Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

If we’re honest with ourselves, I think the Gospel for this Sunday really tugs at our sense of fairness.  I don’t know about you, but when I hear those workers who started at the beginning of the day complaining that they were paid the same as those who only worked one hour, I think they have a case.  This isn’t fair.  It certainly seems to me that they are being cheated, even if what they received was what they agreed to at the beginning of the day.  Certainly, this wouldn’t fly in any work place today, at least not one that is doing things “above board” and following the law.  In fact, we would call this wage theft.

          But to interpret this Gospel in this way would be a mistake and may distract us from the more important point that Jesus is trying to make.  How so?  Jesus isn’t commenting here on fair labor practices.  Rather, He’s telling a parable (a simple story meant to illustrate a deeper truth) to describe for us “the kingdom of heaven.”  And so he starts, “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers….”  Given this, rather than get distracted or caught up in our sense of righteous indignation at the treatment of these workers, let’s set that aside and look at what Jesus is really driving at there.

          To do this, it is important to remind ourselves once again that this is Matthew’s Gospel.  And, as most scholars agree, Matthew was writing for a primarily Jewish audience in order to win over as many of his fellow Jews as possible to this new “way” of Jesus, the Christ.  And so, I think it is a safe assumption that on one level Jesus is likening His fellow Jews to those laborers who responded to the call of the landowner to enter the vineyard early in the day. 

The Jewish people are truly our “older brothers and sisters.”  In the first Eucharistic Prayer, we refer to Abraham not as their father in faith, but our father in faith.  When you get home or back to your dorm room, pull your Bible off the shelf.  Notice that about two-thirds of it is comprised of the Jewish scriptures, or what we call the “Old Testament.”  Each year in the Easter Vigil we pray for our Jewish brothers and sisters, referring to them as the people “to whom the Lord our God spoke first” and as “the people [God] first made [His] own.”  In 1938, a year after issuing an encyclical condemning Nazism and its racist ideology, Pope Pius XI famously said of the Church that “spiritually we are all Semites.”  In other words, spiritually speaking, we are all, in a sense, Jewish.  As Christians we do not look at our faith as an offshoot or radical departure from Judaism, but as an organic development of that same faith.  The New Covenant does not “cancel out” the Old Covenant, but fulfills it in the blood of Christ, the “Lamb of God.”

My point is that this parable certainly has this sense of appeal to our “older brother and sisters” in the faith.  At the same time, Jesus is reminding His fellow Jews that just because they “entered the vineyard” first doesn’t mean that others are barred from entering it later, and that each will receive their due.  Also, there is a subtle admonition here that just because they were called first, doesn’t mean they can simply rest on those laurels.  They are still called to live up to the sacred covenant that God had established with them.

But, this is only one layer.  There is, I think, another layer that we need to consider.  In describing those who “entered the vineyard early,” Jesus may be referring to those who have committed themselves to God from an early age and have, more or less, lived a godly life.  While those who “entered the vineyard late in the day” may refer to those who, perhaps, did not live so godly a life for a long time, but who in their later days, even in the last hour, say “yes” to that invitation of the landowner to enter the vineyard.  After all, Jesus came to call sinners (as we prayed in the Penitential Rite at the beginning of Mass). 

And so, certainly, there is a sense of appeal in this parable to all those who, for whatever reason, may have shunned God’s invitation, or even thrown it back in His face, or run as far away as they possibly could, to even now “enter the vineyard” of the Lord.  To borrow an image from Luke’s Gospel, those who started at the beginning of the day are like the “older brother” in the parable of the prodigal son.   Those who entered later in the day, are like that prodigal son who demanded his inheritance and then proceeded to squander it through a life of selfish indulgence, but who, in the end, “came to his senses” and returned to his father’s house, where he was greeted with an a kiss, a robe, a ring, sandals on his feet and a feast. 

To illustrate this, I think of one my favorite movies, or at least one of my favorite westerns (which is a pretty short list for me).  It’s the 1993 movie Tombstone, about Wyatt Earp, his brothers and the notorious gunslinger, Doc Holliday, and their feud with the Clanton gang in Tombstone, Arizona.  Fair warning: it is a violent movie, but there are a lot of great lines and great moments in the movie.  Probably my favorite scene in the movie, isn’t the famous “shoot out at the OK corral,” but one of the last scenes of movie.  It’s almost a “throw away” scene and one in which you could easily miss the significance of what’s happening.  It’s when Wyatt Earp is going to visit his good friend, Doc Holliday, on his death bed.  As Wyatt is arriving, a Catholic priest is just leaving, apparently just having administered what we used to call “Last Rites,” normally comprised of confession (or probably Baptism in this case), Anointing of the Sick, and Viaticum (or Holy Communion).  As Wyatt approaches the bed, Doc says to him, “Father Feeney and I were just investigating the mysteries of the Church of Rome.  It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds.”  Now, Doc Holliday was one who ran from the Lord for a long time.  He was a gambler, a heavy drinker, a womanizer, not to mention a violent man.  And yet, this scene in the movie is apparently inspired by the story of Doc Holliday’s deathbed conversion to the Catholic faith.  Was he just “covering his bases?”  I don’t know.  I have no window in to his conscious, but I would like to believe that he was sincere in his desire to make his peace with God.

Here, indeed, is a man who entered the vineyard late, but would we truly want to deprive him of his “wage” just because we may have been in the field longer?  Would we stand in the way of God’s mercy for someone who, even in their last moments, said, “I am sorry, Lord; have mercy on me, a sinner?”  Are we jealous because God is generous?  Is God not free to do as He wishes with His mercy?

I think also of a conversation I had in seminary with one of my classmates, who had a somewhat dramatic conversion story of coming to the faith in his college years.  It wasn’t Augustine-esque exactly, but certainly more exciting than my story, which seemed so “vanilla” in comparison.  I was born and raised Catholic, and was a pretty good kid all the way through, though certainly not perfect.  And so, I was telling my friend how in a way I felt jealous of him because of his story.  Was it that some part of me had wished I had “lived it up a little more” before entering seminary or was it that I longed for some profound, felt experience of God’s mercy and calling?  I don’t know.  But my friend said to me, “You don’t understand, Thom.  You had all along what I was looking for all these years.  You had the grace of the Sacraments from the time you were baptized.  That’s not nothing.”  I had never thought of it that way.

It might be easy for us to be indignant or even jealous in situations like this, but this reaction is probably more of an indication of our fallen human nature than a reflection of any true sense justice on our part.  If we really think about it, our reaction to these and similar stories should be joy, overwhelming joy and gratitude to God.  We should say, with Isaiah (from our first reading): “Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked his thoughts; let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.” For God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are God’s ways our ways. And that is a very good news.