Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

4219 words long.

Published on 2024-05-13

An admission of ignorance preceded my salvation. Sometime around March of 1985, I was having a conversation about the Bible with a Christian named John. He complimented me on how well I knew the Bible. I told him I knew some things about the Bible, but confessed that I didn't understand it. I believe that moment of honesty was an important step toward faith. A few weeks later, that man led me through the sinner's prayer and I became a Christian.

Over a decade ago, while reading Jesus' Parable of the Soils, I realized that I did not understand the parables as well as I though I did. This new admission of ignorance preceded a new round of learning and growth. If we ever think we have learned everything about the messages found in the Bible, we are deceived and risk halting our spiritual progress.

When Jesus taught his disciples the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), he was talking to us, too. The story is about workers called to work in a man's vineyard at different times throughout the day. At the end of the day, the owner pays all the workers the same, regardless of hours worked, and the ones who showed up first grouse about it. The workers who showed up late are us. When I consider the blessings I have received from the Lord throughout my life, the vast knowledge at my disposal, the wealth of my household, and every other modern convenience, I am tempted to agree with those men who showed up first. I do not deserve it but I am grateful for it.

When I was analyzing Matthew as I wrote Peace, like Solomon Never Knew, I discovered that the whole Gospel is relentlessly focused on evangelism, which is bringing a harvest of souls into the kingdom of God. Matthew is structured according to many patterns. First and foremost is the Harvest Pattern. That pattern may be found at least seventeen times, from small parables, to groups of chapters, to the whole book. Next is the Growth Pattern of Solomon, whose twenty-eight times match the twenty-eight chapters of Matthew. That pattern overlays a prophetic clock onto all of Matthew, with each chapter holding a prophecy for one era of history, from the time of Christ's first coming until his second.

I also discovered that some parables contain miniature prophetic clocks that span long stretches of time. The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is one of them. Here is the analysis of that parable excerpted from the chapter "A Minute Look at Matthew" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.

Many Patterns

As Lord of the Harvest, Jesus taught us the harvest pattern by his example in resisting Satan’s temptation and by his parable of the soils and the seed. As Lord of the Sabbath, he is the Prince of Peace, the one who invites us into God’s sabbath of eternal rest. That means that the path to peace Solomon outlined in Ecclesiastes 3 is also his path. Matthew has Jesus informing us in 12:42 that “now something greater than Solomon is here.”

Is that it? Does Matthew leave us with a mere declaration that Jesus knows the path to peace and a promise that he shall one day reap a bountiful harvest? Having deduced the harvest pattern and the rhyme and reason of the twenty- eight times, I undertook to discover whether Matthew had more to say about these two patterns. Since several psalms and prophets like Job exhibit these patterns, I expected to find a few instances scattered about the gospel. After all, Matthew defined one of them and if Jesus is greater than Solomon, the seasons of Ecclesiastes might make an appearance as well.

Imagine my shock! I didn’t find one or two applications of the harvest pattern – I found seventeen! (Recall that seventeen is the Biblical number of complete victory.) In fact, the whole of Matthew is divided into seven sections according to this pattern, and each section contains two or three smaller examples of the pattern. Look closer; each of the seven larger sections also references four of Solomon’s times, in proper order.

Matthew does not repeat Ecclesiastes. That book lays out God’s plan for time – for the world’s rise and fall and the church’s path to peace. The gospel writer has a tighter focus. His purpose is to lay out God’s majestic plan for spreading the good news to the whole world. It breaks the task of evangelism into five main revivals or explosions in missionary activity, plus instructions for the end times, beyond the last revival, when the task becomes surpassingly difficult. By correlating Matthew, the Pentateuch, and Psalm 107, we can see to the nearest decade when each wave of missions was to begin, where the strength of the church would be at the start of that era, and the varying nature of the work in each. Also, examples of the harvest pattern in each section focus on one phase of the pattern, shedding further light on the missionary task.

Why has no one seen this before (if indeed that is the case – I have not seen this reported elsewhere, but could have overlooked it)? If these detailed instructions for missions are present in the gospel, wouldn’t it have been useful to describe the plan clearly before today? That is the mystery of God’s wisdom. He chose to reveal His will to one man or woman at a time by faith. He did it through the gospel, as its meaning entered the hearts of believers who obeyed His will without knowing they were doing so. It is only in retrospect that we can see this majestic plan, just as the difficulty is about to ramp up. We require encouragement that God has not abandoned us. Here then is that word of encouragement.

