The Timing of the Landowner
The Timing of the Landowner. A meditation on Matthew 20:1–16
“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.”
There is a detail in the parable of the workers in the vineyard that is easy to pass over:
The landowner keeps going out.
He goes out at dawn.
He goes out again about the third hour—around nine in the morning.
Again at the sixth hour—around noon.
Again at the ninth hour—around three in the afternoon.
And then, astonishingly, at the eleventh hour—around five.
The working day is almost finished. The shadows are lengthening. There is hardly enough time left to accomplish anything.
And still he goes out.
Perhaps the timing is itself part of the parable. Perhaps Jesus is showing us a God who never tires of going out in search of the human person.
Dawn — the first calling
In the world of Jesus, the working day followed the sun.
There were no electric lights illuminating fields after dark. Labor began early, and daylight was precious. The “first hour” roughly corresponded to sunrise, while the twelfth hour brought the working day toward sunset.
So the landowner begins where we would expect him to begin:
at dawn.
Some people encounter God like this.
Their faith seems to begin with the morning of their lives. They learn to pray as children. They hear the Scriptures before they can understand their depth. The name of God is spoken over their infancy.
For them, the invitation into the vineyard seems almost as old as memory itself.
What a gift to be called at dawn.
But dawn is not the only hour at which the landowner comes.
The third hour — nine in the morning
“Going out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace.”
The Greek text speaks of the third hour.
The day is already underway, and the landowner discovers people who have not yet been chosen.
He sends them too.
Later, Christians would recognize the third hour as a significant hour of prayer. The Acts of the Apostles places the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in the morning around this hour: Peter tells the crowd that the disciples are not drunk, because “it is only nine o’clock in the morning” (Acts 2:15).
The ancient third hour would eventually echo in the Christian prayer traditionally called Terce.
And so, reading the vineyard through the later rhythm of Christian prayer, nine o’clock can whisper:
Come, Holy Spirit.
There are moments when God calls us not at the beginning but after life has already begun moving.
Something awakens.
A question appears.
A door opens.
The Spirit disturbs what had become comfortable.
And the landowner says:
You too. Come into my vineyard.
The sixth hour — noon
Then comes the sixth hour.
Noon.
The sun is high. There are few shadows in which to hide.
In the Gospel of John, noon carries remarkable encounters. It is around the sixth hour when Jesus sits beside Jacob’s well and meets the Samaritan woman.
A woman comes carrying a water jar.
She leaves having encountered the One who knows her thirst.
There is something fitting about encountering God at noon.
Noon is exposure.
Noon is clarity.
Noon is the hour when the light stands almost directly overhead.
Perhaps there is a noon in every human life—a moment when we can no longer hide so easily from ourselves.
The ambitions that once drove us may no longer satisfy. The wounds we avoided begin asking to be healed. The questions we postponed return.
Who am I?
What am I doing with the life I have been given?
What am I thirsting for?
And once again the landowner appears.
Not to condemn the hours already gone, but to say:
Come. There is still a place for you.
The Church’s later prayer of the sixth hour, Sext, sanctifies precisely this middle of the day.
Even the middle can become holy.
The ninth hour — three in the afternoon
Then the parable mentions the ninth hour.
For Christians, it is difficult to hear this hour without hearing Calvary.
The Gospels associate the ninth hour—approximately three in the afternoon—with the death of Jesus.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The ninth hour therefore carries a different light.
It is the hour of the Cross.
It is also an hour of prayer. Acts tells us that Peter and John went up to the Temple “at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon” (Acts 3:1).
The later Christian office of None preserves the memory of this ninth hour.
Perhaps some people enter the vineyard here.
Not through childhood innocence.
Not through youthful enthusiasm.
Not even through the clarity of noon.
They enter through suffering.
A death.
A failure.
A betrayal.
An illness.
A broken dream.
An emptiness that can no longer be avoided.
There are people who discover God beneath the shadow of the Cross.
And He is there.
The landowner has gone out again.
And then comes the eleventh hour
This is where the parable becomes extraordinary.
Five in the afternoon.
One hour before the customary end of the working day.
From an ordinary economic perspective, why bother? What meaningful amount of work can these people still accomplish?
And yet the landowner goes out again.
He finds people still standing there.
