New Testament : The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard? But Jesus challenges that expectation. The special inheritance that Israel believes to be hers is going to be extended—in full—to other nations. It’s not that the Hebrews were against God extending blessings to other nations. They just always assumed that God would value those nations below Israel. In response to the kingdom of God, Israel would make the same argument as the early laborers, “you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work.”
Jesus often uses parables to reveal what the kingdom of heaven is like. He portrays how one enters the kingdom and who the different characters are. In this Parable of the Laborers or Workers in the Vineyard, there are things that He tells the disciples and us about the grace of God and that God is always more than fair. Here is a discussion on this parable and what Jesus means in giving it.
The master of the house would seem to be God and the vineyard is the place where those servants who have been called to work for the master as laborers will enter into the work. The laborers are those who have been called and saved by God. They enter into the work or their calling by God under the guidance of the master, which is Jesus Christ. In another place in the Scriptures, Jesus uses this symbolism of believers being used by God to labor for the Lord as in Matthew 9:37-38 where He says “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
A more careful reading of the parable offers an alternate meaning behind Jesus’ words. The eleventh hour workers in the parable represent people who have not heard of Jesus previously. When questioned as to why they are not working, they reply in verse seven that “no one has hired [them]” (Matt. 20:7, NKJV). Even in the “deathbed conversion” interpretation of the parable, the fact that all workers receive the same wages does not indicate that Christians are given a free pass in life as long as they repent before they die. Instead, the parable assures us that there is no advantage to having been born a Christian and that all are likewise saved not by their works but by the goodness of Christ.
Jesus spent a great deal of His ministry announcing the coming of God’s kingdom and overcoming first-century presumptions by teaching people to recognize that kingdom. And a lot of His parables focused on communicating valuable truths about this kingdom. One misunderstanding that Jesus needed to clarify was the idea that the Jews held a special insider relationship with God. From the very beginning, God told Abraham that all the nations of the world would be blessed through his offspring (Genesis 22:18), but as far as the Israelites were concerned, these other nations would never be as blessed as they were. See more details on the The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard video on YouTube.