Matthew’s Punch Clock

Many prophetic clocks analyzed in this book follow a cadence. They divide history into even segments on a time scale derived from a number with symbolic significance, like 100, 119 or 120. We saw in “The Time of Her Confinement” how Matthew’s Parable of the Ten Virgins corresponds to ten “seasons” of 240 years each. Then in “Job’s Dialogue with History”, we saw how Matthew’s forty- two name genealogy of Jesus corresponds to forty-two eras of time and matches the forty-two chapters of Job. Matthew includes another prophetic clock: an hourly worker’s punch clock.

This new clock of Matthew’s divides the time from the completion of the Old Testament to the end of history into seven periods. These periods line up with the seven sections into which the Book of Matthew is divided. So like Ecclesiastes, parables and stories from each section of Matthew double as prophesies for the corresponding era in church history. When we get to the detailed look at the structure of Matthew, as we encounter such parables, it will be shown what they predict about that era.

To make that intelligible, let’s jump ahead to the parable of the workers in the vineyard in Matthew 20. It quantifies the framework employed to interpret the rest of the gospel.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early

in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay

them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard…”

- Matthew 20:1-2, NIV

The landowner proceeds to hire additional workers throughout the day. Five times he goes out. Each time the landowner leaves, the parable takes pains to give the time of day – the hidden meaning must have something to do with time. Chapter twenty occurs in the productive sixth section of Matthew, corresponding to ingathering in the sevenfold harvest pattern. The parable is about a harvest. Matthew ends with the Great Commission call to “make disciples of all nations”. The parable has prophecy written all over it.

A Prophecy of Revival

With the other clocks, it required lots of study to infer the overall story or goal of the events referred to by the prophecy, such as progressing through life’s stages to reach maturity and peace in Ecclesiastes. Matthew is not subtle, nor Jesus, whose words he quotes. The parable is about world missions and the recurring need to recruit new generations of missionaries to spread the gospel. The gospel writer’s laser focus compels us to look for a precise chronology of the missionary task.

As the landowner makes repeated trips to find new workers to tend the vines, Jesus draws attention to the time of day. The NIV modernizes the time references, using nine in the morning, noon, three in the afternoon, and five in the afternoon (in addition to the vague “early in the morning” and “evening”). The ESV uses traditional references to the third, sixth, ninth and eleventh hours. These are more helpful when interpreting the prophecy.

Questions

Faced with this text and supposing it to be a prophecy, what are the unknowns?

When does the prophetic clock start? When was the zeroth hour?
Are the time intervals uniform in duration? If proportional, how long is one hour?
When was “early in the morning”, the time when the first workers were hired?
When will evening fall, when the workers are paid?
What events in history correspond to the five trips to hire more workers?
What does the denarius paid each worker represent?
What happens at nightfall?

Solutions based on earlier interpretations of Job and Ecclesiastes did not fit. Prophetic frameworks for those books employed time periods of 100, 119, 120, 240, or 1,000 years. Other timetables with obvious matches to history prove inconsistent with some details from the parable. Hardest to place was dawn. Dawn is not mentioned in this chapter, but it figures prominently in Old Testament prophecy. If we can associate important events with each time new workers were hired, this story implies that another important event happened at dawn to start it off.

Dawn. Candidates for dawn were the year of the resurrection (33 AD), the year Jesus sent the disciples into the towns of Israel (31 or 32 AD), the year Jesus first called the disciples (29 or 30 AD), or the year of Jesus’ birth (ca 4 BC). None worked. Only after I had all the rest of the details consistent with one another and history and worked backwards to dawn could I discover the event that happened at dawn: completion of the Septuagint prior to 132 BC (according to Wikipedia). Since the year of its completion is uncertain and the times given in the prophecy use approximate measures like “about noon” and “about five”, we shall adopt 145 BC as the time of dawn, the zero hour. (The Septuagint was completed in phases. Some sources only refer to the much earlier date when the Pentateuch was completed.)

Walking. The following interpretation makes an assumption not present in the text. If a landowner goes to town to hire workers, they have to walk to his vineyard before they start work. That takes time. We can imagine that as he walks them to the vineyard he is explaining the work he wants done, so when they arrive at the worksite they can start immediately. In history, this implies that the Lord first trains new workers and equips them with the tools they need: a new Bible translation or some other development that will enable the Gospel to go new places where it has hitherto been prevented from spreading. In four out of five instances, this training period is twenty-five years; the fifth is indeterminate, as records of the history of that period are murky. During training, some evangelism occurs, but its main purpose is to recruit new missionaries, Bible translators and publishers for the new era.

Timing. How long is an hour? An hour corresponds to 175 years. The primary justification is that Abraham lived to 175, he was God’s first missionary, was listed first in Matthew’s genealogy, and it was promised that through him all the world would be blessed. Also recall that in the longer of the prophetic structures found in Ecclesiastes, 175 years corresponds to a single time of the twenty-eight times of Ecclesiastes 3. (The more common length used in the shorter prophetic structure was 120 years per time.)

