Sermon on the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard by Finn Chirnside
A sermon by Finn Chirnside at Sumner Redcliffs Church on Matthew 20:1–16.
Summary
Finn Chirnside, Associate Vicar at Sumner Redcliffs Church, preaches on the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard from Matthew 20:1–16, situating it within a broader sermon series through Matthew's Gospel. He argues that the parable is not primarily about economics but about the condition of the human heart — specifically envy, entitlement, and the inability to accept God's radical generosity. Chirnside draws on the story of Jonah as the clearest Old Testament parallel to the parable's logic: that mercy is extended to those who do not deserve it, and that this offends those who believe they do. His central claim is that the gospel is fundamentally unfair — and that this is precisely what makes it good news. He closes by calling the congregation to move from envy as a default posture to rejoicing, and to live with a generosity that is countercultural and inexplicable to those outside the faith.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Series Context
Finn Chirnside: What a fun passage. Don't we just love it when Jesus throws something at you and you're like, cool, cheers mate, appreciate that one, that's awesome. That's very much how I feel about this one. There are not many passages in Scripture where I read it and go, oh, I don't like that — that really smacks me in the face. But this one is definitely quite high up the list.
If we haven't met before, my name's Finn. I'm the lay minister here — not ordained, no collar. Some of you will love that, some of you will be like, yeah, whatever. I have two children out there and they might come running up halfway through, so if you see children trying to get some attention, those are my children.
As a church, we've been spending some time within Matthew's Gospel over the past few weeks, and the readings from the lectionary have all come from a similar block of teachings within the middle to latter parts of Matthew's Gospel. The week before last, we talked about Jesus's framework for conflict resolution — how the church can be an effective witness to the peacemaking gospel of Jesus in a world that's tearing itself apart and, let's be honest, isn't very good at conflict resolution. Last week, Harry talked about forgiveness, and specifically asked the question: what does it mean to forgive, and what do I do if I can't forgive?
One of the overarching themes we keep coming back to is that Jesus is not laying down new laws that must be followed no matter what the context is. If he is, we're all stuffed — and as I said two weeks ago, basically every bloke in the room would have no eyes. What he is creating, challenging, and ultimately casting a vision for is what his community of followers — his church, which is us — will look like, and must inevitably come to look like if you follow his teachings.
Jesus is primarily concerned with the transformation and the motivations of the heart. Because from the heart, in biblical thought, flows all things — whether it's evil, or kindness, or even just laziness. It comes from your heart posture. And if we view his teachings as law, it can easily become this thing where we follow them with the wrong heart motivation, and you're actually back at square one. So you can bring about some conflict resolution between two people, but you can be a real bully and think they're both fools. You can stop looking at porn, but then you can just keep looking at men or women in horrifically degrading ways. You can give to the church, but be a really selfish person. Jesus wants your inner being changed, sanctified, healed, and set free. All this language describes that journey of following Jesus, and it begins with the renovation of your inner self.
And this is one of those parables where Jesus just — boom — goes for the jugular. There are layers here, so it sounds on the surface like it's pretty chill, but the more you open the rabbit hole, you're like, oh heck, I don't like this one. I am going to miss things. You Bible nerds, I'm sorry in advance. There are things I will not say. I could take two or three hours on this one. I'm not going to, for the sake of your eardrums and the awareness that my vocal tone is irritating, so over time you'll just be done. I want to have some mercy on you.
The Parable and the Workers' Anger
On the face of it, this parable is communicating a way of relating to money that is radically countercultural. It was countercultural in Jesus' day, and it's countercultural in our day. The landowner picks up workers throughout the day, right? He agrees a contract with each — that's important. He says he will pay them what is right. And at the end of the day, he lines them up. The workers hired most recently, who only did probably about an hour of work, are paid first. He pays them a denarius, which is about a day's wages. And then, despite all the contracts and all the setup that's happened, you can't help having a little bit of sympathy for the guys who were hired earlier, because there's probably this little feeling of like, oh, maybe we're going to get some more money then. Except it's not. They're all paid the same.
