UNFAIR!

September 20, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

I was born in the Catskills and grew up in Central New York farm country. My father was a poorly paid school teacher with five kids and he spent his summers working on road crews to make ends meet. When my siblings and I approached him for money we did not have high expectations.

As a result we looked for sources of income elsewhere. We painted, we weeded neighbor’s gardens, we became orderlies in the local nursing home, we trimmed the grass around gravestones at the cemetery.

I was the oldest so the better opportunities came my way. One of our neighbors was Dick Bury, a dairy and hay farmer, who was dependent on hired hands to get the chores done.

I had some wonderful, challenging, back-breaking experiences working for Dick. In the spring I helped pull overflowing sap buckets off the maple trees and pour the sap into large vats where it would be boiled and boiled until it became maple syrup. I was surprised that the sap from the tree was tasteless and definitely not sweet but it was a useful lesson about being patient until the golden syrup was ready for your waffles.

In the summer Dick would mow his hay and mold it into tightly packed 85-pound rectangles that plopped out of the baler every few feet. Several of my friends and I would be hired to lift and toss the bales onto a flat-bed truck driven by Dick.

It was hard work but Dick was generous with breaks and always had a vat of sweet ice tea ready to soothe our throats. My friends and I began work at sunrise and worked through suppertime. When the day was over he paid us for the hours we worked in cash.

Not all of us were able to begin the day at sunrise. Sometimes we had family obligations or other duties and we would join the hay bale crew at noon. We knew we’d take a pay cut for fewer hours of work. But of course that was only fair. Dick Bury was a good and fair man.

In fact, I would go so far as to say Dick would have been constitutionally incapable of paying the same wage to workers who had worked half as many hours as the others. His conscience would not allow it. It would be unfair.

Fairness is one of the fundamental credos of human conduct. Even young children know when they are not being treated equitably. I sometimes think the accusation of “UNFAIR” is among the first words used by kids who think a brother or sister is getting more than she deserves.

We measure our integrity and goodness by whether we are being fair or being treated fairly. We have the Fairness Doctrine. Fair Wage. Fair Play. Fair chance. Fair opportunity.

So how do we understand Jesus’ declaration, in Matthew 20, that all these exemplars of fairness may hold little weight in the Kingdom of God?

Professor Nicholas J. Schaser, of Macalister College, to whom I have turned many times for instruction, helps us parse the Parable of the Vineyard Laborers.

In Jesus’s parable, a landowner hires laborers to work in his vineyard throughout the day (Matthew 20:1–7). He agrees to pay the first group a denarius for the day, then hires additional workers at the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hours—about 9:00 a.m., noon, 3:00 p.m., and 5:00 p.m. At day’s end, he pays the latecomers the same denarius promised to the first workers (20:9–10).

Seeing that the later workers receive the same pay, the first group complains: “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat” (20:12). The landowner replies, “‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you” (20:13–14).

Professor Schaser introduces us to different ways this parable has been interpreted.

“Unfortunately,” he writes, “much traditional interpretation identifies the grumbling group as works-focused Jews or Pharisees, and the subsequent workers as gentiles or Christians.”

That makes little sense, he says. There are no Pharisees in the audience so Jesus has no reason to chastise them for grumbling against the landowner. Jesus is addressing his disciples, so it makes sense that the first laborers represent the first disciples Jesus called to follow him and the latecomers are the followers who came after them.

Rather than centering the laborers, Professor Schaser invites us to consider the householder. Jesus’s parable portrays God’s love and grace toward those who follow him. Before any work begins, the householder enters a binding agreement with the first laborers and promises their pay. This reflects God’s covenantal faithfulness: human effort does not earn the reward but flows from the grace of a covenant already established.

The householder also continues seeking workers throughout the day. “About five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’

Although the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition’s wording—“standing around” and “standing here idle”—may suggest indifference or laziness, the Greek simply describes them as “without work” (argōs).

In the parable of the vineyard, Professor Schaser notes, we are reminded of the command God gave Israel through Moses: “Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deuteronomy 15:10–11).

The generous householder—God—offers work and purpose to everyone he encounters.

What could be fairer than that? This is good news for each of us. God doesn’t care if we are cradle Lutherans or lapsed Lutherans, whether we are unchurched, whether we are good or bad, whether we are just or unjust, whether we are worthy or unworthy, or whether we are late to faith.

No matter who we are, whenever we come to the vineyard of faith, God is not measuring your worth by when you clocked in. When God says, “You also go into the vineyard,” the full rewards of the Kingdom are yours by grace.

Like the “generous” householder (Matthew 20:15), God seeks those who need meaningful work and extends to all the grace of a living wage in the Lord’s vineyard.

And that is no reason to grumble.