URC Daily Devotion 11 February 2026

About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing.  He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’  So they went. 

He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing.  About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’  ‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered. He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’ The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius.  So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius.  When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner.  ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?  Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you.  Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
 
Reflection
 
I’ve often wondered whether this parable was about generosity or incompetence. The owner of the vineyard is generous in giving the workers who only laboured for one hour the same full day’s wage the earliest group received. However many hours they worked, their families needed the same amount of food. What he gave each of them could be called a living wage. 
 
But to line them up and then quite openly pay the one-hour men first, so the all-day labourers could see how much they were getting was sure to result in upset – because our idea of justice isn’t generous at all. It’s about fair shares – and a concept of deserving.
 
The Victorians were keen on this. They divided poor people into ‘deserving poor’ and ‘undeserving poor’. In other words, poor through your own fault, misbehaviour or poor management is seen as not deserving of help. Did the Pharisee and the priest look at the wounded man on the Jericho road and decide it was his own fault? Because if it’s your own fault, you don’t deserve any help.
 
And there was in the past an idea that sin and illness were connected. Jesus was asked about the blind man he cured: was his blindness his parents’ fault? Had they sinned?
 
And here we discover we’ve been lured into the thorny thickets of judgment and judgmentalism: who deserves what depending on our judgment of their worthiness. What do people have to do to deserve our generosity? Be born in our country, have skin the same colour as ours, live the same way as us, follow the same religion as us? Are there necessary qualifications?
 
Or are we really meant to heed Jesus when he says: ‘Judge not, or you’ll be judged. And you’ll be judged in the same way you judge others.’ (Matthew 7:1-2)
 
Prayer
 
Forgive us our sins, O Lord, against the poor and the despised.
Open our hearts to your kind of generosity and justice.
Amen