When six o’clock came, the manager, acting on his master’s instructions, first paid the men who had been hired at the end of the day, and gave each one a full day’s wage. In doing that the owner was acting, not as a hard-headed employer of labour guided by “the lore of nicely-calculated less or more”. (1) He was acting as he man he was, a generous man who had compassion on the pitiful plight of others. The men he hired in the market-place were not loafers or shirkers. He had satisfied himself on that score by asking those whom he had hired last why they stood there idle all day. “Because no one has hired us” was their answer (NRSV, Matthew 20: 7), and he knew what that meant in human terms – the family at home waiting hopefully for the breadwinner to return with wages in his pocket, only to be met at the end of the day with a disappointment bordering on despair.

So he gave to each of them a full day’s wage.