25 Sunday of Ordinary
Time –
September 20, 2020
For many of us, our day to day life can be fairly predictable.
One day is much the same as the day before.
I am sure we observed this during the shutdown and even now with limitations. We have a certain routine
that we
tend to keep to. Beyond our looking forward to those l imitations being dropped,
we normally
do not like our routine to be disturbed. However, we also know from experience that the unexpected can
suddenly come along and throw our routine up
into the air. Some misfortune, like COVID 19 or a forest fire
that gets out of
control, can strike us or those we love and nothing is ever quitethe same
again.
Or some wonderful news can come to us out of the blue, like winning the lottery or a new
drug that cures cancer, and everything we subsequently do is bathed in a new light.
That element of the unexpected is very present in today’s gospel (Matthew 20: 1-16).
There is
something very surprising, even shocking, about the way the landowner operates.
Most employers do not give a full day’s wage to somebody who only does an
hour’s work;
their business would not last
very long. That is simply common sense that we understand.
Why would anyone want to work for a day if they were sure of getting a day’s wage for
an hour’s work? The story that Jesus tells is
not about the human way of doing business.
Rather, Jesus is giving us a picture of God’s way of doing things.
He is showing us
that God’s way of doing things is very different and unexpected from
our way. In today’s
first reading Isaiah reminds us, “my
thoughts are not your thoughts;
my ways are not your ways”. Because God’s
ways are not our ways, we will often find
God surprising and disturbing. This
is the one parable of Jesus that is most likely to get
people upset and
alarmed. We feel that an injustice is being done to those who worked all day.
Yet, the vineyard owner gave those who worked all day a just wage; and then he
gave those
who worked fewer hours the same wage.
We know from experience that people can surprise us. Some
people might surprise us in a negative sense.
They do not measure up to our legitimate expectations of them; they disappoint us. Others can surprise
us in
a positive sense. They far exceed our expectations; they show us that there is
more to them than
we realized. Today’s
parable suggests that God will surprise us in a positive sense.
God’s goodness is always greater than we
might expect; God’s generosity goes beyond our
expectations.
God does not give to us in accordance with what we have earned.
God does not put our efforts on one side of
the scale and then put an equal
amount of grace on the other side of the scale to balance our efforts.
God
graces us in unexpected and undeserving ways. God gives us the equivalent of a
day’s wages for
an hour’s work. The grace and love of God transcends
our human calculations. If we stop to think about it,
the same is true of our
relationship with others. The love and goodness that we receive from family
cannot be
fully understood or evaluated merely in terms of our goodness or what
we deserve at the moment.
If the strangeness of God’s
ways, like the behavior of the landowner, seem disconcerting to us at first,
God’s strange ways are ultimately very reassuring for us. The parable suggests that God’s
favor is not
parceled out on the basis of what we have earned. God is
constantly gracing us through his Son in ways
that bear no relationship to what
we have done, or failed to do. How we hear this parable will to some extent
depend on those with whom we identify in the story.
If we identify with the men
who worked all day, we will be tempted to feel resentful at God’s generosity
towards those we consider
less deserving. However, if we identify with the undeserving ones, those who
were called into the field at the end of the day, we can allow ourselves to experience the thrill of divine generosity.
Maybe, that is where the parable invites us to
place ourselves.
We are all undeserving, and, yet, God continues to grace us in
and through his Son every day,
if we have eyes to see. The parable invites us
to allow something of God’s
ways to shape our ways,
so that we too begin to relate to others not on the
basisof what they deserve but out of the generosity
of our heart, the generous
heart that is motivated and
fashioned by God’s
heart.
Fr. Don Webber, C.P.