What God Does By His Own Mercy

In Matthew 20:1-16, the Lord tells of a householder who goes out at daybreak, at the third hour, the sixth, the ninth, and even the eleventh hour, to hire laborers for his vineyard. At evening he pays every man the same penny, whether he labored twelve hours or one. Those hired first murmur against the goodman, reckoning that more labor should have earned more wage. But he answers, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?”

Their murmuring is boasting in embryo, the very spirit Paul later names and forbids; the parable pictures, in narrative form, exactly what Ephesians states as doctrine in 2:8-9, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” The penny paid to the eleventh-hour man is grace in miniature: a wage he did not earn, given by a goodness not his own. Had the householder paid by the hour, the laborers would have had grounds to boast in their length of service, precisely as Paul says boasting arises wherever wages are reckoned by works. Because the gift is fixed by grace and received by no merit of the workman, all boasting is shut out, and the parable becomes Ephesians in a single scene: what the goodman does with his own money, God does with His own mercy, and neither owes an explanation to those who would rather be paid than be given a gift.

This same grace converts the thief upon the cross. Dying beside the Lord, guilty and with no possibility of amendment before death, he turns in that final hour and says, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.” He brings no labor and no lifetime of service, nothing but a believing heart. Christ answers at once, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." The laborer, the believer of Ephesians, and the dying thief all receive the same wage by grace.