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_.”