It's not fair
Sermon Notes 20th September
Matthew 20:1-16 by Desiree Snyman
It’s not fair. Is this your reaction to the parable? It’s not fair?
The conventional interpretation of the parable is that God is the vineyard owner and God is generous. The parable stresses the lavishness of God’s grace and our inability to earn favour with God. We, like the workers, are reprimanded for grumbling, “It’s not fair,” and urged to imitate the generosity of God. Even our collect leads us in this direction: Loving and righteous God, your boundless generosity exceeds all that we can desire or deserve, and you give to the last worker all you promised to the first: liberate us from all jealousy and greed…
I wholeheartedly disagree with this interpretation. I think it domesticates a deeply disturbing parable. It spiritualizes a story about land, wealth, labour, unemployment, ownership and wages and, in doing so, risks protecting us from precisely the questions Jesus is asking. Before we automatically decide that the wealthy and powerful landowner represents God, could we at least allow the context to make us suspicious of that assumption.
Text and Context of Matthew 20
Immediately before this parable, a rich young man asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Do you see the word inherit? Jesus tells him to sell his possessions, give to the poor and follow him. The man goes away grieving because he has great wealth and won’t do that. Jesus then says it is extraordinarily difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God and then tells the parable of a wealthy landowner. The owner has land. The workers do not. They have only their bodies and their capacity to work.
“Piece workers” were something Marius and I grew up with in South Africa. Unemployed people would line the roads, vulnerable and desperate for work. Someone needing labour for the day would stop and choose some of them. Others would remain behind. When I lived in Grahamstown, now Makanda, in one of the poorest parts of South Africa, I heard a phrase that has haunted me ever since: “You will never understand how expensive it is to be poor.” Poverty costs money. When you have no car, transport costs more and takes longer. When you cannot afford to buy in bulk, food costs more. When you have no savings, every unexpected expense becomes a crisis. Poverty does not simply mean having less. Poverty itself extracts a price.
Having left some of them waiting almost the entire day, the landowner asks: Why are you standing here idle all day? My blood boils. They answer simply: Because no one has hired us. There it is. They have not chosen unemployment. They have not chosen poverty. They are standing there because no one has hired them. The person with the most economic power is questioning the people with the least: Why aren’t you working? Why haven’t you found a job? Why can’t you afford the rent? Why are you receiving Job Seeker? The workers answer: Because no one has hired us.
In fact, I have some questions for this wealthy landowner. What is wrong with you that you have had to come back several times to hire more workers? Don’t you know what the hell you are doing? You own the vineyard. You know how large it is. You know when the grapes need harvesting. Surely you know roughly how many workers it takes to bring in a crop. So why do you keep returning to the marketplace? Are you incompetent? Or are you stingy? Are you trying to get away with hiring as few workers as possible? We don’t know. Jesus doesn’t tell us. Once we stop assuming that this man represents God, we are free to notice just how strange his behaviour is.
The text and our context
The parable can speak rather uncomfortably into Australia. In September 2026, JobSeeker for a single person without children is about $404 a week. ACOSS places the poverty line at approximately $584 a week. People receiving JobSeeker are expected to survive substantially below the poverty line.
Yet there are other forms of government assistance that we seldom call welfare. People who own property, shares and investments also receive significant financial benefits through the tax system. We call those tax concessions. Treasury estimates that the capital gains tax discount for individuals and trusts will result in approximately $21.8 billion of forgone government revenue in 2025–26.
The benefits of tax concessions associated with investment and asset ownership are disproportionately concentrated among people with higher incomes and greater wealth. This raises an uncomfortable question. Why do we call government assistance to someone who owns almost nothing “welfare”, while assistance to people who own assets becomes a “tax concession”? The question is not whether Australia has welfare. The question is whose welfare we notice. We hear a lot about wealth trickling down. We hear much less about wealth trickling up.
This is not about wealthy people being bad people. That is far too simplistic. It is about systems. Wealth compounds. So does poverty. Or, as that phrase from Makanda reminds me: you will never understand how expensive it is to be poor.
Ownership
The landowner says something extraordinary: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” The biblical tradition answers: No. “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” The landowner owns the vineyard, but he did not make the soil. He did not make the sun. He did not make the rain. He did not make the water that keeps the vines alive. Does ownership really give him the right to do whatever he wants?
