Faithful Sheep, Shepherds and Laborers, 20th Wednesday (II), August 21, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Pius X, Pope
August 21, 2024
Ez 34:1-11, Ps 23, Mt 20:1-16

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following thoughts guided the homily: 

• The ultimate transformation that Jesus wants to work in us is to change us by his love so that we will learn how to love others as he has loved first. Today in the readings, we see two different ways by which he has sought to love us and how that love is supposed to spur us toward living by his standards. But the readings also reveal how sometimes we fail even to try to live to his standards. And the saint the Church celebrates today is someone who not only strived to live by Christ’s standards of love but help the whole Church to do so.
• Let’s begin with the Psalm and first reading. In the famous Psalm 23, we focus on the Lord as our Shepherd. He leads us to verdant pastures and restful waters, guides us in right paths, accompanies us firmly through dark valleys, spreads tables before us even in the sight of opponents, anoints us as priests, prophets and kings, fills our cup to overflowing, inundates our life with goodness and kindness and invites us to dwell with him in his house permanently. With him as our shepherd, we shall not “want,” we shall not be lacking of anything we need. When Jesus finally came into our world as our Good Shepherd, he fulfilled all of these hopes, calling us as his sheep by name, leaving the 99 and going after us when we had wandered as if we were the only sheep in the world, guiding us along his paths, and feeding us ultimately with himself. But his ultimate goal was to transform us, while remaining sheep, to be shepherds after his own heart, to care for others with a similar care by which he first cared for us, to take responsibility for others and protect them, provide for them, go in search for them when their lost, and love them. We see in the first reading that the people of Ezekiel’s time, especially the leaders, were failing to do that. Rather than shepherding and pasturing God’s flock, they were serving themselves, feeding off their milk, shearing and wearing their wool, slaughtering their fattened ones, and giving them over to pillage. They were not strengthening the weak, healing the sick, binding the injured, seeking the lost and bringing back the strays. As a result, the sheep were scattered and became food for the beasts, being taken advantage of by others, wandering far from God and the care he wanted to provide them through his people. So God swore an oath that he would come against those shepherds, take his sheep from them, save his sheep, look after them himself and tend them. That’s precisely what happened when Jesus the Good Shepherd came. But he wants us in his Church to learn the lesson he taught the people of Israel through Ezekiel, and become truly shepherds of others, not using others for our own benefit, but loving and caring for them, calling them in Christ’s name, guiding them to him, protecting them from the wolves and marauders, and seeking to bring them to the Good Shepherd himself to feed them, pasture them, bind their wounds and heal them. It leads us to ask the question as to how much effort we put to shepherding others, to passing on the faith, to protecting people from the predators of every age, and to making sure they’re fed not just with material food but with the food of everlasting life. In an age of individualism, we can allow people to fend for themselves, as they wander far from Christ’s fold. Today Jesus, through the prophet Ezekiel, is calling us as his sheep to learn from him how to shepherd rightly.
• The second great image comes to us from the Gospel. Jesus entered our world to work. He even took on a human trade, doing challenging manual labor as a builder for most of his life on earth, a sign of how he sought to build us up into a holy temple united with him. In the work of salvation, he worked indefatigably as a shepherd, as a fisher of men, to save as many as he could, walking up and down the ancient holy land to bring the Gospel, not having a place to lay his head, sometimes so tired he would fall asleep in rocky, soaked boats in storms, even willing to be tortured and murdered in order to accomplish his work. And he wants us to be hard workers for his kingdom alongside him, because he knows that part of our salvation is precisely through our doing that work together with him. He similarly wants us to experience the joy of work well done, a piece of the happiness of heaven when we’re able to bring in a harvest for and with him, when we’re able to see the return of one or more sheep and rejoice with all of heaven. That’s what the Gospel Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is all about.
• Looked at with worldly lenses, when we compare the men who worked twelve hours and those who worked for one, we think that the latter group had it better, especially since they all ended up receiving the same pay. But this manifests the jaundiced view many of us have of human work, which certainly influences our reaction to Jesus’ story. Most of us have come to think about work in general — and the work of sharing the faith in particular — as a burden rather than a blessing, even though we know that God gave us the vocation to work — to “subdue the earth” and have “dominion” over all animals — before the Fall (Gen 1:28). Work is a part of our vocation, how God has us grow and develop; as we do honest work, we not only make something, but we make ourselves, we build our character, through the qualities we bring to our work.
