25th. Sunday of
Year (A)
(Isaiah
55:6-9; Paul to the Philippians 1:20-24, 27; Matthew 20:1-16)
My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor
are your ways My ways, says the LORD.
As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are My ways above your ways
and My thoughts above your thoughts.
That characteristic “otherness” --
including even a certain “strangeness” -- but above all, the “absolute and
incomparable superiority” of God’s holiness, was also shown very clearly in the
Gospel reading, for you all heard the cry of the earlier workmen on receiving
their pay for the day:
These last ones worked only one hour,
and you have made them equal to us, who bore the day’s burden and the heat.
Although our understanding can
accommodate the attitude of the landowner in the parable, nevertheless our
emotions are such that we are much more readily inclined to sympathise with
those early workers and, as a result, we can find ourselves somewhat puzzled by
Jesus telling such a parable for our instruction.
However, Jesus not infrequently shocked
people in order to make them pay attention, and that would seem to be the case
here, for the very difficulty this parable has for us teaches us a basic, and
absolutely essential, lesson: namely, that we, of ourselves, are
not holy, only God is holy; and His holiness is so sublimely
transcendent that we cannot rightly conceive it other than by experiencing it …
first through early stages of growing appreciation, and then through succeeding
phases of wonder, amazement, and ultimately in self-abandoning humility and
self-committing love.
That was the lesson God had, by His
great prophets, been teaching Israel over many centuries. The prophet Daniel finally summed up Israel’s
long historical experience of God’s dealings with them in words of simple
finality and conviction:
O Lord, righteousness belongs to You,
but to us shame of face, as it is this day -- to the men of Judah, to the
inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those near and those far off in all
the countries to which You have driven them, because of the unfaithfulness
which they have committed against You. O
Lord, to us belongs shame of face, to our kings, our princes, and our fathers,
because we have sinned against You.
(Daniel 9:7-8.)
The prophet Ezekiel taught the same
truth in terms that correspond yet more closely to our present situation as we
try to understand Jesus’ teaching in the parable before us:
The house of Israel says, 'The way of the
Lord is not fair.' O house of Israel, is it not My ways which are fair, and
your ways which are not fair? Therefore
I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways,"
says the Lord GOD. "Repent, and turn from all your transgressions, so that
iniquity will not be your ruin. Cast
away from you all the transgressions which you have committed, and get
yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.
For why should you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the
death of one who dies," says the Lord GOD. "Therefore turn and live!” (Ezekiel 18:29-32.)
And so, despite Israel’s failure to
understand and unwillingness to obey, God still wanted, and was determined, to
offer them fullness of life in appreciation of and response to His own holiness,
as those words of Ezekiel proclaimed:
“I have no pleasure in the death of anyone
who dies”, says the Lord GOD. “Return and live!”
Therefore, the Father sent His Son as
our Redeemer, that through Him we might receive forgiveness of our sins and a share
in His holiness by the gift of His Spirit; and, ultimately, be
prepared and enabled to live as His children with love in His Presence for all
eternity. Let us, therefore, carefully try to understand more of Jesus’
teaching about God and ourselves in this parable.
We are told that the landowner:
went out early in the morning to hire
labourers for his vineyard (and) agreed with the labourers for a denarius a
day,
before going out again, about the
third, sixth, and ninth hours to hire more labourers.
Now that was most unusual; there was a
steward by his side to pay the men’s wages, and he it was who would normally
have done the drudgery of repeatedly going and coming to negotiate with and
hire workers as needed. On such
occasions, voices might well be raised, heated opinions expressed, and wild
accusations made -- rough and tough men under stress, then as now, might call
at times for firm handling – and therefore, such negotiations would not
normally be carried out by the landowner himself.
The landowner was obviously deeply
concerned about those workmen unable to find employment: looking below mere
surface appearances he saw them not just as potential labourers for his own
personal profit, but as husbands and fathers unable to earn enough to feed and
shelter their wives and families; much as Jesus saw, with supreme compassion,
the ultimate evil of sin ravaging the lives of those lost sheep of Israel whom
He had come to save by giving Himself, sinless as He was, to death for all who
would be brought to repentance.
Look at the workers now. Those hired at the eleventh hour could have
gone off elsewhere or even back home much earlier, for example after sixth the hour;
why hang around so very frustratingly, especially after the ninth hour (mid-afternoon), for who would be hiring men so late in the day? The fact that they did remain, therefore,
would seem to show that they did so because they hoped for what seemed
most unlikely. This last group
therefore, were those unwilling to give up hope: hoping against hope, they
were still waiting there at the eleventh hour only one hour before sun-down and
tools-down.