And the workers who were hired earlier are fuming. Matthew 20:11–12: When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. "These who were hired last worked only one hour," they said, "and you have made them equal to us, who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day."
The word "grumbling" here is not doing itself any favours, although it's probably the right translation. It's not a good thematic translation. What it should probably say is something like: they expressed smouldering discontent. The reference it's making is to when Israel gets set free from Egypt and they grumble against God — and it's not like, oh, I don't really like what you're doing, God. It's the seeds of revolution. This is what it's trying to connotate. There's something deeper going on here. It's not a gossip session of being like, I don't really like his haircut. It's a deeper level of: this is done, we've got to end this.
So why are they so upset? There are a couple of things culturally at play here, and I think they translate pretty well to us.
The first assumption is this: those who do more should get more. That sounds pretty normal to most of us, right? And the caveat here is that the people who did the most are still getting paid fairly. They're still getting paid well. It's not like they're getting paid unjustly. They're getting paid what is right, according to their contract. But in paying the later workers the same — this is the real catch — the landowner has dishonoured the earlier workers by, as the text says, making them equal to us. In an honour-shame culture like the ancient Near East, this is a big deal. By evening the playing field, what the landowner has done in their minds has dramatically lowered the social status of the earlier workers, by basically saying: you're not worth your work, and therefore your status is worth so little to me that I feel I can pay these people who did one hour the same. Now, that's an incorrect view of the world, but that's how they're perceiving it.
The second assumption comes from a way of viewing the world that makes perfect sense in that time — scarcity mindset. There's only so much money, only so much food, only so much time. And the way they would view it as well: there's only so much honour. So if some person gets honour, another person must lose honour. Once again, it's that honour-shame thing. Someone will go without. So the later workers receive honour, the other ones lose honour. What it's trying to hint at is that the landowner's generosity to the later workers has actually caused the earlier workers' loss. He's actually robbed them of something. That's how they perceive it. That's not what's happening, but that's how they perceive it.
I think we can all agree that we've totally moved on from worrying about having enough stuff, right? We don't worry about that. We don't worry about what people think of us. We don't worry about our status. We don't worry about food or money. No, we're sorted. That was just an ancient Near East problem and now we've nailed it. We're ahead of the curve.
God's Generosity and the Call to Radical Giving
And Jesus offers a view of the world where the landowner is generous in his distribution of resource, and the way he does it doesn't fit into any socioeconomic box. Sorry to ruin that one for you. You can't box an idea like that into anything. The landowner chooses, out of his own volition, to bless those who have not worked for it, simply because he's kind. All people receive the same gift. In one of the commentaries I was reading on Matthew, there's this line: common practice does not constrain his generosity. And I thought that was good. God does not abide by our ever-shifting social conventions around economics, whatever and wherever in history that is.
And the church has actually always understood this. This is why a key marker of the Jesus people has always been absurd generosity. Because in biblical thought, you can't out-give God, because he's the one who gave everything.
If you jump back to Genesis — beginning of the Bible, good time — we encounter a world that is filled with abundance, that humanity is called to steward and to enjoy. We didn't do anything to deserve it. I don't recall us in the primordial soup writing an essay saying, this is why we should get a whole bunch of stuff from God. That didn't happen. It was just given as a gift by a generous creator.
However, one of the great tragedies of Scripture, and then the wider human story by extension, is our squandering and misuse of that gift. Whether it comes from malevolent intentions, from foolishness, from greed, from mistrust in God, or unbelief in a good and generous God — humanity hoards, and we create more for our little tribes and kingdoms. Whether that's our families, lineages, dynasties, just ourselves, our works, whatever that is — we all have our little tribes and we hoard. We can't help hoarding for the sake of it. It's the natural posture, even if that comes at the expense of others. It has always been this way, and until Jesus returns, it will always be this way. "You do you," which is like the modern West in a nutshell, has in its own way been one of the mantras of all human civilisation. It just might play out differently. It might be you do you for your family, you do you for your culture, but ultimately it's preservation of little kingdoms.
