Frans de Waal is a biologist who teaches in the psychology department at Emory. He and his team taught a group of capuchin monkeys to trade pebbles for pieces of food. I watched a video of a monkey in a crate, separated from the lab worker by an acrylic panel with a few holes in it, large enough for the monkey’s hand. The monkey reaches into a small box of pebbles, takes one, offers it to the lab worker, and receives a juicy piece of cucumber. All of the monkeys in the group have learned this behavior, and when they’re not already full after breakfast, they happily exchange pebbles for food, a dozen times or more in a row.
The team modified the experiment so there were two monkeys in separate crates, side by side.[1] The monkey on the right offers a pebble to the lab worker and receives a piece of cucumber. The monkey on the left watches. Then the monkey on the left offers the lab worker a pebble and gets a piece of cucumber. All is well.
Now the monkey on the right offers the lab worker another pebble and gets a grape – that’s like monkey candy. And the monkey on the left is watching. Now he reaches through the hole, pebble in hand, and the lab worker gives him a piece of cucumber. You can tell he’s not happy. He takes half a bite, and throws the rest into the corner, his eyes on the scene in the other crate, where his buddy gives a pebble and gets a grape.
The monkey on the left gets agitated, grabs a pebble, eagerly reaches through the hole, and puts it into the lab worker’s hand. He gets a piece of cucumber, again, and this time he doesn’t even take a bite: he throws it back through the hole, visibly angry, and starts shaking his crate in protest.
All the capuchins in the group do this. They happily munch on pieces of cucumber until they see their buddy in the other crate who gets to eat a grape and they don’t. It violates what we would call their sense of fairness.
Had the workers in the vineyard not seen what the others were paid, all would have gone home happy, we may safely presume, from the first to the last. It’s like the owner of the vineyard did all he could to make the lack of fairness obvious.
Managers and business owners hear this story and wonder what kind of operation the owner of the vineyard is running. How does he recoup his labor costs?
Union reps listen, and they are adamant that you can’t pay some workers for one hour’s work what their fellow-workers make in an entire day.
Take the story to the corner of the parking lot at Home Depot where out-of-work people gather, waiting for someone to hire them, and they smile. They know how hard it is to make a full day’s wage with hourly pay. They know the desperate disappointment of watching truck after truck drive by.
When Jesus first told this parable, many farmers in Galilee had lost their land, and they had to make a living as day laborers. Mid-size and large farms, many of them owned by absentee landlords, were usually operated with day labor rather than slaves; it was much cheaper, and there was an abundance of landless peasants. “Day-laborers constituted a limitless and disposable fuel … that made the ancient economy run,” writes Stanley Saunders.[2] Day-laborers in Galilee were poor, underemployed, and heavily taxed by the Roman authorities. One denarius, a small Roman coin, appears to have been the going rate for a day of field labor, but a denarius was a poverty wage. For a denarius, you could buy bread to feed a family of four for about three days. For a lamb you had to pay 3-4 denarii; for a simple set of clothes, 30 denarii.[3]
The landowner in the story is peculiar. He goes out early in the morning to hire laborers, which was the usual time. But then he comes back at 9 to hire more, and you say to yourself, “Well, he must have realized that he needed more hands to get the work done.” When he comes back again at noon, you wonder if he knows what he’s doing or if he is one of those rich guys who got himself a vineyard and a winery as a hobby. And then he comes back in the middle of the afternoon. It’s hot, everybody is dreaming about quitting time, and he keeps hiring. You’re running out of explanations that would make sense of this kind of behavior. Is he perhaps not quite right in the head? But that’s not the end of it. The sun is already low in the west when he returns again to the marketplace, and he hires every last worker he can find. In this story, the day begins in the familiar setting of the tough Galilean rural economy, but it ends in a world that looks and feels very different.
Imagine you got up at dawn to go to the corner where they pick up day laborers. You know that if you get hired, you can get some bread on the way home and your family will eat dinner. But you don’t get picked in the first round. You go to the other side, hoping to have better luck over there, but you don’t. The younger ones are hired first. The stronger ones are hired first. So you wait, you got nothing else to do, and just when you decide to call it a day and go home, this landowner shows up and asks you, “Why are you standing here idle all day?”