• If we understand the way work happened in the ancient world, we see clearly how great a gift work actually was. Men used to go to the market place in the morning hoping to be hired as day workers. They did all they could to be chosen, arriving with their tools, running up to meet those who were hiring, selling themselves as hard-workers, much as almost everyone in the United States did during the Great Depression. In the ancient world, many men and their families were living on the semi-starvation line. To be unemployed for a day was to court disaster. If they were not picked at dawn, they would be filled with anxiety. If they were not picked later, at 9, they would have been concerned about letting their wife and children down. If they were not selected by noon, they would have begun to wonder if any sandals and deprecations would be hurled in their direction upon their embarrassed return! If they were not hired by three, they would have begun seriously to worry that their family, and especially their children, might go to bed hungry and malnourished. It’s not like those who were not hired would have been in the market place playing poker, smoking, drinking and gawking at passersby. Most of them would have been eaten alive by apprehension. They easily would have traded in 11 hours of hard work in the fields for the eleven hours of anxiety waiting in the square.
• These considerations bring us to the first application of the parable. Jesus was using this story to preach to the Jews about salvation. By the time of Jesus, the Jews had already been God’s chosen people for about 1800 years, since the time of Abraham. For thirteen hundred years, they had been committed to keeping a covenant with God based on the faithful fulfillment of the Mosaic law. All of a sudden a carpenter from Nazareth, who was accomplishing various types of miraculous signs to back up the authority of his potent preaching, was saying that others were going to get the same “life’s wage” that they were. Jesus stated that the prostitutes, if they repented and accepted his Gospel, were going to receive the full pay of salvation, adding that tax collectors, hated by observant Jews for their complicity with the Romans, would receive the same if they accepted the Gospel like Zacchaeus or Matthew did. Most shocking to the Pharisees’ phylactery-covered ears was Jesus’ assertion that even the Gentiles would be saved. It just didn’t seem fair to them. They resented — to use the words of the parable — that others were being made “equal” to them. Even though Jesus was underlining that his Jewish listeners, too, would be saved if they accepted the fulfillment of all God had been doing among them and embraced the Gospel he was proclaiming and enfleshing, many of his listeners were convinced the “system” was unfair. After all, weren’t those who had kept the Mosaic Law with such exactitude and rigor for thirteen hundred years entitled to something special? Didn’t those who had borne the greater “burdens” and “scorching heat” of the moral law from the dawn of their life have a right to something more than the Johnny-come-latelies — who up until that time had never kept the covenant or, in the case of the Gentiles, hadn’t even heard of it? The Lord’s generosity in freely offering salvation to others, like he would to the Good Thief Dismas on the Cross, was making them jealous and angry.
• Through this parable, Jesus was exposing a serious flaw in the way his contemporaries looked at the Covenant with God and with the religious life in general. Just like sometimes we can view work as a burden rather than a blessing, so many Jews, especially the Scribes and Pharisees, looked at their keeping of the covenantal precepts more as a yoke than a grace. They failed to see that they had already received far more than the others were being offered because of the great gift of having been able to walk in the Lord’s ways up until then. We Christians can sometimes be guilty of the same flaw. We can be secretly jealous of those who have lived a wild and sinful life, but who, because of God’s mercy, converted before it was too late. We can behave like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son and resent that the Father treats our profligate brothers and sisters with the same love with which he has treated us who have never disobeyed his commands in such a flagrant way. We can be bitter, as those who had worked all day were, that the Master is making others “equal to us” who have shouldered the weight of fidelity to his law all along. But this envy happens because our vision has become distorted. The expression the Master in the Parable uses today, “Are you envious because I am generous?,” is a loose translation of the Greek St. Matthew employs, which says, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” The generosity of another, especially of God, can make us angry because we think that if we are to win, others must lose; that we can’t be happy and enjoy the fruits of our work unless others, especially the lazy bums who haven’t made the same choices we have, don’t get the same thing and are unhappy. Our eye becomes evil when we’re confronted by others’ sharing their goods or sharing in those goods. We have to add that one of the reasons why we, like Jesus’ Jewish listeners, are prone to anger by the Lord’s merciful generosity is because sometimes we value sins more than we value the love of God and of others. That’s why we’re jealous of those who “get in” at the last moment after having lived a sinful life. If we truly treasure God, however, we recognize that we’ve been blessed all along way more than those who were sinfully enslaved to various idols. Repentant sinners clearly recognize this: that’s one of the reasons why they convert!
