25th Sunday of Ordinary Time, A September 20, 2020
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Video of 8am Mass: https://youtu.be/_RYOIHmDjfg
The sugarcane harvest is starting, so for the next four months or so will see many, many people working 12-hour days and more. How would they feel if people showed up in the last hour of the day and got paid the same amount? But that is exactly what happens in the parable.
Now, this is not exactly business advice. Jesus is not teaching that business owners should always pay a full day’s wage to people who only work one hour. This story works for his teaching because it is an act of generosity in a single case, not the establishment of a standing compensation policy. Nonetheless, it is a lesson on God’s generosity that we should take to heart in more ways than one.
Working in the vineyard is a symbol of serving the Gospel by believing his teachings and sharing them with others. This landowner’s repeated attempts to find employees is a symbol of God’s eagerness to get as many people as possible into his vineyard so that he can get as many people as possible into heaven.
So, the point is that everyone who comes to the vineyard of the Church, even at the “eleventh hour” – the last minute – will be saved. In other parts of the gospel, Jesus does tell parables where people who do more receive a bigger reward. It is true that the holier our lives, the more glorious we will be in heaven. But this one is focusing on what is the same for everyone in heaven. From the greatest saint to the last soul out of purgatory, everyone in heaven will live forever in eternal joy even if they experience different levels of divine glory.
Jesus is targeting a particular obstacle to this salvation, as he makes clear at the end. “Are you envious because I am generous?” Envy is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. The literal phrasing of this question is even better. It’s more like “is your eye evil because I am generous?” Earlier in this gospel, Jesus taught “The lamp of the body is the eye… if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be.”
Envy is specifically when we get sad or angry that something good happened to someone else; it’s when we see evil where there is actually something good. These workers were so focused on their own expectations that they looked at something generous and called it unjust. This is dangerously close to the unforgiveable sin of blasphemy against the holy spirit which is to refuse to admit what is good and what is evil. Envy, like all sin, can blind us to the ways of God.
As Isaiah puts it in the first reading, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” Jesus uses these parables with unexpected and shocking twists to dislodge our earthly perspective and open our minds to the eternal way of seeing things. The particular focus here is the ridiculous generosity of God. Last week, we see how God is willing to forgive an unbelievably large debt if only we forgive others. This time, we’re seeing that God is willing to give the undeserved gift of eternal life to anyone who shows up, no matter how late.
But these grumbling workers complain, “you have made them equal to us, who bore the day’s burden and the heat.” Therein lies part of the problem. They see their work primarily as a burden, something to be endured for the sake of a reward. Work can be burdensome, but that’s not all work is. Look back at the exchange between the last workers and the landowner. “Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They answered, ‘Because no one has hired us.’” The implication here is that these men weren’t cheating the system – deliberately waiting to the last minute doesn’t work for faith and salvation either. They were trying to work but found themselves unemployed. It is part of human nature to work. We might think we want to be idle all day, but the reality is that that leaves us feeling empty and unsatisfied. How many of us were truly happy couped up during the quarantine with nothing valuable to do?
This landowner’s generosity doesn’t start with a fat paycheck for one hour of work, it starts with the willingness to give these men some sense of purpose to redeem a mostly wasted day. It starts with his willingness to see these men not as tools to make him money, but as fellow human beings who, like everyone, long for purpose and belonging. And he knows that, even if they didn’t work all day, they still need to eat and make a living, so he pays them fully.
But envy and greed blind us to this. The world tells you that businesses exist to make money. Don’t believe that. Businesses should exist to provide goods and services to our fellow human beings; they exist to give human beings a meaningful participation in the world around them, which glorifies God who made the world. Profit is a good and necessary byproduct of that, but it is not the goal. The goal, like everything worth doing, is love of God and love of neighbor.
So, what’s the point of the parable? What do we do with this lesson? We check our greed and our envy. We learn to look at labor as a share in God’s work, rather than a burden. We learn to look at fellow men and women as people we love rather than competitors for a slice of the pie. We learn to hope for the salvation of our bitterest enemies.
That means you should pray that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for all her mistakes, may have been called to God’s vineyard in her final moments. That means you should not view people on welfare as leeches but look with compassion on those who do not enjoy the dignity of meaningful employment. That means you should look at employees not as cogs in your machine, but as human beings who need to make living wage even if they can’t always do all the work you want done. That means that, when you feel sad that something good happens to someone else, you should repent and force yourself to express gratitude and joy instead.
“The last will be first and the first will be last.” Hours on the clock and dollars in the bank will mean nothing when we stand before the judge. All that will matter is whether you are in the vineyard when the day of your life has come to its end. Don’t waste your time judging those who haven’t come in yet or comparing your reward to theirs. Do your part now; pray and evangelize so that those idling away their lives might join us before it’s too late.