Matthew 20:16

Christ here points the moral of the parable = Matthew 19:30, the terms ἔσχατοι πρῶτοι changing places, the better to suit the story. The meaning is not: the last as the first, and the first as the last, all treated alike. True, all get the same sum; at least the last and first do, nothing being said of those between; but the point of the parable is not that the reward is the same. The denarius given to all is not the central feature of the story, but the will of the master, whose character from a commercial point of view is distinctly eccentric, and is so represented to make it serve the didactic purpose. The method of this master is commercially unworkable; combination of the two systems of legal contract and benevolence must lead to perpetual trouble. All must be dealt with on one footing. And that is what it will come to with a master of the type indicated. He will abolish contract, and engage all on the footing of generously rewarding generous service. The parable does not bring this out fully, as it gives the story only of a single day. It suggests rather than adequately illustrates its own moral, which is that God does not love a legal spirit. In the parable the men who worked on contract, and, as it came out at the end, in a legal temper, got their penny, but what awaits them in future is not to be employed at all. Work done in a legal spirit does not count in the Kingdom of God. In reward it is last, or even nowhere. This is the trend of the parable, and so viewed it has a manifest connection with Peter's self-complacent question. On this parable vide my Parabolic Teaching of Christ.