A FAIR DAY’S WORK FOR A FAIR DAY’S WAGE…

Our lectionary reading for the coming Sunday is one we are all very familiar with. We may have read it since coming to church as children.  It concerns a group of people hired to work for a day.  A wage is agreed for the day’s labour, but later in the day, more men are hired for exactly the same wage. They work less hours, but are given the same amount.  Is this fair?  Does it offend our sense of rightness?  Does it not breach minimum wage laws?

The story can, I think, be deliberately read in several ways.  It can on one hand be read to imply that the “Kingdom of God” is something open to everyone no matter how late in life they decide to enter – the cost, and the result are the same.  This has lead over the centuries to many deathbed confessions!

It is likely that at the time in which it was written, that the story was to be seen as a startling act of compassion rather than anything else.  The day’s wage – denarii – was a sort of basic subsistence wage on which it was possible to feed a family for one day – the story was probably written then as a way of saying that the “Kingdom of God” cares for everyone equally, and makes allowances for the weakest.

What kind of landowner makes no real judgment about how much labour he will need during the day?  It seems a very inefficient way of hiring people – lending some weight to the argument that this is not about fairness but about providing for the weakest.  What kind of landowner does this? The answer appears to be one more concerned about making sure everyone gets the same rather than how much work is done.

This may seem a million miles away from today’s world of work, of 70 people applying for every vacancy and people leaving school, college and university to no job – but is it so very different? What set my mind thinking along these lines is a story I have just heard on the radio in which more than 20 young men were saved today from slavery, in England!  In England?  Yes, in England.

The world it seems to me is much the same – too many people chasing too little work, too many willing to extort others to gain a foothold themselves.  The Kingdom of God accepts no slaves, wage slaves or otherwise, the opportunities and the rewards are there for all.

God Bless, Alan