That stings. You already feel like a left-over person, no longer needed, unnoticed, forgotten, and this man calls you idle. This man who doesn’t know how long you have been on your feet, how hard you have tried to find work, or how hungry you are, and how much you dread coming home tonight with empty hands.
“We’re here because no one has hired us,” you say.
“You also go into the vineyard,” the landowner replies. And you go. You’re not doing it for the money, you don’t even ask him how much he’s paying. You go because … who knows. Perhaps it’s just to show him that he can’t call you idle when all you are is underemployed. You go and work in the vineyard.
Soon the manager calls everybody to line up, starting with those hired last, starting with you. You barely got your hands dirty. How much could it be for an hour’s work? It doesn’t really matter. It won’t be enough anyway. And then the manager puts a coin in your hand, and it’s a full day’s pay.
The news travels fast to the end of the line, where the ones hired first are waiting to be paid. Now imagine you’re one of them. You’ve worked twelve long, hard hours. You are dirty, sweaty, your clothes are sticking to your skin and your back is aching. But you’ve seen the ones who got paid first. You’ve seen their faces, how their eyes lit up with surprise, and your back is already starting to feel better. You move to the front of the line, and the manager puts a coin in your hand. It’s a denarius. One denarius.
You turn to the people around you, and they are just as upset as you are. “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.” You have made them equal to us. You have offended our sense of justice and fairness. Sure, you can do as you please with what is yours, you’re the boss. The air is charged, a thunderstorm is brewing. As a reader, I’m waiting for somebody to step forward and say the words that bring relief and ease the tension. But this is the end of the story: this uncomfortable silence after the landowner asked, “Are you envious because I am generous?” When Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like this, what does he mean?
The story holds the pain of those in every generation who have been treated as disposable people in the marketplace, unwanted, no longer needed, overlooked, and it holds their hope that a very different kind of payday is coming, when no one counts the hours they have put in, and when all receive the full reward. It also holds the pain and the hope of those in the company of sinners whom no one considers worthy of divine reward, and whom Jesus calls and welcomes into the kingdom.
But this story also holds the anger and resentment of those in every generation who worry that too much mercy for others will only breed further lack of effort on their part. All those in the company of the self-made upright who cannot imagine themselves as recipients of gifts they didn’t earn, but whom Jesus calls and welcomes with equal compassion as he welcomes notorious sinners.
This kingdom story holds a mighty surprise, and whether we respond with joy or with grumbling depends entirely on how we see ourselves: Have I been working since the break of dawn, or am I only just beginning to learn how to be a worker in this vineyard where status and entitlement are meaningless?
We rarely complain, it seems to me, about getting more than we deserve. I watch a capuchin monkey happily munching on a grape while his buddy is shaking his crate in protest. The scene feels uncomfortably familiar, like looking into a mirror.
But there’s another scene, one that feels movingly familiar, also from the depths of evolutionary time. De Waal’s research team ran the same cucumber/grape experiment with chimpanzees; and they found that among chimpanzees, sometimes the one who gets the grape waits to see what his partner gets, and refuses the grape until his buddy also gets one.[4] Sometimes, care and concern for the other and a desire for shared joy are stronger than the lonely pleasure of a sweet grape without company.
Sometimes, when Jesus says, “the last will be first, and the first will be last,” it sounds like the great reversal, the cosmic turning of the tables, when the Mighty One brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly.
Sometimes, though, it sounds like a generous leveling, when “the last will be [just like] the first, and the first will be [just like] the last,” when far from anxious comparison and envy, we all rejoice when the work in the vineyard is done.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/08/15/338936897/do-animals-have-morals
[2] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-25/commentary-on-matthew-201-16-5
[3] Ulrich Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (EKK 1/3), 146.
[4] Guy Raz and Frans de Waal, TED Radio Hour, September 5, 2014 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/338936897