• So the first lesson that the Lord wants us to take from this parable is that he in his mercy and generosity continues to call others into his vineyard to join those whom he called earlier. Jesus’ heart is so moved with compassion for the crowds that he begs us to pray to the Harvest Master for laborers for his fields. He wants us to rejoice when others respond to that prayer, even if they respond at the last minute, and to let people know how many job openings there still are in the vineyard of the world! That’s how our thoughts will become like God’s thoughts and our ways like his ways.
• But there’s a second, equally important lesson from the parable. When many “cradle Catholics” hear this parable, we initially seem to relate to those hired at 6 am in the story, because we think we’ve been in the vineyard from the day of our baptism. When many converts hear it, depending upon how long ago they received the grace, they see themselves in those hired perhaps at 9, noon, 3 or 5. But the Lord wants us — including us priests and religious — to recognize that in terms of work for the Kingdom, we may still be in the market place! Many of us may not yet have begun really to labor for his kingdom: we may be bodies in his vineyard, but not yet laborers. There’s the famous quip of St. John XXIII in response to the question, “Quante persone lavorono in Vaticano?” “How many people work in the Vatican?” Rather than give a number of employees, he replied, “Più o menu, la metà!” “More or less, about half.” Half of the priests, religious and laity in the Vatican were really working to build the kingdom in the heart of the Church; the other half just pretended to be laboring. With regard to the work of the Church in parishes, surveys show that only about 7 percent, one of 14, ever volunteer to help out as catechists, coaches, in the food pantry, or elsewhere. More broadly, the majority of Catholics aren’t even coming to Mass. They’re not learning the faith to pass it on. They’re not only not living the faith with discipline in the middle of the world, but sometimes actually living opposed to it, as some Catholic politicians sadly show us. Likewise there are some priests and religious who do the minimum of their duties, undistinguished by diligence or zeal, happy to allow others to get the callouses. The Lord is calling all of us to labor in his vineyards, to pray to the Harvest Master, to bring Jesus and his teaching to others, and to help to bring others — including notorious sinners, including those who might seem to be far from the Gospel — to Christ. God wants each of us to become a real laborer, a true hard worker, in and for his kingdom, with sleeves rolled up and sweat on the brow.
• And in calling us to work hard for his kingdom, Jesus is once more simply telling us, “Follow me!.” In the parable, we see how the Master, representing Jesus, exhausts himself even in comparison to the workers who were hired first thing in the morning. Despite the fact that the Master had a foreman to whom he could have delegated all the hiring, the Master himself went out to hire at 6, 9, 12, 3 and 5. He was even willing to lose money to hire people at the end of the day, not only because he cared about taking in the harvest as urgently as possible, but because he didn’t want anyone excluded from the work of and in his kingdom. Notice that he doesn’t give things out of charity to the people sitting idle in the marketplace; respecting their dignity as workers, he gives them something to do. His question to those hired at 5 pm, “Why do you stand here idle all day?,” shows his passion that everyone come to his vineyard to work; after all, he had already come out four times that day to hire everyone who was present. Their response, “Because no one has hired us!,” shows in a sense how so much inactivity had led to a self-pity that had made unresponsive and irresponsible. Did they not realize that the Master of the Vineyard was hiring everyone? Even if they were in the ancient “out house” the first four times he was hiring, did they not grasp that everyone was being summoned to work in the fields? People often say that the reason why they have never gotten involved is, “No one asked me.” With regard to the harvest, however, God never wants us to say that. He wants us to grasp that he is hiring all of us, that there’s room in the vineyard for everyone willing to work, that he’s counting on all our help. And he’s passionately and continuously coming out in search of each of us to summon us to labor with him for the salvation of the human race.
• The essential lesson of the parable is that to be in the Kingdom of God means to be working together with God and together with others, some who have entered the fields before us, and some who have come after us. There’s much work to do and God wants each of us working as hard as talented athletes strive to make the Olympics and win the gold. We see in the Parable that remaining idle on the sidelines when God’s hiring us all to do his work is not merely the worst of missed opportunities, but rather a lack of the life the God of the Kingdom wants us to share. He wants us not only objectively to share in the urgent work of the harvest, but he wants to form us as harvesters, because our life, like that of the day laborers in the marketplace, is purposeless unless we grasp that we’re hired and get down to hard work. Our failure to recognize and to respond to his call deprives us of this grace.