The central theme of Jesus’ preaching
was the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God, and the parable He was putting
before the people was, even in the saying of it, taking on reality: for the
Kingdom of Heaven is about a concerned and committed Lord and Saviour, and a
humble people irrevocably committed to trusting in and hoping for Him.
What was the other difference between
those five groups of men? Did you
notice? And if you did, do you realise
the significance of that difference which is slight in words but portentous in
meaning?
Only the last group, hired at the last
minute so to speak, said that they had been standing there doing nothing “because
no one has hired us”. Experience had
led them to recognize that the opportunity to work was a gift, a blessing, one
which they could not give to themselves.
Each of the other groups, having been more or less spared the humbling
anxiety of wondering whether any work would come their way, had been waiting to
receive offers of work ready and primed with confidence in their own abilities,
and those who had accepted a job and now completed the task, were keenly aware
of the amount of work they had done for the landowner: ‘we have slaved all day;
we have been hard at it from the third, sixth, or ninth hours’.
That, however, was not the whole
picture; indeed, such a portrayal distorted the basic reality of their
situation which only the members of the last group -- the last-gasp-group so to
speak -- had come to recognize through an understanding of what the landowner
had done for them. They were the ones
whose experience made them humble enough to recognize -- as the hours went inexorably by -- just how much they depended upon the goodness of the landowner, who, in
fact, ultimately hired them not for the work they could do for him but out of his
compassion for them and for their families in need.
At the end of the day when all were
gathered to receive their pay all those workers taken on in the beginning and
then in the third, sixth, and ninth hours were full of the work they had done …
and that brought them bitterness of heart.
The eleventh hour group, however, were able to taste something of the
joy of the Kingdom of Heaven proclaimed by Jesus, for they were stunned by the
awareness of God’s goodness and the landowner’s compassion. Thank God this landowner came back again for
us!
Self and sorrow; Jesus and joy!
The sublime truth here taught by Jesus
was that the gift, the reward, which God offers to His faithful, being both
divine and eternal, infinitely transcends any earthly work we can give, any
personal merits we may invoke. Our first
and foremost Christian calling and duty is to humble ourselves before God and
praise Him with grateful hearts and minds for His great goodness whereby He has
called us into His Kingdom and even given us an opportunity to work for that
Kingdom, in His Son and under the guidance of His Spirit. And, whatever work we do will only have value
before God in so far as it is offered as our humble yet loving contribution to
the great redeeming work offered to the Father by Jesus, our Saviour and
Brother; and that awareness will be the deepest root of our heavenly
delight: God is All in all; He is All for us in Jesus in Whom we are all for
Him and for each other by His Spirit.
There are many who go through life
without reference to God, they seek to do their own will, not His; they want to
satisfy their own desires or the world’s expectations, not win His
promises. They have that attitude of
mind described in the book of Job:
They say to God, 'Depart from us, for
we do not desire the knowledge of Your ways.
Who is the Almighty that we should serve Him? And what profit do we have if we pray to
Him?'
(21:14-15)
Such people may, indeed, come towards
the end of their lives thinking: “I’ve been very successful; I have proved
myself a winner; I always managed to get the most out of the system”; or
perhaps in the case of simpler, less ambitious, or more timid individuals, “I
have always been popular and well regarded.”
Job, in the midst of all his
difficulties and trials, struggled to understand these things:
Why do the wicked live and become old
(and) mighty in power? Their descendants
are established with them in their sight, and their offspring before their
eyes. … They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave. (Job 21:7-8, 13)
And how many suffering people in the
world today are tormented with similar awareness and such thoughts!
Still, the Christian message is clear:
those who work for themselves, for this world alone, will ultimately experience
the terrible truth of Jesus’ judgment:
They have had their reward.
Our work for God should never lead to
the bolstering-up of our native self-satisfaction and pride. On the contrary, whatever befalls us during
our time on earth -- whatever good we may be given to do, whatever successes
may come our way, or whatever trials we may be called upon to endure -- only
when we come to gratefully recognize, and whole-heartedly respond to, the goodness
of God secretly and surely guiding and sustaining us in and through all
these happenings, will we begin to appreciate something of that fullness of joy
and peace in Him called eternal life.
People of God, here below, we are
always – in response to our heavenly calling -- on the way to our heavenly
reward, and there can be no greater blessing than, in the course of our efforts
for God, to have become so emptied of our self-esteem and pride, as to be
totally open and able to delight to the full in the infinite beauty and
goodness of God, as members of His family in Jesus. Remember St. Paul's words:
For me, life is Christ and death is
gain; I long to depart this life and be with Christ … (for) that is far
better. Live your life in a manner
worthy of the Gospel of Christ.
(Philippians 1:23, 27)
