Misread Passages of Scriptures

by James Baldwin Brown

I believe that there is nothing very definite in detail here set before our minds, and that we shall get into dire confusion if we inquire about the class or classes of members of the Church which may be signified by the husbandmen. There is no question of classes of Christian labourers, or kinds of Christian work, in the narrative. It is God’s work, and these are God’s workmen in the field of His visible Church, in the broadest sense which those words may bear. The vineyard is the visible field of God’s tillage. The vast invisible field we are not called to consider; except to assure ourselves that one grand principle rules, explains, and justifies God’s methods with the whole. The visible field, up to the day of Pentecost, was the Jewish commonwealth, which was about to expand into the Christian commonwealth when our Lord delivered the discourses which contain our text. In the Jewish commonwealth, not priest and prophet only, but every child of Abraham was a called husbandman; just as every Christian disciple, as much as apostle, bishop, evangelist, or deacon, is a called labourer in the wider vineyard of the Christian Church. The broad feature of the work of the vineyard is, that it is man’s true, noble, God-ordained work.

It is the work for which all his organs and powers were fashioned, and in which his whole being was made to rejoice. Why were these men standing in the market-place? What took them there? Why were they not lounging idly about the fields, or sleeping at home? Clearly because some divine instinct within them moved them thither, that they might be in the way of being hired for a day’s toil. A divine instinct, I say. He little understands humanity, who imagines that the great bread and cheese question is at the bottom of even a tithe of the daily labour of mankind. It would be hard to find a man who just works enough to provide the bread and cheese and beer which he needs to sustain his animal nature, and then folds his arms and takes his ease until new hunger compels new toil. There are such men about the world, no doubt; but it is a hard matter to find them. And when they are found, men attach to such a bestial idea of life the epithet “unmanly” with a bitter emphasis, which reveals how deeply there is inwrought into the very texture of man’s nature the divine instinct of work. Man is made for it, as the flower of the field is made for the free air of heaven. Shut out from it, he grows irritable and sickly, his powers droop, his courage fails, his hope dies, his life is a wreck. And very noble motive inspires well-nigh the whole of human labour. Love, pure self-denying love, love of wife, love of child, of friends, of mankind, is the moving spring of most of man’s most strenuous toil. God’s work, work for God, and for man for the love of God, is but the highest form or mode of human labour. Man’s divine work is not something essentially different in principle from all his other work. All his best labour in his daily tasks proceeds upon the existence within him of powers and organs which can only find their highest exercise, and which can only justify their lowest exercise, in the work of the vineyard which the Lord has given us each one to do. Man is simply unmanned while he stands all the day idle in the market-place; his goodliest powers and organs are rusting, his blood trickles with dull stagnant motion through his lazy veins, his whole system is oppressed and burdened, his muscles ache for exercise, his cheek is pale, his eye is dim. The kingly being is unbraced and discrowned; no joys or honours attend the fainéant king.

Who are the pitiable ones here? On whom shall we spend our regrets and sorrows? The hardy sunburnt workmen, who have spent their strength manfully in a brave day’s work; who watch the westering sun as only the tired labourer has the right to watch him; and who settle peacefully to the workman’s rest till the gay sunlight wakes them again to new glad toils in a young, fresh, dewy world? Nay, the work of the vineyard is man’s honour, joy, glory, and bliss. To be called to work in it is the crown of his manhood; to finish his work with joy is his noblest praise. But why should it not end here? If he is to be counted blessed who works in the vineyard, if his work gladdens, enriches, and ennobles him what room is there for the thought of pay? What can the pennies in this case mean?

Man is made with a large capacity, and a large thought and hope of happiness. He can take a large blessing into his being, larger than he can meet within his present sphere. The range of his nature takes in the infinite and the eternal. The work is noble, glorious exercise; but God only can fill and satisfy his spirit. Man needs something beyond the mere play of his powers, though their free play is an intense exhilaration and delight. He needs the fellowship of beings to satisfy the yearning, to feed the appetite, of his nobler nature; he needs the love of God, and communion with all that is of God, that he may rest and be blessed. This is the reward which the earthly day of his toil and patience will bring. The true workman is happy in his work, and sings while he toils. But God has a yet richer benediction for His children when the work is done, a blessing which will beautify and glorify life through eternity. This He gives to the workman out of His royal bounty, His own blessedness. It is His own to give; and all true workmen, whatever the measure of their work, because of the spirit of their work, shall claim it at His hand.