• Today the Church rejoices to celebrate someone who was a good shepherd after Jesus’ image, someone who was a hard worker his whole life who brought that diligence to the papacy, St. Pius X. His whole life as a disciple and then his priorities as a priest, bishop and Pope were all to love God and neighbor with all he had and to help form Christ’s people to do so as sheep, shepherds and laborers. Born in 1835 in a small village called Riese near Venice, one of a family of 12 whose father was a mailman, Giuseppe Sarto discerned a priestly vocation as a boy but his family did not have the resources to pay for his priestly education. His pastor came to the rescue. He tutored him in Latin and arranged a scholarship for him to go away to seminary where, despite a ten mile journey on foot each day, Giuseppe excelled so much that he was ordained a priest by dispensation at the early age of 23. He was assigned as the assistant to an aging and crippled pastor in Tombolo for nine years. In between pastoral calls, he continued to study St. Thomas Aquinas and canon law, established a night school for adult catechesis, and became a much sought-after preacher. In 1867, he was named pastor in Salzano, where he rebuilt the Church, provided for a parish hospital, and heroically served the ill during a cholera epidemic. Recognizing his talents and zeal, his bishop then made him a canon of the Cathedral, spiritual director and rector of the diocesan seminary, and finally vicar general. Because he was faithful in so many “little things,” he was entrusted with greater. At the age of 49, he was named Bishop of Mantua, a diocese that was in rough shape due to various scandals among the clergy. He immediately set out to reform his priests, present and future, and with and through them to reform the people. He taught dogmatic and moral theology at the seminary. He gave weekly catechesis to adults. He heard confessions regularly. His charity knew no bounds. After eight years, there was a such a change in Mantua that Pope Leo XIII named this simple priest of humble origins Cardinal Patriarch of Venice. There, in contrast to the pageantry with which such a prelate was accustomed to be treated, his unpretentiousness and zeal in trying to teach the faith quickly won over the people, who regarded him as a saint. After Leo died in 1903, the cardinals in conclave were set to elect the Vatican Secretary of State Mariano Rampolla as the new pope, but his election, by an historical situation too complicated to describe now, was vetoed by the Austrian emperor Franz Jozef. Providentially, Cardinal Sarto was elected as a compromise. During his 11 years as pope, he brought to the papacy his vast priestly experience ministering to ordinary Catholics. He chose as his motto, “To renew all things in Christ” (Eph 1:10), and he began that renewal with the “source and summit of the Christian life,” Christ in the Eucharist. Most Catholics, influenced by Jansenist rigorism, received Holy Communion only once or twice a year. He encouraged them to receive Holy Communion frequently, even daily. He lowered the age of first communion from about 18 to the age of reason. He promoted communion to be brought to the sick. He encouraged all Catholics to read Sacred Scripture each day, preached publicly every Sunday on the Gospel, and founded the Pontifical Biblical Institute to help in the understanding of the Bible. He reformed Church music so that the people would be able to sing simple Gregorian plainchants during Mass and come to Mass to love God and receive his strength to love others, rather than to attend to hear a concert of famous Bach, Beethoven or Mozart orchestral Masses. He fostered Marian devotion. He clearly denounced the various forms of “modernist” ideas that were undermining people’s faith and made sure that all priests and teachers who had a responsibility to pass on the Catholic faith took an oath to promise they would pass it on rather than modernist notions. He also began a thorough reform of canon law and resolved various complicated Church-state issues so that people would have the proper context to grow in Christ-like love. We can summarize his life by saying that, from a very early hour in his life, he worked hard as a student, seminarian, priest, seminary teacher, bishop, cardinal and pope to restore all things in Christ, to refresh the faith of the people and to encourage them, by his example, to get involved as workers in the Vineyard.
• Today Jesus is look at each of us straight in the eye and saying, “You, too, go to work in my vineyard!” He’s telling each of us, “You’re hired!” If we respond to the blessing of that calling, if we roll up our sleeves, and help him spread and strengthen the faith as laborers and shepherds, then he will give us each not just a denarius or full day’s wage, but the abundantly generous reward of eternal life, the same reward as Our Lady, St. Joseph, and all the great saints. We don’t have to wait that long to see that generosity, however. Before we engage in his work later today and throughout this week, he already gives us something far greater than a salary of a billion dollars. The reward he gives is the greatest expression of his generosity he could: he gives himself! He even involves in this gift the “work of [our] human hands.” But to whom more is given, more is to be expected. As we prepare to receive him today, we thank him for never stopping to come to meet us in the marketplace to remind us of the gift of the work to which he’s calling us. We thank him for shepherding us and sending us out to pasture others. We beg him to strengthen us from our communion with him on the inside to respond wholeheartedly to his holy summons. There’s much work to do and, out of love for others and for us, God is sending us to do it. Let’s get started!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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