His question is almost heartbreaking:
“Why are you standing here idle all day?”
And they answer:
“Because no one has hired us.”
Perhaps all day they watched others being chosen.
The strong first.
The experienced.
The desirable.
The useful.
Morning passed.
Then noon.
Then afternoon.
Still they waited.
By the eleventh hour, perhaps they had stopped expecting anyone to come.
But someone does.
The landowner himself.
And this may be one of the most beautiful revelations in the entire parable:
God comes even when almost everyone else has stopped looking.
Human beings say:
Too late.
God says:
Come.
We say:
What can possibly be done with one remaining hour?
God says:
Go into my vineyard.
We look at the setting sun.
God looks at the person.
The hours of our lives
Perhaps these hours can also become a map of human existence.
Dawn may be childhood.
The third hour, youth.
Noon, maturity.
The ninth hour, the years when life’s shadows begin lengthening.
The eleventh hour, old age—or simply whatever moment makes us think:
Surely it is too late for me now.
But we should be careful not to imprison the parable in a rigid scheme.
Our spiritual lives rarely move neatly from dawn to evening. A person can experience several dawns. There can be a noon at twenty-five and another at seventy. There can be an eleventh hour followed unexpectedly by a new morning.
The deeper truth is simpler:
There is no hour in which the landowner ceases to go out.
The hours of prayer
Centuries of Christian prayer give these times another beautiful resonance.
The Church learned to sanctify the passing day by stopping to pray at particular hours:
Morning prayer.
The third hour.
The sixth hour.
The ninth hour.
Evening prayer.
Night prayer.
The clock itself becomes a kind of monastery bell.
Time is no longer merely something disappearing.
Time becomes a place of encounter.
Perhaps that is why the timing of this parable can speak so powerfully beside the Liturgy of the Hours.
At morning:
He comes.
At midday:
He comes.
In the afternoon:
He comes.
As evening approaches:
He still comes.
The Hours teach us that God is not waiting only at the great spiritual moments of life.
He enters ordinary time.
Nine o’clock.
Noon.
Three o’clock.
The middle of work.
The interruption.
The tired afternoon.
The fading day.
Every hour can become an altar.
But there is something even more beautiful
Notice who is moving.
Again and again Matthew tells us:
The landowner went out.
The workers do not first find their way to his estate.
He goes looking for them.
At dawn, he goes out.
At the third hour, he goes out.
At the sixth and ninth hours, he goes out.
At the eleventh hour, when any sensible landowner might have remained home preparing to settle the accounts—
he goes out once more.
This changes the parable for me.
Perhaps the deepest mystery is not that human beings eventually find God.
Perhaps it is that God keeps coming to find us.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Through Scripture.
Through another person.
Through beauty.
Through suffering.
Through silence.
Through disappointment.
Through an unexpected longing.
Through a church door we had not intended to enter.
Through a prayer we thought we had forgotten.
He goes out.
And when evening comes…
Eventually the parable reaches the words:
“When evening came…”
Every human life has such an evening.
One day there will be no next earthly hour. The bell will sound for the final time.
And perhaps then we will look back across our lives and recognize something we could not see while living them.
We thought we were searching for God.
But across every hour—
dawn,
nine,
noon,
three,
five,
and the fading light—
He had been searching for us.
The Lord of the vineyard had been walking the roads of our lives all along.
Calling.
Returning.
Waiting.
Coming again.
And perhaps this is why the eleventh hour is not ultimately a frightening image.
It is an image of hope.
Because even when the day is almost over,
even when the shadows are long,
even when we believe there is no longer enough time to become the person we should have been,
we may look up—
and discover the Landowner approaching once more.
A prayer through the hours
Lord of the vineyard,
at the dawn of my life,
You were there.
At the third hour,
when the world opened before me,
You were there.
At noon,
when the light exposed both my longing and my thirst,
You were there.
At the ninth hour,
when crosses appeared
and shadows lengthened,
You were there.
And at the eleventh hour,
when I fear that too much time has passed,
come looking for me again.
Teach me to recognize Your footsteps
through the hours of my life.
Teach me to understand that no hour given to You is empty.
And when evening finally comes,
let me discover that the One I spent my life seeking
was always the One
who first came seeking me.
Amen.
