TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "A"

TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR

Cycle “A”: Mt. 20, 1-18 : God’s Generosity

God has no time to waste with those of us who are stingy with smiles or money or compliments or gentle words or time. Today’s parable is one of the most puzzling of the 40 parables Jesus has shared with us. And yet it has much to teach us about God and ourselves. The hired labourers of the parable were the lowest class of Jewish working men. They and their families lived on or below the poverty line. When they were hired for a day’s work, Old Testament law required that they be given their pay packets before sundown, so they hurry to the shops and put some bread and milk on the family table that night.

We are in September, and in Palestine it would be just the time for the grape harvest. By mid-September came also the torrential rains, which explains the frantic

efforts to save the grapes, and every available pair of hands would be drafted. The Jewish farmer worked from sunrise to sunset, a long twelve hour day. The times when the migrant workers would be hired were 6.00 am, 12 noon, 3.00 pm, and 5.00 pm. With heavy storm clouds hovering over him, the vineyard owner would naturally panic and race out to find workers as late as 5.00 pm – one hour before closing time.

You can quite rightly visualise Jesus himself coming around that time after a day of teaching and healing, standing with the others and waiting to be called  -  waiting with their fingers crossed and praying for rain. Waiting till 5.00 pm shows you how badly those labourers wanted employment; and pretty humiliating, too.

However, the hero of the parable is not the labourers but the vineyard owner. He is, of course, a stand-in for God. And the point of the parable is the equal treatment meted out to those hired out at the first and also the 11th. hour. The intervening three groups are ignored, serving only as padding to fill out the story. The vineyard owner, out of pity and generosity, gives the almost useless 11th. hour workers the same wage as was given to those hired first thing in the morning. A denarius was a full day’s wage, just enough to keep a family fed at the end of the day. Giving anything less would spell starvation. The denarius was one whole day’s wage for a worker. Had the vineyard owner in the parable rewarded the workers exactly according to the hours they worked, most of them would have received much less than a denarius. He was therefore concerned about the fate of each one and paid them accordingly.

This parable rudely upsets our picture of God. It tells us that our human standards are useless in measuring God or trying to understand him. So this parable presents a particularly sharp challenge to contemporary society. We are being taken over increasingly by the rhetoric of competition and of the measurement of rewards. Schools and universities, hospitals and social services alike are rated in league tables and given financial prizes for ‘excellence’. It seems to be obvious that ‘rewarding excellence’ is the only fair strategy. Salaries and bonuses are ‘performance-related’, and the performance involves keen competition. The economics of today’s parable is quite different: the purpose of salary is to sustain the worker, and what is just is to give to those who need it.

God is telling us through this strange parable, “Don’t cut me down to your size. I simply will not squeeze into your stereotypes.”

One of the very few people who really understood God was a peasant woman named Mary. She is on record as saying of God: “He has filled the hungry with good things, but the rich he has sent empty away.” In the time of Jesus, the Jews considered themselves a privileged group and looked down upon the Gentiles as “late-comers.” But God assures us that all men and women, no matter when they come are equally precious to him. In truth, salvation is entirely a gift, a grace  -  not a reward  -  and God’s pure initiative.

God must get great pleasure when he notices our generosity. Remember how lavishly Jesus applauded the widow who dropped her last coin in the Temple money box. If it were left to us, we would perhaps have told the widow to go home with her coin and let the Temple look after itself. But not so the Nazarene. Why? Because he proposed to take care of her wants by his own methods. Remember how St. Luke’s Gospel has him saying, “Give, and it shall be given to you, pressed down in measure and flowing over. So let us be generous and sit back. God will more than match our generosity every time out.

PRAYER:  Lord God, owner of the vineyard, you are generous beyond expectation with your workers. Make us like you: untie our strictures and increase the flow among us of kindliness, considerateness and material assistance.

Creator of the fruitful earth, you have made us stewards of all things. Give us grateful hearts for all your goodness, and steadfast wills to use your bounty well, that the whole human family, today and in generations to come, may with us give thanks for the riches of your creation. We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord.


They could not see that the landowner had the right to do whatever he chose. He had offered a standard 'day's wages' and if he was willing to give that to the men who had only worked for one hour, why should he not? It was certainly a 'fair wage'; the men who had been hired at the end of the day could not complain … neither should the others because they received what was agreed. Jesus was teaching that the 'faithful Jewish nation' had no right to exclude others from the rewards of His kingdom. He could be generous to whoever He wanted to bless.

Envy is a wicked motivator and should have no place among God’s people. But all too often, the older church members resent the blessings which young or new believers receive. Jesus was teaching His trainee apostles that they should not let people in the churches demand their rights to have things the way they want, or be envious of God's kindness to people who do not seem to have deserved it. We can never earn our salvation or any reward as we serve the Lord; His reward is a free gift to those who freely offer themselves to Him. Often those who seem most undeserving will be the most grateful, while those who get their 'rights' are arrogant. It is time to recognise the extreme grace of God to us and learn to praise Him for even greater grace to others.

25TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, CYCLE A

MATTHEW 20:1-16A

Friends, the parable that Jesus tells in today's Gospel is one of the most unnerving, disturbing and confounding of all. We know the outline of the story well: a landowner goes out to hire workers for his field, hiring some first thing in the morning and then others at different times during the day. Then, at the close of work, he pays each the same wage. I would like to offer two reflections on this puzzling story. First, we should remember that God's ways are not our ways. Does this story represent an undermining of justice? No, rather, a showing forth of the justice that flows from God's vision of things. Here's a second perspective: We sinners are very susceptible to a reward-centered understanding of our relationship to God. Tit for tat. I do this; then you better do that. But this is very juvenile, very primitive. We've been invited to work in the vineyard of the Lord. That is the greatest privilege imaginable, to participate in the Lord's work. Why are we fussing about rewards? And how liberating this is! I don't have to spend my life worrying and comparing. I can live