Please read the passage before the commentary.
He paid those who worked one hour as much as he paid those who worked all day! Aren’t we all one-hour workers? It was the vineyard’s owner who paid those who had worked the last hour. Many had worked several hours before the last hour, but all had worked the one hour.
In French the word for Thank You is merci. It looks very much like mercy. Perhaps this is important. When we show others mercy we are being thankful. We should be merciful if we are thankful.
What about the last hour? Dying is an active verb: we die. Somebody may or something may kill us, be we have to die; no one can do it for us. In dying, we give up ownership and control in submission to God. We cannot fight dying; we have to do it. In dying we give up our favorite projects and pastimes, and we find that we have obeyed the Lord’s command fully in this past hour.
We like to think that we have followed God remarkedly well, but we only completely give in to God when we die. God’s thankfulness, which is God’s mercy to us, gives us the usual daily wage.
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