So the challenge to believers in Jesus — myself included, because I was born in the modern West and I'm wearing a jacket by Disney — is to live in a way that radically shames and outdoes the conventions of the culture we're in. It doesn't come from a need to impress or to earn God's love; we've already got it. It comes from the truth that we are deeply loved and we will be deeply cared for by God.
This is not where I transition to say, by the way, we're doing a building campaign, we'd love some money, please. I'm not going to do that. But I want to challenge you to consider praying about how you can outdo our culture in generosity, factoring in your means, obviously. Not everyone here has money. So I'm not saying go and sell your house and give it away. But depending on your circumstances, there are things you probably could do — myself included — because we've got this worldview of Jesus as the generous one who calls us to live differently.
And here should be the response: people who aren't Christians, and even some Christians, should look at you and go, well, that's silly. Here's an example. This is something that happened to us, and I've told this before, but I think it's so daft that it's a great story. A few years ago, I felt called to go and do my theology degree, and I was like, how the heck are we going to survive? What are we going to do? And then a friend of mine calls up and says, hey, really random, we feel like God's telling us to give you $200 a week for two years to help pay your rent — which I think equated to $20,000 or $30,000, I can't quite remember. They had money, but they didn't have that much money. But they were like, this is what we've been called to do. So they did it. They could have paid off more of their mortgage. They could have gone on another holiday. They could have done all these different things. When I've told my friends who aren't Christians, you can see their brains just not compute the concept. Because that's just daft. It doesn't line up with the way the world works. And that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Because that's ultimately, when you go back to Jesus' parable, that's the deal. You're looking at the landowner and you're going, why are you seriously that kind to those guys? Are you sure?
The Kingdom of God and Who Can Enter
So with all this in mind, you then zoom out and look at the other thing Jesus is touching on, which is entrance to God's kingdom. The phrase Jesus uses to tie the financial and the eternal together is this: the first will be last and the last will be first.
In Matthew's Gospel, the kingdom of God is the most consistent theme. And one of the defining questions of Jesus' teachings is: who can enter God's kingdom? The common assumption of the day was that the kingdom of God was really only available for Israelites, and if you were lucky, if you converted to Judaism. And within that, there were special classes of people — the best, the brightest, the holiest, the richest — who for the most part considered themselves to be God's actually special ones. We call them now Pharisees, Sadducees, the religious leaders of the Jewish time.
The religious leaders were formed by the story of Israel. And actually, to an extent, fair enough. Because the story of Israel was one where Israel gets called as a nation to be a light to the world, to produce a seed who will defeat death — very quick summary of the story of Israel. And God had promised that they would be blessed if they lived by his way. They didn't. They oppressed the poor. They did a really fun method of land fraud, which was called moving your boundary markers. So what you're supposed to do: you had boundary stones to say, this is my land and this is your land — like old-day fences. And then landowners would come along and just go katonk, and move the boundary stones a little bit. And then they would debt-trap people and get them into debt cycles so that they could take their land. And every 50 years, it was all supposed to reset. There was a thing called Jubilee, and it was all supposed to reset so that the family land you had was meant to go back to you. So even if you got into a debt spiral, 50 years later, your kids would get the land back. We don't have any proof that Israel ever did it, but that was meant to happen. So what you had was this justice-injustice reversal mechanism that never played out. That was something God gets genuinely, really angry about. Because his thought is: it's not your land, it's my land. I gave it to you and I gave it to those people. How dare you accumulate that level of land and do it at the expense of others?
They also did tax fraud. They mistreated slaves. And they killed their children as well. So as a result, the kingdom of Israel was torn in two, and people were exiled to Babylon and to Assyria separately — there are two separate stories. Read the book of Kings. It's a great time. It's not a great time. It's terrible. But it's a real thing.
