else.

Then the master names the disease by its old Hebrew name. "Is your eye evil, because I am good?" The ophthalmos ponēros, the evil eye, is Scripture's idiom for the grudging look, the eye that narrows when good comes to a neighbor (Deuteronomy 15:9; Proverbs 23:6). Against it stands one flat word about God: agathos, good. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, saw what that does to the dawn workers' standing. Men who had labored honestly all day, he said, "are possessed by the basest feeling of vice, jealousy and envy" — and so the complaint that sounds like a demand for fairness is exposed as something much smaller.^*

John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, puts the accounting exactly where the master put it: "since God defrauds no man of a just hire, He is at liberty to bestow on those whom He has lately called an undeserved reward." Two things are true at once, and holding both is the whole lesson. Justice is kept. Grace is free. Matthew Henry, the English Puritan commentator, says it in a sentence: "God distributes his rewards by grace and sovereignty, and not of debt."

So "the last will be first" is not a threat that God will one day reverse the order to spite the diligent. It is a warning that a heart keeping a ledger can stand in the vineyard all day and still miss the master entirely, while a beggar who arrives at dusk with nothing but need goes home held. Carson is careful here too: the parable is not saying everyone in the kingdom receives an identical reward, but that kingdom rewards rest on God's sovereign grace rather than on seniority of service. And nothing in the story makes the early workers Jews and the latecomers Gentiles. Many of the church fathers read it that way; Carson answers that the context knows no such distinction, and the warning is aimed squarely at insiders — at Peter, at the Twelve, at us.^*

The third announcement, and the first mention of the cross (20:17–19)

For the third time Jesus tells the Twelve, his chosen apostles, where this road ends, and this time he spells it out: handed over to the chief priests and scribes, condemned, given to the Gentiles "to mock, to scourge, and to crucify; and the third day he will be raised up." This is the first time in the Gospel that the manner of his death is named, and the first time the Romans appear in it — only they could crucify.

Even the geography is quieter than it looks. "Going up" to Jerusalem need not mean the climb has begun; Carson notes that the phrase had become simple idiom, "as in England one 'goes up' to London from every place except Oxford or Cambridge."^* So Jesus can still be in Jericho two paragraphs later without contradiction. He is not yet on the ascent. He is simply, deliberately, walking toward it with his eyes open.

Hold these three sentences in mind, because everything that follows in the chapter happens in their shadow — a request for thrones, an argument about rank — as though nobody heard a word of it.

The mother's request, and the cup (20:20–23)

The mother of James and John kneels with a request: the two best seats in the kingdom, one at his right and one at his left. Matthew has her speak; Mark has the brothers ask for themselves. Chrysostom saw no difficulty in it — "It is probable both things were done," he says, and he guesses the brothers took their mother along to make the plea harder to refuse.^* The indignation of the other ten says the same thing: the sons were in it up to their necks. Her kneeling is not worship of deity but homage to a man she is increasingly sure is the King.

The timing is almost unbearable. A scramble for cabinet posts while the King describes his execution. Henry sees the ignorance in it with painful clarity: "They knew not what it was to sit on his right hand, and on his left; they talked of it as blind men do of colours."^* Keep that line; by the end of the chapter two actually blind men will ask better than this.

Jesus does not scold the ambition so much as show them its price. "Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?" The cup, all through the prophets, is the cup of God's wrath (Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15), and it is the very cup he will beg to have taken from him in the garden (26:39). Carson states the exchange rate in eight words: "To ask to reign with Jesus is to ask to suffer with him."^* They answer breezily, "We are able." And in a mercy they cannot yet see, he tells them they are right. James will be the first apostle killed. John will grow old in exile.

But the seats are not his to hand out. "It is for whom it has been prepared by my Father." Here Carson and Chrysostom part company, and it is worth saying so. Chrysostom, uneasy that the Lord of all should lack anything to give, reads the answer as condescension to a confused question — nobody, he says, will sit at that right hand at all. Carson takes the sentence at face value: the places are real, they are already assigned, and "his authority is a derived authority," received from the Father and exercised in obedience to him.^* Calvin stands nearer Carson, and so do we: the Son on his way to obey will not reach past his Father's hand to seize an honor, and that restraint is not a gap in his divinity but the shape of his love. The tension stays, though, and it is an old one.

And this King's right and left, in this Gospel, will not turn out to be thrones. The next time Matthew puts two figures at Jesus' right and his left, they are two criminals on crosses (27:38). That is the coronation he is walking toward.

Not so among you (20:24–28)

The other ten are indignant — not, we suspect, on principle, but because two of them moved first. So Jesus gathers all twelve and draws the line that separates his kingdom from every other kingdom there has ever been.

"You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you." It is easy to hear that as a complaint about tyrants, and most of us do. Carson shows it is not. The Greek verb behind that phrase carries no implication of abuse. It simply means to exercise lordship, and it sits parallel to the exercise of authority in the next breath. Jesus is not criticizing bad government. He is saying that the whole structure of ruling — the perfectly legitimate kind — cannot be carried over into the company of his followers. Calvin saw the same thing from the other side, and warned against using this verse to shut kings and magistrates out of the church; Jesus is describing the apostolic office, not abolishing the office of a king.