Schedule. How does this work out in history? Assume that “early in the morning” is the first hour and evening is the thirteenth hour or later.

Zero hour (Dawn) – 145 BC
1st hour – 30 AD
3rd hour – 380 AD
6th hour – 905 AD
9th hour – 1430 AD
11th hour – 1780 AD
13th-15th hour (Dusk) – 2130–2480 AD.

Why give so long a date range for dusk? The grape harvest in Israel occurs between June and September, so the length of the day (dawn to dusk) varies from 15 to 13 hours, respectively. Evening falls before dusk, so the time when the workers are paid falls in that last time range, 2130–2480 AD. This brackets 2280 AD, when several other clocks run down. If dusk falls in 2280 AD, that equates to a dawn-to-dusk period of 13:51, which corresponds to late August in Israel.

Events

There is no harvest without seed, so dawn is the readying of the first seed – the completion of the Septuagint. From then on, what climactic events occurred at each appointed hour? Each hour marks two times, roughly 25 years apart. The first involves recruiting new people to spread the gospel. The second is often related to a new means for propagating the gospel, such as a new Bible translation. One can liken this to a week. On Sunday, the first day of the week. you go to church to be taught the truths of scripture. On the remaining six days, you do your work and try to obey the teaching you heard on Sunday. 25 x 7 = 175 years. An “hour” of work in God’s vineyard thus has twenty-five years of preparation (Sunday) plus six days of work (6 x 25 = 150 more years).

1st hour. Circa 30 AD, the disciples were called, received their initial training from Jesus and were sent out to the towns of Israel. Twenty-five years later, around 55 AD, Mark completed his gospel and the Apostle Paul entered Macedonia, bringing the gospel to Europe. The mission? Conquer Rome.

3rd hour – In 380 AD, by the Edict of Thessalonica, Christianity became the state religion of Rome, fulfilling the first mission goal and launching the second wave of missions. Prior to this, in 370 AD, Ulfilas translated the Bible into Visigothic, the first Bible translation done specifically for missionary purposes. Then in 382 AD, Jerome began work on a Latin translation, the Vulgate. He completed it in 405 AD, twenty-five years after the start of this missionary wave. Who else did the landowner hire during this training phase? Augustine of Hippo, who became a Christian in 386 AD and the ancient world’s greatest theologian. The mission? Evangelize Western Europe.

6th hour – 905 AD. With the successes of Charlemagne and his successors to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, the 9th century saw pretty much every king of Western Europe and several northern kingdoms submit to Christ, completing the prior mission. In the late 9th century, the Bible was translated into Old Slavonic. In 910 AD, the beginning of the Cluniac monastic reforms revitalized the western church, while the eastern church took up its own cross. The mission? Spread the gospel to Eastern Europe and Russia.

9th hour – 1430 AD. This year did not fall in an auspicious time. The Ottomans pressed in on their goal of conquering Constantinople while recurring bouts of the Black Plague still shook Europe. The first wave of missionary recruits were refugees from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 who brought their learning to the west, including knowledge of Greek and Hebrew sorely lacking in the western church. This enabled the creation of more accurate Bible translations, which in the next century would help Martin Luther to see the gospel more clearly and rediscover the righteousness that is by faith. Yet it was two other men, born before the sands of the twenty- five year clock that started in 1430 ran out, who most shook the church and the world. During the 1430’s, Johannes Gutenberg began experimenting with new ideas that matured in 1440 with his invention of moveable type. This led to his printing of the first mass produced Bibles in 1455, exactly twenty-five years after the start of this wave of missions. By 1500 AD, the Bible had been printed according to this fashion in fifteen European languages. The second indispensable man was born in 1451 AD. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World and opened a new field for the spread of the gospel. The mission? Take the gospel to North and South America.

11th hour – 1780 AD. The decade following the start of this next wave of missions shook the world. The United States was founded and the French Revolution shattered a great monarchy. Yet it was an obscure, self-taught man of no importance who shook the world more. William Carey was baptized in 1783 and ordained in 1787 by the Particular Baptists. When he attended the 1785 meeting of the association’s Ministers’ Fraternal, he was invited to propose a topic for the pastors to discuss. Carey proposed:

“Whether the command given to the apostles to ‘teach all nations,’

was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the

world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent.”

Carey based his whole argument on the Great Commission in Matthew!!! In 1793, he took his own advice and sailed for Calcutta. In 1797, Carey completed a draft of the New Testament in Bengali. In 1801, it was printed. By his example, the greatest wave of Christian missions of all time was launched. In 1804, just before the twenty-five year clock ran out, the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded, the first of hundreds of Bible societies to come. Additionally, the Second Great Awakening hit America at the Cane Ridge Camp revival in 1801. This resulted in a revitalization of the American church and a groundswell of support for missions. Another notable Christian became active at this time, Charles Finney, pioneer of modern techniques of mass evangelism. To assist the church, God poured wisdom into scientists, who created the telegraph, telephone, and radio to speed up communication. The mission? Take the gospel to the whole earth.