The religious leaders were formed by this story. And the prophets in the Old Testament were promising this new king who would come and bring the kingdom of God about on earth — who would restore the creation itself to how it was always meant to be and reverse death itself. So the religious leaders are like, dang, that sounds pretty cool, I'll have some of that. So they try to create Israel to be this holy nation. But they miss the mark. Because instead of living holy as Scripture calls them to, they basically do what I call a holiness algorithm. They just come up with these points of like, if we do this, and this, and this, and this, then God will come back and it'll be great. That's not a bad thing, but they miss the point. Because the diagnosis of Jesus, and of the Old Testament, is that all of these things flow from a disorder of the human heart. Augustine would call this disordered desires — saying that our primary thing should be the desire for God, but sin means that we go and desire different things instead, whether that's money, fame, sex, power, all these different things. We put those in play, and then if God's lucky, he has fourth or fifth place, but usually with most people he doesn't. And basically that goes against the fabric of creation itself, and therefore brings death and destruction into the world.
Jeremiah, the prophet, would say: the heart is deceitful above all things. What had happened was that the hearts of the religious leaders had become hard and unreceptive to the word of God. They had got so caught up in performance that they had come to feel like they were entitled to things from God — particularly access to God's kingdom. Moses and Jeremiah and David all talk about the need for a new heart to be born within humanity.
The Landowner's Rebuke and the Warning of Envy
And I would argue that the reason the landowner pulls the last workers first and gives them their pay first is to expose the problem with the earlier workers, and then by extension the religious leaders, and then by extension us. We must never forget that with Jesus, all exposure, critique, and rebuke, as harsh as it may seem, is done for the sake of love. Sometimes he needs to get our attention by hitting us where it hurts. Parents, right? If your kid does something that's really not okay, are you just going to be like, you know what, that little bit of violence — good job? No, you're going to enact some form of whatever your parenting philosophy allows, but you're going to do something about it. That's just what Jesus does. Psalm 141:5: Let a righteous man strike me — that is a kindness. Let him rebuke me — that is oil on my head.
And what matters before God is a heart that is humble and open and repentant. If you know the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector — great parable, it's a good one. There are two blokes, a Pharisee and a tax collector. The Pharisee, he's got all his robes on, he's looking real nice, he's got all his jewels on, he's chilling in the temple, and he's praying to God and he's like, man, God, I thank you so much that I'm the coolest dude here. I've got my Louis Vuitton bag, I'm chilling, I'm having a good time. My house has got ten bedrooms, it's pretty cool. I've got a big pool. And I thank you that I'm not like that tax collector, or that prostitute, or that person over there. I'm so much better than them. And I thank you that you have justified me because of how much I observe your laws. Look how well I tithe.
And then you've got a tax collector who comes along. He won't even look at the temple because he is so reverent towards God. And he knows he's a mess. And he beats his breast and says, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And then Jesus says, which one of them is justified? The religious system of the day would say it's the Pharisee, because he's the guy who's done the stuff and he's got the blessing. But Jesus is like, no, it's the tax collector. He's the one with the open, repentant heart. He's the one who's willing to change. He's the one who's willing to actually acknowledge his position in the world.
That's not very fun. The attitude of the heart isn't exclusive to religious leaders of Israel's day. Envy is a problem in all of us. Can you seriously tell me you've never looked at someone and gone, they don't deserve that? Oh, they didn't work for it. They're not good enough. They're not smart enough. They're not attractive enough. All of us.
And there's this little thing Jesus does which hurt my brain slightly when I found it while reading this week, because I didn't know this. On the face of it, Jesus' use of the word "friend" — so Jesus in verse 13 calls him "friend," right? And you'd probably go, that's positive. He's rebuked him, but he's called him friend — that's nice, or at least it's neutral. In the New Testament, the main word used for friend is philos, which covers a lot of ground and is part of the root word for philosophy — philos, sophia, a love of wisdom. It can mean friend, dear, or loving. So when Jesus says the beautiful verse, "you are no longer my servants but my friends," he's saying philos. He doesn't use that here. He uses a word called hetairos, and it only occurs three times in the New Testament, and it's only Jesus who uses it. Hetairos can be more translated as comrade, but it carries an ironic undertone. So it's already a little bit like, oh, something's going on here.
