Mat 20:2 And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.

This line is interesting because I was just writing over at my strategy blog about the power of freedom. In a free society, people have the ability to choose what is best for them. We choose where we work, what we do, and how much we will work for. It is interesting that this idea is reinforced so strongly by Christ's view of the "the universal rule."

The main point here is that people are free to agree about what is fair. Here, the price, a penny a day sound cheap, but it is based on an outdated translation. The real currency mentioned was the denarius, which was a coin of silver, which had the purchasing power of about $20 today (though comparisons are obviously not very meaningful). It was the standard wage for a day's labor by a general laborer, which for most of human history was an agricultural worker. To offer and agree to work for this wage would be considered the expected practice for hundreds of years around the birth of Christ in the Roman Empire.

So this agreement was not only fair, but it was what was expected.




"Agreed" is from sumphôneô, which means "to sound together." It means "to make an agreement or bargain" and it is a is a metaphor for harmonizing.