Homily for the 16th Sunday after Trinity (25th Week in Ordinary Time)
Today’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard gives us a compelling and yet disorienting vision of the kingdom of God. As Fr. Simeon puts it, “The parable is a catechesis meant to transform the natural man and his pagan values and mentality into a Christian with the generous mind and redeeming Heart of Christ, that is, into a being capable of bearing the full joy and glory of a kingdom where every breath is an act of love.”[1]
This is one of those gospel passages that, as a preacher, feels a bit like attempting to drink from a fire hose. There is just too much. Which is itself perhaps one of the most prominent concepts lurking behind the story. On this muchness, Peter Kreeft says, “God is always more of everything good. That is the best word for God: more. Always more.”[2]
With that in mind, rather than presenting you with one main idea today, I want to begin with some observations about the parable — some things that perhaps we might miss at first glance — before proposing briefly a handful of applications.
So on to the observations.
The real drama of the parable comes at the end with the payment of the workers. Note here the unusual order: the landowner intentionally begins with the workers who began latest. He could have paid the early workers first, sent them on their way, and let his generosity be private. But no: he wants everyone to see. That in itself is an interesting clue to the fact that what’s going on here isn’t fundamentally about the wages, or the workers, but about the master. He wants the workers to understand something about himself and who he is.
In fact, the complaint of the early workers about having born “the day’s burden and the heat” is, as Fr. Simeon suggests, “almost laughable in comparison to all the exhausting running about of the master himself, who seems to have left his bed much before dawn, earlier than any of the workers. The master of the vineyard is clearly himself the hardest worker in the parable….” The 12th century nun Mechtild of Helfta, imagines Christ speaking here: “This vineyard is my Catholic Church, in which for thirty and three years I labored, and which I watered with my sweat; do thou labor with me in this vineyard.”[3] So however we want to interpret who the workers are, the central figure here is Christ. His goodness is more important than all our concepts of equality and justice.
What we have in the grumbling workers is an exemplary case of envy. In casual speech we often conflate envy and jealousy, but jealousy is more specifically just wanting the good that someone else has. Envy is seeing the good that someone else has and hating the fact that he has it. As such it is often described in the tradition as one of the worst evils. It is more than a disordered desire, or an abuse of something good, it is a hatred of something good. Verse 15 has a phrase that is often translated in our modern versions as something like “Do you begrudge my generosity?” But the more literal Greek reads, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” This visual reference suggests the way that envy interferes with our ability to see our neighbor. Envy clouds our view of reality so that instead of seeing God’s infinite goodness we only see a particular and limited good that we have defined for ourselves.
Let me now offer five interpretations of the workers for your consideration. These are all valid ways of thinking about the parable and applying it. I mention them all because I frankly find them all important and potentially fruitful. Scripture speaks to us in different ways at different times, so maybe you’ll find one more convicting than others.
1. And this is maybe the most obvious early church reading: the latecomer workers are the gentiles. St. Gregory actually compares the different hours to the ages of the world and the workers to the patriarchs, the law, and the prophets. But to put it more bluntly, the people of Israel, the Jews, are the original workers, the faithful first, who responded to the call. And yes, part of the parable is very much directed at the Pharisees and the leaders of the temple in the first century who looked at the early Gentile Church with envy. But for us the lesson here isn’t about them, but about how we should respond to God’s generosity, and how we should view those older brethren in faith and workers in the vineyard. We dare not turn that envy into an envy of our own, or a pride of our own! We came late to the work. The fact that we have been given access, through Christ, to the promises of Abraham, does not negate, as St. Paul so often points out, the witness of the original people of God.
2. We might think of the workers in terms of generations. This is perhaps the least properly theological suggestion I want to make, but one of obvious contemporary application. If you live in the world of social media — which is, maybe, a world constructed on envy — you find a near-constant dynamic of frustration between boomers, Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, and all the various microgenerations in between, all of whom fret that their work has been misunderstood or judged unjustly. To be sure, the complaints may be legitimate, but they still have no final place in the kingdom. The old may rightly look at the entitlement of youth who take their inheritance for granted; the young may look at the greed of the old who treat their success as pure merit. Ultimately both have to look to God who is the source of all, finding in him the capacity to see each other with charity.
3. The laborers can naturally be compared to the lifelong faithful and late conversions. St. John Chrysostom makes this comparison in his classic Paschal homily. At the extreme here we have the baptized Catholic who has lived a whole life of fidelity, grace, and virtue, versus the person who embraces the truth at the point of death — the thief dying on the cross being the great gospel example. How can we describe the mysteries of providence? In the Ordinariate, where so many of us have entered the Full Communion of the Church from other Christian traditions, we can also find ourselves envious of those who delayed and came in later. Personally I can see myself in both positions: I came into the Catholic Church knowing many who had done so years and decades before, yet I also see those doing it now and wonder what took them so long! Here too, envy is the great enemy of grace. God’s work relativizes all our decisions.
4. The equality of the reward in the parable, the fact that all the workers receive the same wage, raises obvious questions in light of other New Testament passages suggesting greater or lesser rewards. St. Thomas addresses this problem directly in the prima secondae, arguing that while all the blessed receive the same reward, that is salvation and eternal life, not all experience it in exactly the same way. In other words, the gift is objectively identical, but its subjective enjoyment varies. This is how the tradition understands equality and distinction within the heavenly court. God’s goodness is the same, but we can become more or less capable of receiving it.
5. The parable shows that grace is not opposed to freedom, and that salvation is both a gratuitous gift and hard work. I wonder if the most characteristic modern misunderstanding of salvation is that it has to be only one or the other. In the parable, the landowner says, “Why are you standing idle?” Salvation is not idleness. He does not simply walk up and hand everyone a denarius. He invites them to work. He wants them to work with him in his vineyard. Salvation is not something we earn, as if the master had some obligation to give it to us, but nor is it mere receptivity. It is an invitation to his work for us, and we still have to show up and respond.
Wherever we see ourselves in this parable, it challenges us to recognize that God’s ways are not our ways, and that he works tirelessly to bring us to himself, despite our tendencies to idleness or envy.
[1] Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Volume III.
[2] Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings, Cycle A.
[3] Quoted in Leiva-Merikakis above.