He uses it in this parable, and he uses it two other times. One time is in a parable where a man is at a wedding — and the wedding represents the kingdom of God — and he doesn't have the right clothes on. He doesn't have wedding clothes on. And the wedding host, who's representing God, goes, dude, where are your wedding clothes? Hetairos, where are your wedding clothes? And that person stands there dumbfounded and goes, oh, jeepers, I don't know. And then he's kicked out of the wedding. What it's trying to imply is someone who's tried to enter God's kingdom through a philosophical back door, or tried to earn God's favour through works, but still has a hard heart — they've missed the point. So you can imagine the religious leaders getting smacked in the face with this one, because it's directed at them.
The other time is when Judas, his betrayer, brings the guards to arrest him, and Jesus says, do what you came for — hetairos. Three times, all in the negative. I would argue that Jesus' use of "friend" here is actually a warning. It's subtle, but within the Greek and Hebrew context, I think it becomes quite clear. Envy, comparison, and contempt is a dangerous road that very quickly leads to death.
And this makes sense when you expand a bit. Verse 15: Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous? The NRSV translates that more literally as: Is your eye evil because I am good? The connotation of the phrase "evil eye" is one of being filled with resentment at someone else's success, or having an aggressive desire to see loss or harm come to the one you envy. And the phrase "because I am good" seems to indicate that we simply are unable to accept how kind and generous God is, even to those who we don't like, who we envy, and who we want to see harm come to.
The Story of Jonah
There's one story in the Old Testament that really strikes me about this, and it's the story of Jonah. If you haven't heard the story of Jonah before, I'll do a quick rundown. Jonah is this prophet — lovely guy. His dad was named Amittai, which is my kid's name. That's very fun. That's actually where I got it from. And Jonah gets this word from the Lord, and the Lord says, go to this place called Nineveh and tell them that they're all in trouble, and if they don't repent, they're going to get blown off the face of the earth. And Jonah's like, no, don't want to do it. So he runs away.
For context, Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, which, as I mentioned earlier, had swept into the northern kingdom of Israel and ripped it apart. They'd taken people into exile, and it was a massacre. It was horrific. I won't even say some of the ways they tortured the Israelites. And Jonah is probably either living under Assyrian occupation or sometime after it, but the memory of what happened is fresh in his mind. He would have heard the stories. For the northern kingdom, this was their 9/11. It's not an exaggeration to say this. This was their Hiroshima.
So Jonah runs away. He's like, I'm not going near those guys. And then the Lord chases him on the boat. And it turns out the pagan sailors are the most Christian people in the room. They go, clearly someone's angry with you — what's going on? And Jonah basically tries, depending on how you read it, probably tries to get himself killed in order to not be sent to Nineveh. He's like, if I get thrown overboard, then I'll die, and it'll be great — I won't have to go. And then God's like, hold it one minute. And then the giant fish comes along — and all your atheists in the room are like, oh, I don't know about this bit. Ignore it. We can talk about that later. The giant fish comes along and swallows him up. And Jonah goes, oh, heck. He spends three days and three nights in the giant fish. And then he does this really profound poem where he talks about how he's repented and changed. And then he gets spat out. And he's like, all right, stuff it, I'll go to Nineveh.
He goes to Nineveh and does this very short sermon. Commentators don't know if what he says in the book is literally all he says. But some commentators suggest — and I would agree with it, based on humans — that when it says "forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown," which is what Jonah says, he doesn't say who's going to do it. He doesn't say why it's going to happen. He doesn't say how it's going to happen. The suggestion seems to be that Jonah is doing the bare minimum that God has told him to, because he really still wants them to get overthrown. So he's like, God, I'm totally listening to you, buddy. But then — what happens? Nineveh repents. These horrific, cruel murderers go, oh, golly, I don't know about this one, and they repent. Even the animals fast. It's crazy. And they say, maybe God will relent.
