Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 19, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
September 19, 2020

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The text that guided the homily was: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which Jesus will show us how he is calling all of us to help him take harvest men and women, boys and girls, in his kingdom. He does so by means of a parable in which a foreman goes out to summon laborers for his vineyard at dawn, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon and an hour before shutting time. Then the owner of the vineyard gives them all the same full-day’s pay. .
• The frame for what God wishes to teach us is summed up by the Prophet Isaiah, who will speak to us in the first reading. Through him, God tells us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.” Each of us can see the validity of this truth by the typical reaction we have to the parable to Jesus’ parable. Without the prodding of any labor union, we’re prone to agree with the beef of those who worked a grueling 12-hour day but who didn’t receive a penny more than those who worked only one hour. In order to have our thoughts become more like God’s thoughts and our ways resemble His ways, however, we first must understand the context of the parable, get to the root of why on various levels it offends us, and then examine what it’s teaching us about God, ourselves, and the kingdom he wants us to enter and help him build.
• Let’s first understand the parable. 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 received the same pay. But this manifests our jaundiced view of human work, in which we don’t regard it often as a blessing but rather a necessary evil. Work is a part of our vocation, given to us before the Fall, as a means God gives us to live in his image and grow. 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. Moreover, if we understand the way work happened in the ancient world, we see that work really was a blessing. 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 all their tools, running up to meet those who were hiring, selling themselves as hard-workers, much as men in our country did during the Great Depression. They and their families were living on the semi-starvation line. Those hired at five would easily have traded in 11 hours of 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 since the age of Abraham, about 1800 years prior, inspired by the promise of the covenant. All of a sudden a carpenter from Nazareth, who was working all types of miraculous signs to back up the authority of his potent preaching, was saying that others — gentiles, even converted prostitutes and tax collectors, were going to get the same “life’s wage” — the full pay of salvation — that the Jews were. Even though they too could be saved, it just didn’t seem fair to them. After all, weren’t those who had kept the Mosaic Law with such exactitude and rigor for centuries entitled to something special? The Lord’s generosity in freely offering salvation to others, like he would to the Good Thief on the Cross, was making them jealous. But they were flawed in looking at their Covenant with God as a burden rather than a blessing. The expression the Master in the Parable says 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 God can make us angry because we think that if we are to win, others must be left behind, that we can’t be happy and enjoy the fruits of our work unless others, those who haven’t made the same choices we have, are unhappy. So the first lesson that the Lord wants us to take from this parable is that he continues to call others into his vineyard to join those whom he called earlier. If we hope our thoughts to become more like his thoughts and our ways his ways, then we must rejoice when others are hired for the work of the kingdom. Moreover, if our thoughts and ways resemble His, then we must strive to work, with Jesus, to let everyone know that there are still job openings in the fields.
• But there’s a second lesson from the parable. When those of us who are “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. But the Lord wants us to recognize that it’s more likely that many of us are still in the market place! We haven’t yet begun to work. We may regularly visit the vineyard, but we haven’t yet rolled up our sleeves as laborers working up a serious sweat in bringing in his harvest. In the parable, we see how the Master, representing God, exhausts himself even in comparison to the workers who were hired first thing in the morning. Despite the fact that he had a foreman whom he could have sent to do the hiring, the Master himself goes 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 the harvest — which represents the ever urgent harvest of souls — but because he didn’t want anyone excluded from the work of and in his kingdom. His going out at 5 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. God is calling us to work, because that is the way we will grow as disciples and begin to look at things from his perspective. Jesus is look at each of us straight in the eye and saying, “You, too, go to work in my vineyard!”  If we respond to the blessing of that calling, if we roll up our sleeves, and help him spread and strengthen the faith, then he will give us each not just a denarius, not just a full day’s wage, but the abounding generous reward of eternal life. There’s much work to do and out of love for others and for us God is sending us to do it and strengthening us by giving us his Body and Blood at Mass not only to give us the stamina for the work but as a down payment of what he wishes to give us forever. He’s hired us to continue his work. Let’s get started!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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