25th Sunday Year A

See Commentary on Matthew 20:1-16


Homily 1 - 2005

We don’t know the original context in which Jesus told today’s story.  Matthew has chosen to use it in the section of his Gospel where he is making a series of points relating to the tensions and temptations that had arisen in his own community.  There were Jewish members in his community who felt resentful, because God in his goodness was calling the Gentiles also to salvation and they were cashing in too easily.  Similar tensions can arise, in different but connected ways, in any Christian community.

There was a time in my life when sometimes I wished I weren’t a well-instructed, well-socialised, Catholic boy but rather an ignorant and lucky other who could, with an easy conscience, do a lot of things I wished I could do but felt prevented by my fear of sin.  Later, as a priest, when presiding at the funerals of Catholics whose lives, by the usual Catholic criteria, had hardly been full-on, I could feel a sense of unfairness in handing them over to God whom I knew to be hopelessly merciful and forgiving.  They could have their cake and eat it! and I couldn’t!  It didn’t seem fair!  I was not observant enough then to see that moments of fun, pleasure, power, victory, acquisition (or whatever), if they are at the price of integrity, do not contribute to an experience of true joy and enduring happiness.  In his poem The Four Quartets, the poet TS Eliot wrote caustically of “.. the strained time-ridden faces distracted from distraction by distraction, filled with fancies and empty of meaning … in this twittering world.” 

How do I see it now?  Well, my feelings still have a life of their own, and my perfectionist personality doesn’t help, but my reflection goes something like this: If I don’t like having to behave the way I try to, and do it only from a fear of sin, of breaking some commandment, of offending God, then I am not free.  I am missing out on the freedom of the disciple of Jesus.  I am missing out on the core experience of the Kingdom.  To do anything simply because of threat of punishment or some external reward: to stick at a job I don’t like simply because the pay is good; to live uprightly and keep the commandments because I’m scared of hell (or of God) leaves me at an infantile level of moral development.

So my instinctive resentment becomes invitation to look more closely at myself - in fact, to grow up and to mature.  The challenge is to go inward, to get in touch with my deeper self where God is, where God’s Spirit is at work giving life, to discover my heart, to discover my openness and attraction to true value - the consequence of my being made in the image of God, and my mysterious connection with Christ through baptism.  Whatever about the surface desires with their strength and their potential addictiveness, the wishful thinking, the siren voices of our really unhappy culture, if I look hard enough, I can tune in to what truly resonates with the truest, deepest me, and the values that are in harmony with who I truly am.  (Though to do this I may need the help of a wise person and the wealth of our Christian tradition.)

When I choose to act from my inner truth, my genuine conscience, (irrespective of how difficult it may sometimes be), then I am free; and only in freedom can I find true happiness.  Jesus came to free us from both a life addicted to surface desires, without values of my own, as well as the service of God simply from the fear of punishment or the hope of heaven.  However we handle the overwhelming encounter with infinite love in the next life, Jesus wants the Kingdom experience to begin for us now.

So the resentment I sometimes feel towards the God who may seem too forgiving (too good for his own good!), can be a call to look again at why I do what I do, and to discover the true me, to grow, to find the inner harmony, subtle perhaps but real, that is the essence of the Kingdom experience offered to us all by Jesus. 


Homily 2 - 2008

Those of you who are parents will know better than I how children gradually learn to make sense of their world.  Initially, they are totally self-centred: what they want, they want!  But mum and dad can have other ideas, so that what they want, they can’t have; and if they get it just the same, then they get punished in some way.  The fact, or the threat, of punishment leads them to see that bad behaviour gets punished.  In fact, bad simply means: what gets punished.

As they grow older, they learn that it can make sense to put up with the pain of not getting what they want, at least in the short-term, not just because it means avoiding punishment, but because it may lead to an eventual reward – Santa Claus begins to make sense!  Good behaviour gets rewarded.  In fact, good simply means what gets rewarded.  Everything is still self-centred.

As they grow older still, they learn that it makes sense to get on with bigger brothers and sisters.  But if the bigger brother wants what they want, rather than getting nothing at all, the smaller ones see that it makes sense to share.  Half is better than nothing – even it it’s not as good as the lot.  The child begins to develop a sense of what’s fair, and can loudly object when things don’t seem fair.  At least early on, fairness is the cry of the smaller child, the less powerful one, saying that half is better than none.  Fairness hardly operates the other way: The claim for fairness is usually a one-way street, and is still very much self-centred.  If they can get the lot, and get away with it, that’s better than half.  I remember hearing of the practice in one family, constantly bombarded by the complaint: It’s not fair!  One child could cut the cake, the other had first pick.

I remember hearing today’s Gospel story when I was a lad, and feeling: It’s not fair!  Children’s, and adults’, moral sense of right and wrong can and should develop a lot further – yet there are a lot of adults whose moral development gets stuck at this level, or who quickly revert to it when it suits them.  Fortunately, God is not stuck at that level of moral development.  God operates purely from undifferentiating love, that has nothing to do with deserving, but immeasurably surpasses it.

A lot of people are much more comfortable in a world governed by reward and punishment.  They find it hard to believe that God really does love unconditionally, and does not really use threats or promises to persuade us to be good.  God’s unconditional love can seem not only unfair but reckless and irresponsible.  [I remember being criticised back in the 70s for talking too much about God’s love and forgiveness and not enough about hell and heaven.]  I suppose that, if that’s where people are at, then that’s where they are at!

The tragedy is that they could grow so much more, and their capacity to handle the complexities of life could be much more nuanced and adequate.  And I also think that somehow their sense of inner peace would be so much deeper and secure.  But, while everybody sings about love, those who have really discovered it are fewer.  To discover love means learning to surrender control.  It means feeling vulnerable.  It runs the risk of being exploited and even victimised.  It means dying to self-interest.  Is it worth it?  To those who have further to grow, it doesn’t make sense.

God thinks love is worth the risk ... and that is the God that Jesus would love us to discover.


 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.


Homily 4 - 2020

Last Sunday we had Jesus’ graphic, challenging parable on forgiveness. We have a similar theme today — Jesus’ parable of the generous landowner. The story is masterfully constructed in such a way that its message puts us first on the defensive. This week I suggest that we allow ourselves to become personally saturated with the scandal of God’s consistent, over-the-top generosity and goodness.

Do we feel comfortable with a God who forgives indiscriminately and who is outrageously generous and good to all?

On my part, for much of my life I had the sense of God as one who rewards merit and punishes bad behaviour. I approached God as one like a bank-manager or meticulous accountant whose assessment of me was dependent on my goodness or badness. God was merciful, perhaps, for a while, but eventually and inexorably inflexible. In the end I would get what I deserved.

Last week’s and this week’s parables undermine all that. God’s attitude to people does not ultimately depend on what we deserve, but is drawn simply from what God is like. And Jesus makes abundantly clear that God loves; God forgives; God is extravagantly generous.

I needed to grow up and mature to come to terms with this God, Jesus’ God. When I behave now, I try to do so, not to win over God and to feel safe, but because, like God, with God, I want to love people and to treat them respectfully for their sakes.

How people behave matters, certainly. Life this side of the grave has become the veritable hell we are only too familiar with when we humans do not recognise each other’s equal and innate dignity and respect each other. That is why Jesus earnestly urged us to pray, “Your will be done on earth”. I often wonder what our world would be like if we allowed God’s love to transform us into the likeness of God in which we were created. How different would our economic, social, political and judicial systems be from what we default into currently!

And eternal life with God? We know no more about that than what Jesus has told us. We need to learn to trust Jesus and to give him every opportunity to convince us.


 

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!