TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (2023)

TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (2023)

Readings:

Isaiah  55:6-9

Psalms    145:2-3, 8-9, 17-18

Philippians 1:20-24, 27

Matthew 20:1-16

I don’t think it is a peculiarly American reaction, but it appears that people in the U.S. are especially repulsed by Jesus’ parable of the vineyard owner and the laborers.  Our sense of fairness and justice, our sense of what is right and what is wrong, is greatly offended by the vineyard owner’s decision to pay all the workers, even the johnny-come-latelies, a full day’s wage.  The parable brilliantly sets up the outrage by requesting that the workers be paid “beginning with the last [hired] and ending with the first.”  Of course, the workers who had been working since dawn would be right to think they were bound to be paid more than the workers hired at 5 PM, 3 PM,12 PM, and 9 AM, even though they surely had a sense of what was coming by the time all five groups had been paid.  To avoid an overreaction, it is important to remember, not only that it is a parable, but it is a parable about “the kingdom of heaven.”

The landowner is the “generous God” spoken of in our first reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, “whose thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.”  For, “as high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.”  There you have it.  God does not think like an economics professor.  God is the one spoken of in our responsorial psalm, a God who “is gracious and merciful,” whose “greatness is unsearchable.”

Parables are never meant to be taken literally, and any pity we feel for the workers who worked a full day should be overwhelmed by the knowledge that we worship a God who is generous beyond our wildest imaginations.  Matthew’s gospel passage makes official room for those death-bed confessions that ‘Jesus is Lord.’  There will be no room for anger or bitterness when we get to heaven and we discover the most unpredictable of individuals living there, for the Lord God “is just in all his ways and holy in all his works.”  How privileged should we feel to worship a God who is so insanely generous, merciful, and kind.  In our dealings with other people may we always be just as generous.