And then Jonah still thinks he knows better. Despite all of that, he thinks he knows better. So this is chapter four:
"But to Jonah, this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, 'Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? This is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.'"
"But the Lord replied, 'Is it right for you to be angry?'"
Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. He made himself a shelter, sat in its shade, and waited to see what would happen. He still kind of hoped that God would change his mind and send a little comet — kaboom. He's kind of hoping it'll still happen.
"Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort. And Jonah was very happy about the plant. But at dawn the next day, God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, 'It would be better for me to die than to live.'"
"But God said to Jonah, 'Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?' 'It is,' he said. 'And I'm so angry I wish I were dead.'"
"But the Lord said, 'You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left — and also many animals?'"
That's how it ends. And Jonah doesn't respond. He doesn't tell us what he thinks. He doesn't tell us what he does. The question is as much to Jonah as to us. And it's basically this: it's not fair. Can you handle it? Can you accept it?
The Gospel Is Not Fair
The radical mercy in the Jonah story is perhaps the clearest Old Testament picture of the gospel. These people didn't deserve it and they got it anyway. Just like the workers didn't deserve the full pay — they got it anyway. And just so we're clear, literally nothing about the gospel is fair.
It's not fair that Jesus calls some people out of Egypt and they reject him in Jerusalem. It's not fair that people who believed in him as Messiah then got him killed before a man called Pilate. It's not fair that the religious leaders somehow managed to contort the system to make it work in their favour. It's not fair that Pilate was more interested in saving his job than freeing a man he knew was innocent. It's not fair that all of his friends abandoned him in the hour of need. And it's certainly not fair that he was whipped to the point where skin draped off his back. It's not fair that he was forced to carry his own cross — and then there was another man who, when Jesus couldn't carry it anymore, was made to pick it up and carry it himself. Actually, fun fact: there's evidence that that man's son becomes a Christian. Anyway. It's not fair that he was crucified alongside two criminals who, according to the Roman legal system, deserved it. It's not fair that he died for you and for me and, as Paul says, became sin so that we may become the righteousness of God. That ain't fair. In no way is that fair. That's crazy.
If God played fair, you and I are stuffed. And I'm not trying to say humans have nothing redeemable about them — I'm not full total depravity here. But I'm saying, if you put human and God side by side, for us to go to God and say, you know what, I've got some ideas about how you could do this morality thing — really? Are you sure about that? But that's the modern West. And that's actually most of human history, but particularly the modern West going, I like the idea of religion, but let me change most of it to what I think is good, because Freud and Nietzsche told me so. Humans cannot hold a candle to God, no matter how hard we try. Even if our intentions are good or seem good, as we've already talked about, our hearts lead us astray. Then we become like the workers, dictating to the landowner how things should work.
But in spite of all that, it is not fair that Jesus sends his Spirit to live with us. What do we do to earn that? To become his temple — that's what the church is — to be empowered for good works that change lives. The church is the most transformative force in human history. Just undeniably, the most transformative force in human history. What do we do to earn that? It's not fair that we don't have to impress God to earn his love — we're just given it. It's not fair that anyone who is willing and repentant, just like the Ninevites, can access God's kingdom and begin a drastically wonderful life, now and then into eternity. None of it's fair. But my gosh, it's good news.
The Call to Rejoice
So the shift we have to make — and I think one of the best witnesses we could possibly make in the modern West — is this: you move from envy as your default to rejoicing. And I'm including myself in that. I'm not sitting there like, you silly people. I am fully shaped by the culture. I'm including myself in this.
Rejoicing because we have been invited into the family of Jesus. Rejoicing because people of all backgrounds and stories are just as welcome as you are. People of all political opinions, people of all stances on certain things that you disagree with, are actually just as welcome as you are. People no matter how rich or poor they are — just as welcome as you are. Rejoicing and living in such a way that testifies to the generosity and the abundant care of the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. And rejoicing because we don't have to bear the burden of being good enough or working hard enough. We're simply loved because we're loved by a generous God. And that's pretty good news.