25th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

 Homily 3 - 2014

As a story, today’s parable is a masterpiece. I think we all rise to the bait. It unsettles us. Tell it differently: pay the first workers first and the last last, and the story would fall flat.

But there is more to the parable than meets the eye. Who were the first workers who had done all the hard work crook on? Who were they envious of? The lucky ones who had not even worked up a sweat - yet got as much as they did? That is not how the story goes. They grumbled at the landowner. They were crook on him. He accused them of envying him. Where did that come from? Yet it reflects, perhaps, the times. He had buckets of money. He had all the power. Lurking in the back of their minds, all day every day, was a simmering envy and anger at him and his ilk. If only they could be like them!!

It is a bit like the Adam and Eve story – which, in its own way, is a masterful reflection on our experience as human beings. God had what they did not have. God had knowledge of good and evil, but was keeping them in the dark, unwilling to share the knowledge with them. Do not eat of the fruit of the tree… Lurking in the back of their minds, all day every day, was a simmering envy and anger. It just took the needling of the serpent to bring it to the surface. They ignored God’s advice; they ate the fruit - and thought that they knew good and evil. Immediately the first effect was that they began to see each other as potential or actual threats. They placed fig leaves strategically because they no longer trusted themselves or each other. Human persons ever since instinctively see each other as potential or actual threats – to security, or status or whatever. We're careful. More damagingly, we unconsciously disfigure our sense of God and see God as potential threat. Instinctively we fear God.

Why did God want to withhold from Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil? We would expect the opposite; and have been doing our best to work it out ever since. Even the Church is in on the act. I think it is because good and evil can only be truly recognised from a stance of perfect love. Without that, it becomes destructive. It becomes the basis for all our automatic judging of each other – inevitably from our sin-scarred, ignorant and blinded standpoints. It becomes an instrument of control for people who instinctively see each other as potential or actual threats. The only way we can handle our necessarily inadequate approach to good and evil is by our system of rewards and punishments. Inevitably we assume that God is up to the same thing; and the fear of possible eternal punishment haunts us.

But then comes the Good News. Jesus has assured us that God is not into reward and punishment. As the First Reading put it: My ways are not your ways. God relates in love. Jesus has revealed to us that the essence of God is love, infinite love, unconditional love – all the time, towards everyone. For God, to be is to love. God cannot be otherwise. It is not just that God loves. God is love. God cannot give a bit of himself to me, another bit to you, a bigger bit to Pope Francis, and none at all to whomever it is I don’t like.

More than that. God’s love is like a giant vacuum cleaner, or a tropical cyclone, in the sense that, to the extent that we let it, it draws us into itself, into the flow. Till then, God's ways make no sense. But, if we let it, God’s love transforms us – and gradually we come to see people no longer as threats but as sisters and brothers. Envy gives way to openness, to sharing, to hoping, to joy.