Isiah 55: 6-9 + Psalm 145 + Philemon 1:20-24, 27 + Matthew 20: 1-16
September 24, 2023 at St William and St Peter Catholic Churches in Naples, FL
This is really a cool parable to hear right now as the Auto Workers go out on strike. And since I firmly believe that the Gospel is for the present time and not some history book of old sayings. Jesus Christ just spoke this parable to us just as really as he did once before to his disciples, the “in group.” Perhaps more than any of the parables, this one shakes us up, and I can remember hearing it when I was a lot younger and thinking: “That’s not fair. Those guys who worked the longest should get the most.” When that thinking starts, you know there is something deeper going on here, and a message that just might rub us the wrong way.
If you move around in this scene and look at it from the perspective of each character, some interesting ideas emerge. What about that land owner? He needed to get the job done, and as the day went on, he realized that he didn’t have enough help, so he went looking for others. He promised a fare wage, and he kept his promise.
What about those workers hired in the morning? They were promised a fair wage. What are they complaining about, a generous land owner? Yet, equal pay for vastly unequal work does not seem right. But maybe this parable is not really focused on wages but on motives.
What about those workers who came on the job late in the day. It’s easy to think they just didn’t get up in the morning and were too lazy to get to work, but maybe they had been looking for work all day desperately going from one place to another until someone finally hired them. We don’t know why they were not working in the morning. What we do know is that all their needs are the same – feeding a hungry family.
When you move around inside the story, it seems to me that one thing comes clear. The owner of the vineyard was more interested in supplying their need than in measuring their contribution to his task. His judgement was not based on how hard or long someone worked, but rather on each one of those workers’ right to life and just wage to support that life.
This is not about capitalism and meritocracy nearly as much as it is about justice. That urge to say “Not fair” can overwhelm the many messages here and avoid the challenges. We all like to calculate our own worthiness. It’s comforting, but it does not always lead us toward a real just society. The growing wage disparity in this world should be troubling to us challenging us to call into question what’s really fair and what’s really just. How can those two things really be opposed by any disciple of Christ? The dignity of human work and the importance of a just wage is something too rarely considered these days until we can no longer ignore the multimillion-dollar bonuses and salaries collected by CEOs who sometime are more concerned about profit and keeping share- holders happy than the needs of those who make those profits.
In the end, this parable is really about generosity, leaving us to wonder what’s wrong with those complaining who got what they were promised. Resentment has no place in the heart of any disciple. Are they jealous of someone who seems to be more generous than they are?
This parable comes after the story of the rich young man and Peter’s claim to have given up everything wanting to know what he is going to get out of it. Like those parables, this is really about relationships, the owner and the workers or between the master and disciples. Ultimately it is about getting the mission accomplished not the rewards. We have work to do. We don’t need to be looking around at what anyone else is doing. There are too many empty pews in this church.