September 20 - “The Usual”
The Usual
Matthew 20:1-16
20 September 2026
Rev. Mary Nelson – First Congregational Church UCC, Williamstown MA
You know about the community for which Matthew wrote his gospel by now. They were a community of Jews living probably in Antioch in Syria, a minority group living in a diverse, cosmopolitan city under Roman occupation. They were not poor, but they were also not powerful. Matthew’s gospel was written somewhere around 5-15 years after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed: Jews across the Empire were experiencing persecution for being Jewish, but Matthew’s community also wasn’t so sure they could fully identify with the Jewish experience and faith anymore; and they were intrigued by what they were hearing about this Jesus guy, but they weren’t fully on board with him, either. Christians were also being persecuted across the Roman Empire, so it’s not like becoming part of that movement was going to benefit them somehow. They were somewhere in the middle, trying to discern who they were becoming.
Today we read a parable that only appears in Matthew’s gospel. And usually the texts that only appear in one gospel are assumed by scholars to have been created (or at least significantly embellished) by the gospel-writer himself. But this is one of those rare cases where scholars believe that this parable does come from Jesus and was not made up by Matthew. In fact, scholars believe that Matthew added the sort-of tagline at the end, “the last shall be first and the first shall be last” as an editorial choice, because that tagline does appear widely in other gospels and even elsewhere in Matthew. But it doesn’t actually make sense as a conclusion of the parable. The parable isn’t about the great overturning of the social order that Jesus and his followers hope will take place—it’s about how God is generous with everyone, regardless of the human social order. This is not a “the last shall be first” parable, it’s an “everyone is equal” parable.
A vineyard owner goes out to the marketplace and hires laborers to work in his vineyard. He agrees with them on a set price for a day’s labor, the usual amount of pay, and brings them back to work for the day. He keeps going back all day, multiple times, to hire more and more laborers. Even just an hour before the day should end, he hires more workers for his vineyard. And when the work day is done, he pays each of them the usual, set price for their labor. He starts with the last people he hired, and the workers who’ve been there all day assume they will be paid more, because they worked more. So when the vineyard owner pays them, they are upset to see that they have been paid the usual, set amount that they agreed to in the first place. The laborers grumble, and the vineyard owner says to them, “I’m giving you exactly what we agreed. I can be generous with what is mine, and that’s my choice to make. Are you envious because I am generous?”
We didn’t talk about parables as much as I thought we were going to this summer. So you may or may not remember that a parable is a story that is based on a metaphor, using imagery from nature or everyday life, and there’s always some kind of twist that is meant to surprise us or make us understand something differently, often leaving us with more questions than answers. The images used in the story are sometimes obscure to us modern folk, though we still have vineyards and day laborers, so this parable’s twist is not as difficult for us to understand as many other parables.
In this parable, Jesus opens the story telling us that “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early looking for laborers for his vineyard.” So we are meant to hear that the landowner is God, and the laborers are us, and we can imagine feeling the resentment that the first set of laborers feel toward the folks who came along later. We can imagine making the assumption that we would be paid more for doing more work. It’s easy to identify with those workers who showed up early and then watched as the folks who showed up later were still paid the same, and paid first. That vineyard owner kept going out all day and bringing back more workers, whether he needed them or not. Why were those people needed, weren’t we doing a good enough job in the first place? What if the vineyard owner ran out of coins to pay everyone before he got to us, what then? What if we’ve been cheated out of our work and our wage?
It becomes easy to catastrophize when we put ourselves in the shoes of the workers who came early.
But let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the people who were invited to work at 10 a.m., at noon. What about the ones who came at 3:00? At 5:00? The vineyard owner didn’t negotiate with them, he just said “I’ll pay you what’s fair.” For a partial day’s work, that’s not enough to live on, to feed a family. Were they just grateful to be given a chance to work at all? Were they afraid they would work as much as possible, and the vineyard owner would decide that “fair” was something less than they deserved? Were they afraid they were going to be cheated, in the end? How grateful were they, at the end of the day, to be given a whole day’s wages? How much did they hope they would be hired back the next day, and how eager were they to work for an owner who would show such kindness? How many of their friends, their relatives, could they tell about the owner’s generosity, so that their loved ones might try to work in that vineyard as well?
And the vineyard owner didn’t cheat anyone. He paid the usual wage for a day’s labor. He kept his word to the first workers who came, and to everyone else. How weird it is, how broken a system we live in—even today—that we assume that an employer will NOT pay a fair wage, expect that they will NOT treat the workers justly, fear that scarcity will be inevitable?
The kingdom of heaven is different than the kingdoms and governments of people.
Socially speaking, Matthew’s community was not in the batch of early laborers, nor in the batch of folks who came late in the day. They were in the middle: not from the place where they were living, but not strangers or refugees or “displaced persons”; not in the top of the social classes, but not at the bottom; not sure they were who they used to be, but not sure who they were becoming. They, too, would have been surprised at the vineyard owner’s generosity. They, too, needed an example of another way to be, an idea of how a community could operate that was not what they’d always known. They needed their paradigms broken, and their fears dispelled. And Matthew knew they needed this story, even if other gospel writers didn’t see a need for it for their communities. In the kingdom of heaven, God is generous and kind and full of grace, and we live differently because of it.
When I came here to Williamstown you were feeling pretty beat up, pretty tired, pretty sad. You felt inadequate, unloved. And that’s not …true. Your feelings were true, but there is another way to be. God’s love, God’s generosity, God’s grace is real and here and waiting for you to receive it! You just needed to be reminded of that. There is another way to be.
I haven’t done nearly as much for you as you think I have, as your pastor. But I’ve loved you—more than I thought I was going to! I reminded you of your behavioral covenant. I’ve helped you walk with each other in a discernment process. We hired a new music director. We came up with a new plan for caring for our building. We came up with a new policy for inclement weather. You supported me in the final days of my father’s life.
This has always been a temporary arrangement, and we knew that. We didn’t know how long I would be here, and I didn’t know how much I would come to love you. We have had the chance to create a new beginning together, to see that grace that it’s possible to have for one another, to see the ways that it’s possible to be together differently from how we are in the rest of the world. We’ve seen new opportunities, new ways to be, and we’ve learned that we are not bound by what has been.
What you do, what you give, what you expect, is not all that God has to work with. And God will always be generous with you, and loving with you, and gracious with you. No matter when you show up. No matter how hard you work. You are loved, and that is the most important thing.
I have loved being your pastor, and I am glad that you have learned how to receive love again. And I hope that you continue showing that love and grace and generosity to each other. You can be part of the new way of the vineyard owner, not the way of the people who live in fear. You do not have to be bound by that. You are becoming who God is calling you to be—and I am grateful to have been part of that journey.
Thanks be to God. Amen.