The Eleventh Hour
Sermon — September 20, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
The landowner in today’s parable behaves more or less like you’d expect an ancient vineyard-owner to behave, at first. He sets out early in the morning, so that he doesn’t lose any of the precious daylight hours. He hires day laborers who are standing in the marketplace, because he needs extra help at harvest time. And he makes a deal to pay them the typical daily wage.
A few hours later, he goes back to the market. He hires more workers and sends them to work as well, and he tells them he’ll pay them whatever’s fair. And then he comes back again at noon and three o’clock, and he does the same thing.
Now, this is kind of odd. Why’s he hiring more people every three hours? Is he underestimating how many workers he’s going to need? You’d think that by the third time, he’d have figured it out. Is he just bored? There’s plenty of work to do; let him go pick some grapes. Is it possible that he’s actually outsmarted us all? Maybe this is some elaborate system to optimize the ratio of vineyard-acres to man-hours by dividing up the day into these tiny slices to perfectly optimize his hiring process. Maybe this is how you perfect the ancient art of grapemaxxing.
Then he comes back at five o’clock, and looks at the people who’re still left and asks, “Why’ve you been here all day with nothing to do?” “Well, no one hired us,” they say. And look, I’m all for following your passions, but if you’re still standing around eleven hours into a workday in the middle of grape-picking season trying to get hired to pick grapes, it might just be that you aren’t cut out for the job. But what does he care? Get in there, he says. Get to work.
Finally the sun sets, and the laborers come back to pick up their pay. The boss pays them last to first. And it’s at this point that my hypothesis that the landowner is a brilliant businessman is proven wrong. Because when those eleventh-hour workers see what they’ve been paid, they’re amazed. No one thought they were worth hiring. They hardly did any work. But now they have a full day’s wages in their hands!
Everyone else is tired after a long day, but this perks them right up. If he paid a full day’s wages for one hour of work, and I got here at three, or noon, or nine, or 6am… at that hourly rate I’m going to be getting three days’ wages, or six, or nine, or twelve days’ worth of pay. I could take the next two weeks off! How awesome is that?
But then these workers receive their pay. And those who worked three hours are paid for a full day. And those who worked six hours are paid for a full day. Those who worked nine hours are paid for a day, and those who worked twelve long hours in the hot sun picking grapes are paid for the work of exactly one day. These last workers to be paid, who were the first workers to arrive, start to get angry. They’d been there twelve times longer than the happy-hour dilettantes, but they aren’t paid any more. And they’re outraged. This is unfair!
They’re not wrong, exactly. It isn’t fair. But on the other hand: they agreed to be paid a day’s wages for a day’s work, and that’s exactly what they received. They haven’t been underpaid; they got what they earned. They’re angry because the owner was so generous to people they thought didn’t deserve it, in a way he wasn’t generous to them.
Because the owner of the vineyard, it turns out, wasn’t grapemaxxing at all. He wasn’t trying to optimize his operations or maximize his profit. He was trying to hire every last person that he could, and give them the same reward however hard they’d worked. And—depending on who you are in the story—this either feels like the best day in the year or a sign of disrespect.
This Sunday marks exactly six years since my first Sunday at St. John’s, on September 20, 2020. And because we repeat our readings in a three-year cycle, we read exactly this Gospel reading on my first Sunday here. I had a look back at what I said in my first sermon here, and I thought it was worth quoting, in part. Here’s what I said back then about this parable:
God wants us to work in the vineyard. God wants us, in other words, to grow in our spiritual lives; to love and serve our neighbors and our world; to spread the good news of God’s love in word and in deed. But these things aren’t a job that we perform in exchange for pay.
…As Christians, we don’t do good things so that God will reward us. We do good things because God loves us, and we love God. But God will love us whether we do good things or not. This unconditional love frees us from the anxiety of trying to be good enough, and frees us to respond in gratitude to God’s love.
Now, this is a risky thing to say in your first sermon as a new rector. [I said, six years ago!] Maybe I should be cracking the whip, telling you to roll up your sleeves and get to work, quoting from the classic hymn: “Come, labor on! Who dares stand idle, on the harvest plain?” (It’s a great hymn.)
But this isn’t really Jesus’ M.O. In fact, Jesus has one of the worst volunteer recruitment pitches of all time: “Take up your cross and follow me.” It will be hard. It will be dangerous. And God will reward you exactly the same, no matter how much or how little you do, whether you’re out working in the vineyard at dawn or you’re still in bed at 3pm. So: want to join the Stewardship Committee?
We all get the joke. If you tell people, look—you have the choice between working hard starting at 6am, and punching in for an hour at 5 o’clock; you have the choice between showing up early for choir practice every Sunday, or walking through the door at 11:15 to eat some snacks; you have the choice between modeling for the world the kind of humble, self-sacrificing love that led Jesus to the Cross or just doing whatever you want—and God will love you unconditionally either way, and God will offer you the same reward in the end, no matter which one you choose—surely, no one in their right mind would choose that harder path. But the whole point of this parable is that that is precisely how the kingdom of heaven works.
This is a risky thing to say, on your first Sunday or your 312th Sunday as the Rector of a church. What if I tell people that God loves them unconditionally, whether they show up to the Vestry meeting at 7pm or they wait until 8:12, and then… nobody shows up? But in fact, six years later, I don’t think I lost that bet. I think it turns out Jesus is right. Unconditional love is a better motivator than obligation, fear, or shame. We’re more likely to do the right thing when the burden of obligation is lifted from our shoulders. We’re don’t make decisions based on the prospect of an eternal reward, but because of the joy and the love we find here and now. And this may not be a good way to run a vineyard. But the last six years have convinced me, at least, that it’s a pretty good way to be a church.
But of course, this parable isn’t just about church, it’s about our whole lives. And maybe that’s where the bigger impact is. Most of us, I think, have lots of little equivalents to the day’s wage in our minds, ways that we measure ourselves compared to one another and to the world. For me, they’ve included my place on the cross-country team and whether I made the cut for the jazz band; how my child behaved in school and how many people were showing up to church; and you can probably name some of your own, big and small: which sibling cared more for your parents as they aged and how many people liked your latest Instagram post and, yes, who put in the longest hours at work. Some of these are worthwhile goals. Others, not so much. But the parable of the vineyard tells us that in God’s eyes, all the ways we measure and compare ourselves to one another will one day fade away. So here’s the question I want to leave you with today: if this were true—if none of these things mattered in the end—how would you really want to live your life? Because it is true. God has chosen to give to the last just as to the first. And you are free to live how you imagined.
