25th Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2023

How wonderful was tonight’s First Reading from Isaiah! Isaiah spoke there of God as a God who “takes pity” even on the “wicked ” or “evil person”; and topped that by describing God as “rich in forgiving”. Forgiving reaches beyond pity to offer personal relationship.

God recognised that people, even the just, would find such an unconditional offer difficult to believe or even to understand. And it is not just Isaiah’s hearers who struggled to feel at peace with God’s approach. God’s promise of unconditional forgiveness seems to blow up the whole traditional understanding of merit, with its reward for good conduct, and its punishment for evil-doing. God offers forgiveness quite gratuitously as pure gift, not as entitlement. If we are honest with ourselves, we may feel that God’s totally free offer leaves us feeling less secure than if we could have somehow earned it ourselves.

Rather than step back from what he had claimed, God went on to emphasise his difference from us. Isaiah quoted God as saying: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways” — and then, in case his hearers still got him wrong, God repeated, “The heavens are as high above earth as my ways are above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts”. It takes a lifetime and beyond to grasp just how wonderfully different God is from us!

And God’s “ways” are always better than we can imagine.

These few thoughts bring us to this week’s Gospel: the labourers in the vineyard. The “Kingdom of heaven” that Jesus talks about there deals with the values and thoughts of God as they apply to our lives this side of the grave. They often challenge our only too usual cultural assumptions, behaviours and expectations.

How do you feel about the “vineyard owner” in this story? Do you side more with him? or with the ones who had done “a heavy day’s work in all the heat”? Do you perhaps even share a trace of their resentment? Of the various groups of labourers, is there one group that you tend to side with more spontaneously?

Becoming aware of our spontaneous reactions may be helpful in the process of our own growth in self-knowledge. We can presume that all the labourers had similar needs for food, clothing etc., for themselves and for the members of their families, and that they were totally dependent on what they could earn each day to avoid hunger and thirst and to acquire whatever else they needed to live a reasonably decent life.

We know that every human person is created by God and individually loved by God, and therefore has a real, though often unrecognised, genuine human dignity.

It is interesting that at the height of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth century, the Pope of the time, Leo XIII, wrote an Encyclical Letter in which he clearly stated that every labourer has the right, based on our common human dignity, to be paid a minimum daily wage. Not long afterwards in 1907, here in Australia, Mr Justice Higgins instituted in law that all workers be paid a minimum wage — which he described as one sufficient to meet “… the normal needs of an average employee living in a civilised country ... in conditions of frugal comfort ... for a labourer’s home of about five persons.”

Personally, I find that today’s Gospel invites me to ponder once again just how much I appreciate my own human dignity, and consistent with that, how much I recognise and respect the simple human dignity of everyone else.

I also ponder how much I seek to see myself as the brother of every other human person and to consider everyone as having an equal dignity to me and to each other.

Quite a thought-provoking Gospel!