Greatness among his people is reset at the root. "Whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant" — diakonos, the one who waits the table — and then, in case the first word was too comfortable, "whoever desires to be first among you shall be your doulos," your slave. In the world Jesus was speaking into, humility was not a virtue but a defect, and a slave in charge was a joke. Carson does not hedge the scale of it: "Jesus' ethics of the leadership and power in his community of disciples are revolutionary." Chrysostom, preaching on these verses, turned the ladder upside down rather than knocking it over: "So that if it be thy will to become great, seek not to become great, and then thou wilt be great." Ambition is not killed here. It is pointed downward.

Then comes the sentence the whole chapter has been climbing toward. "Even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." The ethic is suddenly grounded in the gospel. We serve because he served. But he did not merely serve; he gave his life as a lytron, the word used for the purchase price that bought a slave out of slavery. And the little preposition anti does the heaviest lifting in the verse: it means in place of. One life given instead of many.

And "many" is Isaiah's word — "he bore the sin of many" (Isaiah 53:12). Carson shows how deeply this saying is quarried out of that chapter: the giving of a life, the guilt offering, the polloi healed by one man's wound.^* In Isaiah the word is not a fraction but a multitude, the great number carried by the one, so the sentence expands rather than restricts. Godly Reformed readers do divide over a further question this clause does not answer: whether the price was paid with the people given to the Son in view (John 10:15), or offered as sufficient for all. We lean with the confession toward the first, and we think that argument is made from Romans and Hebrews and John rather than from here. What the clause itself says is the thing to carry away. The life is given anti, in the place of people, for a multitude. It is the opposite of a stingy sentence. Which is why Carson can say that the divine glory "shines most brightly when it is set aside for the sake of redeeming man by a shameful death." Timothy Keller, the Manhattan pastor, caught the indignity of it while preaching on the risen Christ cooking breakfast on a beach rather than on this chapter: "I've come as a bus boy."^*

The free wage of the vineyard is paid for here. Grace is free to us because it was costly to him.

Two blind men, and the King who stops (20:29–34)

The chapter ends on the road out of Jericho, a day's walk from Jerusalem, in a crowd thick with pilgrims heading up for the feast. Two blind beggars hear that Jesus is passing and start shouting the one title that matters: "Lord, have mercy on us, you son of David!" The crowd tells them to be quiet. They shout louder.

And the King, one week from his own death, stands still.

"What do you want me to do for you?" It is the same question he had just put to the mother of Zebedee's sons (20:21), now set before two men who own nothing and ask for the right thing: "Lord, that our eyes may be opened." Carson notes that the two blind men are not a literary device for securing the required number of witnesses; the detail reads like personal knowledge of a well-remembered afternoon, in a town known for growing balsam that was thought good for the eyes.^* Jericho is also, as it happens, the city Matthew has already mentioned in this King's family tree, by naming Rahab (1:5).

Hear what the two men are actually asking for. Isaiah had said that when God came to reign, "the eyes of the blind shall be opened" (Isaiah 35:5). So they are not asking a kind man for a favor. They call him son of David, and they ask him to do the one thing the prophets had attached to the arrival of the kingdom.

The Gospels do not line up neatly here — Matthew and Mark have the healing as Jesus leaves the town, Luke as he comes in, and Mark and Luke count one beggar where Matthew counts two. Calvin took it calmly and had no patience for harmonizing by multiplication. Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian of his own century, had got four blind men out of one, and Calvin says so with a sigh: "Osiander has resolved to display his ingenuity by making four blind men out of one."^* His own guess was that the men called out on the way in, went unheard over the crowd, and planted themselves on the road out. It is a guess, and he says so. What nobody disputes is the sentence all three accounts keep: Jesus stopped.

The beggars see more clearly than the crowd. Blind, they name him son of David — the royal title the whole Gospel has been working toward — while the sighted multitude sees a teacher going by. Carson's observation about that crowd is quietly devastating: they wanted to share in his glory without practicing his compassion, which is the chapter's disease showing up one last time.^*

Chrysostom, reading the healing, says something we should not pass over quickly: "although it be mercy and grace, it seeks for the worthy," and he finds the men's worth in their shouting and in their gratitude.^* We would put it the other way around, and we think the vineyard requires us to. The men bring nothing but noise and need. Their persistence is not a qualification they produced; it is what faith looks like from outside. But Chrysostom has noticed something real that a careless reading of grace can lose: these two did not take the gift and wander off. "They followed him" — down the road, toward Jerusalem, where the ransom would be paid.

Keller, speaking in a sermon on Jesus' prayer for the unity of his people rather than on this chapter, described what the beggars had just come into: "You didn't earn it but you get the wealth of the person you have united with."^* The chapter that opened with grumbling at grace closes with grace received on sight. And Matthew adds four words about these two that he never says of the laborers in the vineyard: "they followed him." Nothing was owed to them. Nothing is owed by them. They simply go up the road behind the King who is going there to pay for their sight with his life.