Matthew 20:1–16

Fleeing love of glory, the Lord speaks as about another householder, though he himself is householder and distributor of the kingdom of the heavens. By “day” he means the whole age, in which at different times after Adam’s transgression he calls some righteous into God-reverent work, setting them a wage for the works.

Those about the first hour are those around Adam and Enoch; those about the third, around Noah and Shem and the righteous from them — for the time is second and the call second, when the ordinances also differ. The workers called about the sixth are those in Abraham’s times, when again came the legislation of circumcision; those of the eleventh, those at Christ’s presence, of whom alone it is said, “Why do you stand here idle all day?” — having no hope of the Lord, godless in the world, idle in every good work, like those standing in the marketplace handling nothing at all, but running through their life vainly and to no purpose. The Lord also exhorts them, saying, “Why do you stand idle?” They answer, “No one hired us” — for neither Moses nor any of the holy ones preached to the nations, but only to Israel. Still the Lord sends them too into the vineyard.

He <says> five calls happened, to show that in each time some succeeded and some missed — as the “five prudent virgins and the five foolish” show, being in the same times — and that some were found virtuous, while some despised the coming age through folly. At the end of life, which is evening (for the time from Christ’s advent until the consummation is the time after the eleventh hour, as John says, “It is the last hour”), the householder, he says, <commands> the wage to be given beginning from the last. The householder may be understood <as> the Father, using the Son as distributor not as a mere servant but as <co-worker>, because through him he administers and works whatever he wills.

He gives each a denarius — the Spirit’s grace, conforming the holy to God, engraving the heavenly characters in their souls, and leading them up into life and incorruption. In this the first seem to have toiled more than the last, having endured the devil’s burning longer while sin, corruption, and death were not yet abolished. If the matter is weighed by equality, something more seems owed to the former, because they lived while death and the devil ruled — that is the burden of the day and the heat, when not even the Spirit’s dew was present helping humans toward righteousness. But the last, having the Master’s generosity instead of toils, receive the wage first, since all after the advent, through baptism and union with the Spirit, have become “sharers of the divine nature” and were named sons of God, while all before the advent were named born of women — though they too are to be called to this. For even if the prophets became partakers of the Spirit, it was not as the faithful: somehow the Holy Spirit becomes like leaven in the faithful’s souls and transforms the whole human into another state of life. That is why we become “sharers of the divine nature” and cry out boldly, “Abba, Father.” The more ancient did not obtain the same grace. So Paul says, “You did not receive a spirit of slavery again unto fear, but you received a spirit of adoption” — meaning the ancients received a “spirit of slavery,” not having the dignity of adoption. Having received the intelligible denarius first, we are necessarily said to have been preferred above the others.