13th-15th hour (Dusk) – 2130–2480 AD. The Lord will pay his workers in the most valuable coin: eternal life. Jesus said in John’s Gospel:

“As long as it is day, we must do the works of him

who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.

While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

- John 9:4-5, NIV

The time of night when “no one can work” approaches. It is up to us alive today to not grow weary until William Carey’s charge to us has been fulfilled. The Lord may even return before 2130, since Jesus told us,

“If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive,

but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”

- Matthew 24:22, NIV

The only way for those days to be cut short is if there is a clearly delineated plan of longer duration that the Father amends because of His great mercy and love for the church. This parable (and other prophesies) are that plan. I believe they set the upper limit for how long we should expect to wait until the last trumpet is blown to declare: Mission accomplished!

Confirmation

Do the Old Testament prophets say anything about how many eras of world missions there shall be? Yes! Two examples should suffice. One defines the substance of what would be accomplished in each phase, while the other reveals geographically where the vital political and spiritual center of Christianity would be in each era.

Substance. Clues in the Pentateuch nail down the substance of each era.

The 1st hour began the Genesis era, when the church was created. It ended with Christians subject to a powerful empire, waiting for deliverance, just as the Jews ended up living in Egypt.

The 3rd hour began the Exodus era, in which Moses delivered the Law. Christianity became the official religion of Rome, a great deliverance. With the completion of the Vulgate, Jerome silenced his critics and included the pericope of the woman caught in adultery, the last part of the New Testament to be approved. Core orthodox doctrine was worked out, the ecumenical councils held, heresies refuted and the iconoclasm controversy resolved. With icons equated by many with idols, this brings to mind the incident of the Golden Calf.

The 6th hour began the Leviticus era, a battle over the structure and governance of the church. Troubles such the Investiture Controversy touching on the relationship between church and state were prominent during these centuries.

The 9th hour began the Numbers era. Just as the Jews wandered in the desert, this was the time of world exploration, when Christians ranged across the face of the planet.

The 11th hour began the Deuteronomy era. Moses delivered his final charge to the people before they entered the Promised Land. William Carey delivered an even greater charge, launching the church into the great age of Christian missions.

Movement

Psalm 107 describes the geographical movement of the church. Like the previous reapplication of the Pentateuch, its words also have a dual fulfillment, one concerning Israel and the second concerning the Church. In the chapter “Psalm 107: Where is the Love?”, we covered how the return of the Jews to Israel following Hitler’s defeat occurred in five waves, each from a different direction, as given in verses 2 and 3:

Let the redeemed of the LORD tell their story—

those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,

those he gathered from the lands,

from east and west, from north and south.

- Psalm 107:2-3, NIV

That was the first fulfillment, the gathering of Jews from those places back to Israel. When we ask how this applies to the church, things are reversed. The church does not gather in, we spread out to evangelize the world. This psalm revealed where the strength of the church would be mobilized in each era in order to promote foreign missions.

For the church, “the foe” was Rome, not Nazi Germany, and so the early church focused on overcoming Rome’s power by converting it. “The east” was Constantinople, for the next center of strength for Christendom was the Byzantine Empire. “The west” was the Holy Roman Empire and a succession of Christian empires in Western Europe. “The north” was Germany, England, Ireland, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. Finally, “the south” was and still is the islands and the countries at the ends of the earth – the Americas, Australia, Africa, and parts of Asia. (England and Ireland are ambiguous, being both part of the North and belonging to the islands. Their strength spanned two eras.)

Taking Matthew, the Pentateuch, and Psalm 107 together, we know when the great mission eras would occur, what challenges would be met in them, and geographically where the political and religious power of the church would spring from for each era. God really spelled it out for us!

We can derive comfort from this. God has a plan, he shared it with His prophets, and it is unfolding precisely as He determined long ago. Just as importantly, the presence of a complex web of intersecting harvest patterns in Matthew plus the presence of detailed prophecies like this that continue to unfold proves that the gospel has not been tampered with. Nothing added, nothing removed, nothing altered, and all of it miraculous. It is like the anti- counterfeiting techniques used by treasuries to render it hard to make fake money, only better.

Now let’s look at that fractal web of intersecting harvest patterns. The whole is greater than any sum...

For the analysis of the rest of Matthew, see the remainder of "A Minute Look at Matthew" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.

For the analysis of a related parable concerning Christian missions, see The Parable of the Wedding Feast