“You, Too, Go Work In My Vineyard,” Twenty-Fifth Sunday (A), September 24, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
September 24, 2023
Is 55:6-9, Ps 145, Phil 1:20-24.27, Mt 20:1-16

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways,” God tells us through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading. Each of us can see the validity of this truth by the typical reaction we have to the parable Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel. 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. Even though they received what was promised, they still cried foul. Fallen human beings, after all, are generally envious of those who seem to have it easier. From the time we’re children, we’re highly sensitized to any situation of perceived injustice. “That’s not fair!,” we protest whenever our brother or sister gets something and we go without. We howl whenever anyone cuts us in line or cuts us off in traffic. We rebel whenever we lose out due to seeming favoritism in academics, sports, clubs or jobs. And we’re particularly upset whenever we think the Lord is unfair. Why are some people blessed with great health, seemingly perfect families, connections in high places, academic, athletic and musical talents far beyond us? Why do others have it easier? Like the Prophet Ezekiel, we’re tempted to exclaim, “The Lord’s way is not fair!” (Ezek 18:25). With the Prophet Jeremiah, with frustration, we cry out, “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?” and “Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” (Jer 12:1). But we see that, according to our evaluations, the Lord is regularly unfair. Why does Job suffer the loss of family members, lands, and health when nothing happens to his friends? Why does Abel die while Cain lives? Why is the good and moral Joseph sold into slavery while his brothers remain free? We can multiply the examples from Sacred Scripture and human life. Life isn’t fair. And God not only sometimes permits that injustice but seems to commit it.
• That’s why today’s readings, especially today’s Gospel, is so important. It unmasks how God’s thoughts and ways are different are indeed sometimes higher than the heavens away from our thoughts and ways. To align our thoughts, ways and lives to God’s wisdom, however, we first must understand the context of the parable, get to the root of why on various levels it offends our sense of justice, and then examine what it’s teaching us about God, ourselves, and the kingdom he’s summoning us to enter and help 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 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 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 — beforethe 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 ravenously hungry and malnourished. It’s not like those who were not hired would have been in the market place playing cards, 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 all 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 be left behind; 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 workingtogether 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. 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.
• Someone who got this message was St. Paul. After Jesus appeared to him on the Road to Damascus, he spent much of the rest of his life crisscrossing the ancient world founding and strengthening Churches in modern day Syria, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece, Cypress, Malta and Italy. He was scourged, imprisoned and shipwrecked various times on account his labor in the Vineyard. He used to support himself doing the arduous work at night of making tents by hand so that no one would think he was leeching off of them. And he continued to work hard even when his strong arms were chained to walls, writing letters to people whom he could not visit and catechizing those who came to see him. In tonight’s second reading, he describes the principle that should motivate every Christian. “For me to live is Christ,” he said, and “If I go on living in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me.” As long as we’re alive in the world, in other words, we should be engaged in some type of fruitful labor, planting seeds for the Lord, reaping the fruit of seeds others have planted before us, and seeking to make Christ, his kingdom, and his harvest, the real driving force of our life. Jesus longs for the day when everyone of us can truthfully echo those words of St. Paul and, in our own part of the vineyard, work with the same energy and fruitfulness with which St. Paul labored to till the soil in seven different countries. The apostle prayed at the end of the second reading that we would “conduct ourselves in a way worthy of the Gospel of Christ,” and hard work to establish God’s kingdom in the hearts of others and to align the values of society with those of God are essential and indispensable parts of that worthy Christian behavior.
• Tonight 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, then he will give us each not just a denarius or full day’s wage, but the aboundingly 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. This morning, 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! If the Lord’s ways are not fair, rather than being gypped, we’re in fact the luckiest people on the planet. As undeserving as we are perhaps to others, he is generous to us beyond measure, and 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 beg him to strengthen us from our communion with him on the inside to respond wholeheartedly to that summons. And we ask him for the grace that, like St. Paul, we may see that truly to live is to live in Christ and to share in his hard work of bringing in a great harvest of souls to rejoice with him and with us forever. 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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