September 24^th 2014. Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Gospel: Matthew 20:1-16

Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

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GOSPEL:                                   Matthew 20:1-16

Now the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner going out at daybreak to hire workers for his vineyard. He made an agreement with the workers for one denarius a day, and sent them to his vineyard. Going out at about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the market place and said to them, “You go to my vineyard too and I will give you a fair wage”. So they went. At about the sixth hour and again at about the ninth hour, he went out and did the same. Then at about the eleventh hour he went out and found more men standing round, and he said to them, “Why have you been standing here idle all day?” “Because no one has hired us” they answered. He said to them, “You go into my vineyard too”.

In the evening, the owner of the vineyard said to his bailiff, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, starting with the last arrivals and ending with the first”. So those who were hired at about the eleventh hour came forward and received one denarius each. When the first came, they expected to get more, but they too received one denarius each. They took it, but grumbled at the landowner. “The men who came last” they said “have done only one hour, and you have treated them the same as us, though we have done a heavy day’s work in all the heat.” He answered one of them and said, “My friend, I am not being unjust to you; did we not agree on one denarius? Take your earnings and go. I choose to pay the last comer as much as I pay you. Have I no right to do what I like with my own? Why be envious because I am generous?”

Thus the last will be first, and the first, last.’

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . The first reading from Chapter 55 of Isaiah tells us that God’s ways are utterly different to our ways. We find that again in the parable from the Gospel. A landowner hires workers at different times of the day, but gives them all a full day’s wage, even those who only worked for one hour. Is the landowner unjust? No he is not unjust, for he gave those who worked all day long a full day’s wage. The landowner is simply someone who gives gratuitously and unconditionally. Human logic works according to the principle of the little weighing scales that we all have inside our heads. If people are mean to us then we should be mean to them. If people ask us for something, then they should be willing to do something for us. But this is not the logic of God. And neither is it our logic when we follow the way of the Lord. Good spouses, parents and friends do not follow the logic of the weighing scales. They bestow love on those who have done little or nothing to deserve it. Sometimes we feel envious of people who convert at the last minute and are “saved”. We feel aggrieved that we have worked all day in the vineyard of the Lord and end up receiving no more or no less than this salvation. But this bitterness arises from the fact that we are thinking according to human logic. Do we really think that we are working diligently for the Kingdom? How wrong we are! We do little and what we do is done badly! We are all like the workers who work for only an hour and are still given salvation! And how wrong we would be to feel bitter for being hired early in the vineyard of the Lord. Just as it is a joy for a father to have employment and bring home bread for the family, so it should be a joy for us to know the Lord early and to discover the meaning of our existence. And, anyway, do we think that the Lord can give a lesser type of salvation to those who convert on their deathbeds and a more substantial salvation to those who convert early in life? The Lord cannot give a half denarius! He cannot half love us, or half save us! Blessed be the Lord who loves us wholly and gratuitously no matter how little we accomplish in his vineyard!

The key to looking anew at the state of our lives: the way we do things is not God’s way of doing things

The first reading is the beautiful passage from the fifty-fifth chapter of the prophet Isaiah.  “My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways; as the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways above your ways”. What a marvellous key for gaining a new perspective on our lives! We are inclined to think that it is right and normal to follow our own ways. If someone somewhere decides to follow the ways of God, then we think that this is a sort of optional “extra” that we may or may not wish to embrace ourselves. But this is simply a wrong way of looking at things. We were made to follow the ways of God and we will not be happy if we continue to follow our own ways. The Lord created us that we might open ourselves to faith and grace. The ways we customarily follow are ways in which God is fundamentally ignored. These ways lead to emptiness and futility, if not directly to evil itself. It is almost worse if they do not lead to obvious inconsistencies, because then we can fail to realize that such paths go around in circles and lead nowhere.

The landowner in the parable is strange, but he is not unjust

The radical difference between God’s ways and our ways is an interpretative key for understanding the Gospel parable of the workers in the vineyard. This peculiar landowner begins by acting in a normal way but finishes by behaving in a way that is almost incomprehensible. He hires workers at different times of the day, even an hour before sunset, but in the end he pays them all the same wage! It seems absurd to us that people who worked vastly different hours should receive the same pay, and this injustice is expressed by the grumbling of the workers who were hired from the beginning. But the word “injustice” is actually incorrect here. As the landowner himself says, the problem is not that he has been unjust with the first group of workers – they still received one denarius each, which was the classic wage for a day’s work. The problem is that the landowner went beyond the dictates of justice and gave the others more than they deserved.

Human justice works according to the logic of perfect balance. But genuine relationships do not follow this logic at all

This fact overturns our system of logic which is based on the notion that a person should be given what they have earned. We have no natural concept of going beyond what is just, what is earned. We evaluate everything in life using the little scales that we have in our minds. And in fact the image of a scales is a symbol of human justice. Everything must be balanced out evenly. Accounts must return perfectly. “To each what he deserves” is an adage found in many human societies. This is how things work – or is it? God’s way work according to grace, that which is unconditionally given. And we function according to grace as well, when we are implicitly following the Lord. If a friendship was based upon each partner in the friendship giving only that which he had received from the other, then the relationship would not last very long. Genuine human relationships require bestowing on each other a benevolence that is undeserved. Imagine a marriage in which the spouses only give to each other that which is earned, in which one spouse says, “If you do this for me, then I will do that for you.” Imagine a parent who responds to a child with merely that which the infant has merited. Parenthood demands filling a child’s life with undeserved benevolence, surprises, treats, presents, things that are given gratuitously. Otherwise how can the child come to know the meaning of love, acceptance, tenderness? Who among us can live without this “something more”, this extra that is undeserved? The ways of God do not involve weighing up the person and giving him what he has earned. God is not a distributor of goods in a communitarian fashion. He is a father who brings history along according to the principle of generosity.

Do we think that we are working diligently in the vineyard of the Lord? How wrong we are! We are all relatively idle! All of us are like the workers who do only one hour and still get the full reward.

God has a coin to give us at the end of the day, and that day is our life. The sun will go down and the Lord will give out the coin that is his Kingdom, his goods, his reward. If one of our brothers and sisters turns to God at the very end of their lives, then God will save them. Does this bother us? We must look at things according to the paternal viewpoint of God. Think of the workers in the parable who are assumed at the end of the day. Their response to the landowner when he asked why they were doing nothing was “Because nobody has hired us.” For a father of a family to be left without work meant to return home without the denarius necessary to buy bread for the family. By giving a full denarius to those who had been assumed for only part of the day, the landowner gave these workers the possibility of feeding their family properly. Today we are all too conscious of the dramatic tragedy of unemployment. But as far as the Kingdom is concerned, all of us are relatively underemployed. We work little in God’s vineyard. The work we do is all too inadequate. But God rewards us anyway even for the hour that we do. God is knocking at the door, offering us this precious work. When we cease to be lazy with regard to his will, then life becomes beautiful and we are rewarded with the Kingdom of Heaven.

God cannot give a half denarius. He cannot give us half his love or half the kingdom, even if we only do half a day’s work in his vineyard. God always gives wholly and completely

God cannot give us less than his entire love. He does not half love us, nor give us half of his Kingdom, nor quarter of his Kingdom. When he gives, he gives completely. The challenge for us is to work in his vineyard and to begin working as soon as possible. If we end up working all day, sure, there is the heat. But we have found a position doing the work that we were made to do, just as the father of the family rejoices when he has found the employment that will put bread on the family table. When we work for the Kingdom then we are blessed for we have found the Lord, we have found the meaning of our existence.