Harvest Anxiety

It is my belief that Jesus frequently used recent local events as the springboard for many of his parables. It is a very reliable "hook" to engage listeners.

Perhaps the return of a shamed son had everybody's tongues wagging and that Jesus tweaked that event into the parable of the Prodigal Son to illustrate the benevolence of our heavenly Father. Perhaps there was a recent flash-flood in a local wadi that had washed indigent housing off of sandbars and that became the parable of building on rock.

Sometimes the parables may have been prompted by something as trivial as a songbird nesting in a tall weed growing beside a field or road.

In many cases, those moral stories were likely to have had their origins in concrete events that the listeners were aware of and triggered visceral reactions within them.

The workers in the vineyard

One parable that seems contrary-to-logic is the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1-16)

In the story, the owner of the vineyard goes to the village square and hires day-laborers to harvest his fruit. Then he goes again at lunch and hires more. Then again in mid-afternoon. At the end of the day he pays them all the same wages

What kind of situation would make that seem logical to the listeners?

Osmosis

Osmosis is a phenomena where water will permeate through a membrane and dilute the side with the more concentrated solution.

Suppose you had a membrane with pure water on one side and a solution with 25% sugar and 75% water on the other. The volume of the sugar-water will increase as water molecules migrate from the pure-water side to the sugar-water side.

That is why ripe cherries, tomatoes and grapes split after a rain. Once split, the crop is spoiled.

A storm is coming

It is almost a certainty that the people listening to Jesus knew of somebody who had lost their entire crop of grapes due to an untimely rainstorm.

If the owner of the vineyard had a sense that the weather was shifting, he would hire every day-laborer available. Since day-laborers might finish up a job mid-day a few might trickle back to the hiring place throughout the day.

Now suppose that the weather becomes increasingly threatening as the day progresses. The original laborers have been cutting the bunches of grapes and filling baskets which are scattered about the vineyard. Those grapes are just as vulnerable to splitting as the ones hanging on the vines. The owner tells the laborers to keep cutting bunches as he goes back to the village to get more laborers to carry the baskets to the pressing room.

Still, the thunderheads tower higher.

The owner goes back to the village to get even more workers, perhaps to run the presses and fill the fermentation vessels.

At the end of the day, the absence of any of the workers would have resulted in the loss of the crop. They would have rotted on the vine if they had not been picked. They would have rotted in the baskets within the vineyard if they had not been carried to the pressing house. They would have rotted in the pressing house if they had not immediately been pressed. In that sense, every worker was worth the same wages. 

Harvest equals anxiety

Crops are usually increasingly vulnerable to losses as they approach harvest. Bugs, animals, humans, war, weather...they can all destroy next year's larder in a short period of time with weather like hail or heavy downpours being able to destroy ripe grapes in a matter of minutes.

Yes, I feel anxiety during harvest season. There are two ways to respond to anxiety: Double your efforts or go comatose. Of the two, increased effort is the more functional response. 

If I were a betting man, I would bet that a local grape-grower had recently lost a bumper crop of grapes due to an untimely rainstorm or hailstorm a few weeks before Jesus shared the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. 

And one of the unspoken undercurrents would be unknowable of sudden storms and other catastrophes. No man knows the day nor hour.

*Potatoes are the exception.