Vineyard, Internet Domain
Our pastor used the parable of the Workers Paid Equally as
this morning’s breakfast devotional. Jesus
tells a story of a vineyard landowner who went into the morning marketplace and
hired workers for the day who agreed to one denarius in exchange for their toil
and sweat. He went out again during the
third, sixth, ninth and eleventh hours and hired more workers promising to “pay
whatever is right”.
When evening came the landowner had his foreman gather the
workers and began paying them in reverse order of their hiring. Each of them received a denarius. Predictably, the workers that were hired
first began grumbling that they should have received more pay. But the owner rightly said that he wasn’t
being unfair and had paid them exactly what they had agreed to that
morning. After all, didn’t he have a right
to do what he wanted to do with his own money?
This lesson really isn’t about monetary rewards, but if we peel
back the onion skin to the next layer, we learn that Jesus was teaching about
salvation. We shouldn’t begrudge anyone
who repents very late in life since in actuality none of us earns eternal
life. Its all about grace and forgetting
about the other guy so that we can focus on those blessings in our lives that
we tend to take all too casually. One of
the criminals being crucified with Jesus later on asked for salvation from the One
securing it for all of us and was granted it immediately.
Before the true meaning of this parable could be discussed, however,
one of our senior members who had successfully retired from his thriving
business, interjected “And that’s how unions were created!”
It took a while before we could get on with our devotional.
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