New Testament : The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard? They must have been astounded when they received the same pay as everyone else. Naturally, they’re frustrated. They’ve worked all day long, and the landowner has made these latecomers “equal” to them. This is precisely the situation that the first-century Jews find themselves in. They were God’s chosen people. They’ve served Yahweh for generations. They’ve been blessed, and they’ve been disciplined. They’ve been waiting for a Messiah to come to rescue them from Rome and reestablish them as God’s unique, chosen nation.
Jesus often uses parables to reveal what the kingdom of heaven is like. He portrays how one enters the kingdom and who the different characters are. In this Parable of the Laborers or Workers in the Vineyard, there are things that He tells the disciples and us about the grace of God and that God is always more than fair. Here is a discussion on this parable and what Jesus means in giving it.
The master of the house would seem to be God and the vineyard is the place where those servants who have been called to work for the master as laborers will enter into the work. The laborers are those who have been called and saved by God. They enter into the work or their calling by God under the guidance of the master, which is Jesus Christ. In another place in the Scriptures, Jesus uses this symbolism of believers being used by God to labor for the Lord as in Matthew 9:37-38 where He says “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
In the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), Jesus compares workers’ wages to the kingdom of heaven. He describes a landowner who hires groups of workers at various points in the day. His first workers agree to work for one denarius, equal to about one day’s wages. As the day goes on, workers who began at the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hour are likewise hired with the promise of being paid “whatever is right” at the end of the day (Matt. 20:4).
Jesus spent a great deal of His ministry announcing the coming of God’s kingdom and overcoming first-century presumptions by teaching people to recognize that kingdom. And a lot of His parables focused on communicating valuable truths about this kingdom. One misunderstanding that Jesus needed to clarify was the idea that the Jews held a special insider relationship with God. From the very beginning, God told Abraham that all the nations of the world would be blessed through his offspring (Genesis 22:18), but as far as the Israelites were concerned, these other nations would never be as blessed as they were. See even more info with the The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard video on YouTube.