Homily
Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 20, 2020
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas
Isaiah 55:6-9
Psalm 145:2-3, 8-9, 17-18
Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a
Matthew 20:1-16a
In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus teaches with a parable that underlines the overwhelming generosity and mercy of God announced by Isaiah in our first reading. The workers who arrive late at the vineyard could be referred to as outcasts separated from the fullness of the religious life of Israel, while those who work all day can be taken as those dutiful to the law of God all their lives.
These
dutiful and law-abiding people were continually offended at Jesus’ interaction
with the outcasts and the unclean, or the scoundrels and wicked as Isaiah calls
them. Jesus’ reply to such criticism is both kind and stern. “Are you
envious because I am generous?” After all, even based on strict
justice, the payment of the all-day workers is honest and even generous.
As
we hear the final sentences of the Gospel, Jesus directs our questioning,
reflection, and prayer toward His generosity and the need for our humility. The
generosity of Jesus reveals to us the generosity of the Father in sending His
Son to save us — the preeminent merciful act to which none of us are entitled. “Are
you envious because I am generous? Thus, the last will be first, and the first
will be last.” We are all sinners in need of forgiveness, but those
who come to a realization of their need for God’s mercy will be drawn into the joy
of His immeasurable love, while those who think and feel themselves to be only dutiful
observers of His law may miss the gift of God’s glory that He offers us daily, or
even miss God Himself.
Does
the parable offend our sense of fairness and justice, or does it call us to
enter more deeply into faith and trust in God’s authentic justice and mercy? Does
the parable challenge us to rely on God’s grace — the daily bread for which we
pray in the Lord’s Prayer? This is the daily bread that the Master in the
parable provides according to His own generosity to all who belong and labor in
His vineyard.
We
are tempted to take our stand against the landowner along with those who were
hired first and paid last. But as Isaiah reveals the words of the Lord in
today’s first reading, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my
ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my
ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” If parables
are to reveal the mysteries of God’s Kingdom, then we cannot look at this one
as simply a lesson in the rules of justice and morality of labor relations. If
we did, we would miss the point and reduce God’s ways and thoughts to fit our
own.
What
this parable focuses on is divine generosity and our conversion to God’s way,
not simply the human justice, human equality, and human fairness of a fallen
world. The landowner is more than an employer, he represents God and the laborers
represent all of those who are adopted into His People by Him. The currency in
God’s Kingdom is mercy, understanding, compassion, and forgiveness, and we are
paid according to our need as well as our merit in light of the fullness of the
truth. Saint Paul reminds us today that life is a gift and its goods are
wonderful and worthy of our esteem, but they are nothing compared to the love
of Christ — a love that sets us free and is unconditional. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your
ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so
high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.”
Christ shows us in His
full humanity, through His words, through His actions, and through His Cross, what
human thinking, human speaking, and human acting in unity with the high
thoughts and lofty ways of the Father looks like. Christ’s gift to us of the
Holy Spirit at Pentecost, with His accompanying gifts and graces, enables us to
think, to speak, and to act according to the high thoughts and lofty ways of
God. Through His generosity and grace, His thoughts and ways soon transform our
thoughts, our ways, our words, and our actions. For Jesus Christ is the answer
to the prayer expressed in the 145th Psalm we prayed today: “the
Lord is near to all who call on Him.”
Yet,
we are tempted to act like the laborers who are first hired and paid last and
try to reduce the high thoughts and lofty ways of God to the thoughts and ways
of the limited scope and logic of our fallen world, a scope and logic that can
only provide scarcity and suspicion, jealousy and resentment. This temptation
currently looks like the misrepresentation of the Gospel of Life as only one part
of a partisan platform or the fragmented positions of political candidates. To
succumb to this temptation would make the Church subordinate to the power of
the state through the public endorsement of candidates or the alignment of the
Church with any one political party.
To
be clear, the right to life is the preeminent human right established and given
by God Himself as the right upon which all other human rights depend including:
the right to the biologically determined and gendered integrity of human
sexuality and marriage between one man and one woman, the right to family life,
the right to religious liberty, the right to live in peace and security with
sound borders, the right to migrate to sustain one’s life and the life of one’s
family, the right to labor and a just and living wage, the right to private property,
the right to clean and potable water, the right to be told the truth, the right
to a good name, the right to basic healthcare, the right to access to an education
sufficient for participation in the common good of a particular society to name
but a few such rights. As Pope Saint John Paul II wrote in Christi Fideles
Laici in 1988, “The
inviolability of the human person which is a reflection of the absolute
inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in
the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common
outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights — for example, the
right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture — is false and
illusory if the right to life, the most
basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal
rights, is not defended with maximum determination.”
Thus, direct assaults on human life, especially
upon vulnerable human life, through such social policies and practices as
abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia cannot be supported or even
tolerated for the sake of other rights or social goods to be enjoyed by others.
We must begin with respect and protection of the inviolable right to life, but
we as Catholics cannot end there. To live according to the high thoughts and
lofty ways of God means that we must begin by respecting the inviolable right
to life and to continue by respecting the other necessary human rights that are
contingent upon the right to life. The high thoughts and lofty ways of God
require of us the measured respect and fostering of each of these rights in an
ordered and proportionate manner without exclusion of any of them for the sake
of human dignity whereby the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This
is in contradistinction with the ways of the fallen world that would entice us
to break these rights apart and to mistreat them only as isolated and competitive
points of self-interest within a partisan agenda where the first are first and
the last are last.
The earliest name for the Church in the Acts of the Apostles is “the Way” which means “God’s way.” It most clearly does not mean “my way.” It is only by trust in God, nurtured through prayer and the grace of God, that we can be converted from our thoughts of undue entitlement and selfish ways to the high thoughts and lofty ways of God. Thoughts that without His grace are otherwise inaccessible to us. “The Lord is near to all who call on Him.”
