Homily for 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
No matter how many times you read this Gospel, it always seems unjust. To pay exactly the same amount of money to someone who has worked only one hour and to another who has laboured for twelve hours in the heat of the day seems blatantly unfair. In fact it would be hard to imagine any employer getting away with it today – not that some of them wouldn’t be above giving it a try. I suppose the problem is that this story offends our sense of justice. Why is it unjust to pay all the workers in the Gospel the same? Because in our human sense of justice and fairness, those who have worked more deserve more and those who have worked less, deserve less. You could argue it was the employer’s money and that so long as he pays what they agreed, the employer has the right to do what he wants – but that would hardly make for good industrial relations. And then there’s also the question of why the workers who were hired late in the day were standing around idle. In the story they say ‘no one has hired us’, and maybe that is true, but you’d also wonder whether if they’d got out of bed a little bit earlier, they’d have found work by now. Perhaps they’d been waiting there all day, or perhaps they were just being lazy. The Gospel doesn’t really say. What we do know is that story seems unjust on so many levels – and it touches a sore point today – for there are moments when in our family life with younger brothers and sisters, in our workplace, or in the world at large, we come across those who seem to get what they don’t deserve when others who have done the right thing, worked hard, and contributed generously seem to get a raw deal. You only have to read a page of two of the Daily Mail, and I think you’ll know what I mean.
So what’s going on in the Gospel? What’s the essential message of what Jesus is trying to say? Well first of all, Jesus is talking to those who were upset and concerned that heseemed to be reaching out to sinners and tax collectors and outcasts, while seemingly ignoringthose who’d worked hard and done everything right. Jesus told lots of stories like this, like for example the one of the prodigal son. Today’s parable fits into this series and is perhaps the most shocking. In this case Jesus tells a story to illustrate that God’s justice is different. In human justice, we often use the word ‘deserve’, as in ‘she deserves to go to jail’, or ‘he deserves to be better paid’, but in the Gospels that kind of language is rejected. And the reason for this is that our relationship with God is not based on reward and entitlement, but on love. It could be said that when it comes to us and God, we don’t deserve anything and we owe everything. However, God who has loved us into existence, God who has given us this great and beautiful world, God who has created us in her own image and likeness with talents and skills galore, God who continues to nourish and sustain us, binds Godself to us not with bonds of debt and reward, but with a bond of love. God does not demand tribute and recognition of God’s goodness or repayment of a debt, rather God simply loves us as we are and desires our human flourishing.
It’s the least we can do then, to look at our world in the way God looks at us. To abandon the language of debt and reward and quit using the word ‘deserve’. In the Gospel the payment of one denarius was not the going rate for a certain period and quality of work, but the amount of money that a man would need to support his family for one day. The landowner is generous, for he goes beyond what is expected of him and he makes sure that all his workers have, not what they deserve, but what they need. In the face of that generosity, shown to us by God in all sorts of ways, are we not challenged to do the same? Yes, when we are generous to all, there will be some who will take advantage, but there will be plenty of others who will be inspired to go and do and likewise. If we all only got what we deserved and only gave what was expected of us, our world would be a poorer and meaner place. But when we recognise God’s generosity and show the same to others, our world can be transformed.