Here this parable meets our Season of Creation theme of Living Water. Who owns water? Who gets to use it? Who gets enough? Who gets to pollute it? Who profits from it? And who pays when it is damaged? Water exposes the illusion that anything is simply mine. The water flowing through my property was somewhere else before it reached me, and it will flow somewhere else after it leaves me. What I do with it affects my neighbour, the fish, the wetlands, the river and eventually the ocean. Water crosses fences. Water ignores title deeds.
Living Water reminds us that creation is not simply a collection of things we own. Creation is a community of relationships in which we belong. This idea runs all the way through the Bible. Just because something belongs to you does not mean you can do whatever you like with it. Sabbath places limits upon endless production. Gleaning means farmers cannot claim every part of the harvest for themselves. In Sabbath Economics every seven years debts are released, the land and creatures rest – no seeds are planted or harvested, and animals are undomesticated for the year, free to be feral. Jubilee, every 7th cycle of 7 years, restores land to its original owners and liberates people from bondage. Repeatedly, through Sabbath economics and Jubilee Politics, the Bible, places limits on wealth and ownership when they hurt our neighbour. Read Deuteronomy 15 and Leviticus 25 for Sabbath Economics and Jubilee Politics, neither chapter would be impressed by the landowner.
At the end of the day, every worker receives a denarius. We can call the landowner generous. Tomorrow morning nothing has changed. The owner still owns the vineyard. The labourers will return to the marketplace and wait again. One day’s generosity has not changed the system that made them vulnerable in the first place. Yet Sabbath economics would transform that completely with justice and rest and not charity. That, surely, is the difference between charity and justice.
Charity feeds someone who is hungry. Justice asks why they cannot afford food. Charity helps someone pay their rent. Justice asks why secure housing has become unaffordable. We need charity because people are hungry now, but the kingdom of God cannot be reduced to charity. The kingdom also asks why people are hungry, who holds the power and what needs to change. Life isn’t always fair. But justice and fairness are not quite the same thing. We do not have to accept systems that distribute dignity, security and the earth’s abundance unjustly.
Concluding comments
Today’s parable of the vineyard workers is the lens through which we ask ourselves two questions: How do we read Scripture? How does Scripture read us? If we immediately identify ourselves with the workers who have laboured all day and identify the landowner with God, the parable becomes a lovely story about God being more generous than we are.
What happens if we stand among those still waiting in the marketplace? What happens if we ask not simply whether the workers received a fair wage, but why one person owns the vineyard while everybody else must wait to be chosen? And what happens when we recognise that many of us are not actually standing among the workers at all?
Jesus’ mandate is summarised in the Our Father: may it be on earth as it is in heaven. Heaven is not simply somewhere we go after death. Heaven is God’s transformed future breaking into the present. Therefore, the question of the kingdom of heaven is also the question of how we organise life on earth: who owns, who works, who eats, who accumulates, who waits, and whether there is enough for all. It means allowing the Gospel to disturb the economic arrangements that have become invisible to us. Jesus invites us to pray and work for the kingdom of God: on earth as it is in heaven. In God’s promised future people have homes, food and dignity; therefore, the people of God work to make that future a present reality. Heaven is a world in which land, labour, food, shelter, rivers and water are not simply commodities to be bought or owned or used and abused. They are gifts. Gifts received from God. Gifts held in trust for one another. Gifts shared within the whole community of creation. “May it be on earth as it is in heaven” means working as partners with God in mending a hurt and hurting world, until the abundance of creation is no longer treated as the privilege of a few, but as gift. Gift enough for all.
· Sources: Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), JobSeeker and poverty data, 2026; Parliamentary Budget Office, Cost of property investor tax breaks, 2026.
· See https://www.acoss.org.au/media-releases/?media_release=more-than-9-in-10-people-on-jobseeker-struggling-to-afford-food-as-unemployment-climbs-new-report. ACOSS is the Australian Council of Social Service, a national advocate supporting people affected by poverty, disadvantage and inequality, and the peak council for community services nationally.
· See Parliamentary Budget Office report. https://www.pbo.gov.au/publications-and-data/publications/costings/cost-property-investor-tax-breaks?utm_source=chatgpt.com.