II. The reason of the idleness of the husbandmen who were not called till the eleventh hour to the work.

“And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and said unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us.” The true key to the parable lies here. There are many other answers conceivable. They might have said, Because we like to lounge and loaf, work is irksome; or, Because we are over-tired with yesterday’s toil; or, Because the pay does not suit us, we are out on strike. Imagine that any one of these answers had been given; the whole character of the parable would have been changed, and the equity of the ways of God would then have been dark, dark indeed. But no. The men were willing to work; they were waiting to be hired; they made no bargain about their pay. “Go ye into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive,” the Master said; and they went, content to leave their wage to His justice. The men evidently cared more about the work than the pay. In truth the idlers were to be pitied. The Master pitied them, and He gave to their will the wage which lack of opportunity had forbidden them to earn before.

And this opens up some serious thoughts about the pagan world, and its relation to the kingdom of God. There is a profound, but not an impenetrable mystery hidden in the words, “the fulness of the time.” Through long ages the pagan world was left groping in the darkness, “feeling after God if haply it might find Him,” and moaning as it grasped at phantoms in the gloom, and saw them slip from its empty hand. Looking at the anguish and misery of the world at this moment, one is constrained to confess that the Lord of the world is One who can bring Himself to look upon, and to bear the responsibility of ruling over, a terrible amount of pain. But what shall we say of the long ages of pagan darkness, when men were not feeling after God only, but crying for Him, shrieking to Him, were maiming their quivering flesh and torturing their shuddering hearts, because the void only echoed back their own voices and none could tell them the Divine Name. The time is gone by when it was possible to look upon the history of heathendom as the history of one long stern effort to break away from God, to blot out His name from the universe, and to tear every trace of His image out of the life of the human world. It is now well understood that the deepest thing in heathen life and heathen literature was ever the cry after the living God, and the effort to find Him; the grandest passages in the religious records of heathendom are the words in which the founders of the great pagan systems proclaimed what they believed had been made known to them of His Being and His Will; and the gladdest, in truth the only joyous, passages in pagan history, are the records of the generations in which men persuaded themselves that God had at length visited His world. Soon the gladness vanished, overborne by wrong and lust. But while it lasted it made the solitary gleam of brightness which crosses the blackness of the pagan night. The revival of morals, of manners, and of hopes, which for a few brief generations has followed the teaching of the great masters whom paganism adores, is the one ray of heavenly light which shines in the pagan darkness, and bears witness that there is sunlight, though shining on other spheres. The joy which filled the hearts of the heathen peoples, when Sakya-Mouni, Zerdusht, Confucius, or Mahomet, proclaimed at any rate a purer faith, a nobler idea of life, than the dark, soulless, senseless formulæ in which a tyrannous priesthood had buried the Divine Name, is like some faint and far-off glow of the joy which leaped from heart to heart like flame when it was known that God had in very truth visited His people, and that the King of Glory had taken possession of His earthly throne.

Through this long sad night, lit only by these rare faint gleams, men had been looking, longing, and moaning for a deliverer; and steadily settling the while, and they knew it, into the slough of the devil’s accursed dominion, because no Almighty Helper and Saviour appeared. We see their misery, their tears, their mad outbursts of passion, their foul orgies of lust; and our hearts bleed, nay there have been hearts that have burst, as they watched this tragedy of despair. And heaven heard it all, saw it all, through long ages; and still no deliverer was sent. It is a profound mystery, the millenniums through which the world was left to grope and to moan in the darkness, while the clear sunlight of God’s truth was flashing its brightness so joyously on the homes of the chosen race. I say again, the mystery, though profound, is not inscrutable; for there is Calvary to expound it. In the long run, in the great day of eternity, it will be seen, that this forsaking of the heathen world was an essential part of a benign and merciful plan, of which Calvary is the centre; and that it lies in the full harmony of a love which “endured the cross, and despised the shame,” that a whole world might be gathered at length to the great Father’s heart. But the “no man hath hired us” has a profound and pathetic meaning, when we search the records of pagan religious effort and aspiration, and when we see how everywhere, when the gates were flung open, the Gentiles thronged, streamed, crushed, into the kingdom of God. I find in this thought the whole mystery of the parable unfolded. The Gentiles had been looking, waiting, longing, in their own dull way, for the work of the vineyard. It was the Master’s counsel, as well as their own dull hearts, which had kept them idle during the noontide heats. And it was the work which it was in their hearts to do that the Master honoured, when He made them equal to the favoured and happy husbandmen, had they but known it, who had “borne the burden and heat of the day.”

III. The Master’s justification of His ways.

“So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny. But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it they murmured against the goodman of the house, saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong; didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen” (Matt. xx. 8-16).