The God of all the earth will do right. He is not deaf to the cries of
those oppressed millions in the ages whose piteous appeals for elemental
justice come to him. This is a terrible indictment of Jewish capitalists
who withheld the meager wages of the men who gathered the harvests.
“Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you
kept back by fraud, crieth out.” The hire of the laborers reminds one of
the proverb, “The laborer is worthy of his hire” (Luke 10:7; 1 Tim.
5:18). The word for “hire” occurs sometimes in the sense of reward
(e.g., 1 Cor. 3:8, 14), but the original idea is that of pay for work
done (e.g., Matt. 20:8), and so here.
The word for laborer means any kind of workman, but it is common in the
New Testament for agricultural workers. “The harvest indeed is
plenteous, but the laborers are few” (Matt. 9:37). When the work is
done, it is only simple justice for the workman to receive his pay, for
the hungry mouths at home have to be filled.
In the Old Testament the cause of the workman was guarded with special
care: “Thou shalt not oppress a hired servant that is poor and needy,
whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy sojourners that are in thy land
within thy gates: in his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall
the sun go down upon it ... lest he cry against thee unto Jehovah, and
it be sin unto thee” (Deut. 24:14 f.). See also Malachi 3:5: “I will be
a swift witness against ... those that oppress the hireling in his
wages.” Tobit charges his son Tobias, “Let not the wages of any man,
which hath wrought for thee, tarry with thee, but give him it out of
hand” (Tobit 4:14). Sirach (34:21 f.) says, “The bread of the needy is
the life of the poor: he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood.
He that taketh away his neighbor’s living slayeth him; and he that
defraudeth a laborer of his hire is a blood-shedder.” Certainly,
therefore, the Jews were not without explicit teaching on this vital
point of elemental social justice.
And yet these men “who mowed” (literally, “heap together”)[90] their
fields had the sad experience of not receiving the wages, “of you kept
back by fraud, comes too late from you” (Mayor). The word means to “fall
short,” “be too late.”[91]
The honest laborers who form the foundation of our industrial system are
not to be treated as beggars or hobos. They are not subjects for
charity. They are the human element in the industrial problem. Blood is
thicker than water and is more valuable than gold. The horror of war is
that it treats men as fodder for cannon, regardless of the result to the
man or those dependent on him.
This stolen pay “cries out” and ought to cry out, whether the hire is
kept back after the work is done or whether the employer purposely
squeezes the laborer down to starvation wages in order to make more
money for himself. There is a just balance to be struck by which both
capital and labor may receive fair remuneration. “The cries of them that
reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.”
“The cries of the harvesters” (Moffatt) are musical when they sing
together as they work, content with their wages and joyous in their
work. But the cries here heard are of a very different sort. They are
the angry, resentful outcries of men who have been wronged in their very
souls by those who should have been their protectors and friends, those
for whom the harvesters have worked. These men cry to heaven, and they
ought to do so. Mayor notes four sins that cry to heaven: a brother’s
blood (Gen. 4:10), the sin of Sodom (Gen. 18:20), the oppressed hireling
(Deut. 24:15), and the cry of Job for justice (Job 16:18 f.). But men
ought to hear the cry of the laborers before they become too clamorous.
It is only right that social injustice should be rectified here and now
and the transgressors punished.
The social test of modern Christianity is to do justice to the laboring
men without doing injustice to the capitalists. The conditions of life
must be made easier. If corporations have no souls, the men who toil at
the forge have. Men are entitled to a bit of heaven here and now at
their own hearth and home. Somehow, many of the laborers have come to
feel that the churches do not sympathize with the struggles of the
laboring classes to better their hard lot but fawn upon the very rich
who sometimes grind the toilers to the earth. It is easy to be extreme
and unjust to one side or the other. The main thing is to be faithful to
God and man, to man as man. The poorest of men is worth more than a
sheep, yes, than gold and silver. The soul is without price, and the
soul dwells in the body. We must shake the shackles free from men and
women who cry out to God. The Lord God of Sabaoth has heard their cries
and will punish the offenders in due time, but that fact does not
absolve us from our present duty in the midst of conditions that call
for action. Wronged workers have a right to a hearing at the bar of
public opinion. They will cry on until they are heard.