Gospel Delights!

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Is 55:6-9; Phil 1L20-24, 27; Mt 20:1-16

The twenty-fifth Sunday demonstrates the Kingdom praxis of God through the landowner’s sense of justice and generosity. 

The landowner needs laborers for his vineyard. Hence, he hires workers at will. Though he goes out to hire workers at different times until it is five o’clock in the evening which signals the close of the day, he is bothered by the sight of those who stand unemployed all day and willingly extends them also an opportunity. 

In his act, the landowner acknowledges the fact that the unhired workers were not at fault. In addition, the thoughtful landowner gives serious consideration to the economic hardship that would otherwise result from their joblessness. However, the failure to understand the landowner’s generous calculations results in grumbling. 

Those who ‘bore the day’s burden and the heat’ are not treated unjustly, as they seem to think. Their disappointment is not more about the day’s wage they have been paid but about the latecomers being made equal to them. In what is an unjustified grumbling, they resent the landowner’s goodness and the equal standing of the latecomers. 

In effect, they try to condition the response of the landowner and want to show the latecomers ‘their place’ because they did not come in time like them. In their self-righteousness, they challenge the sense of the landowner’s judgement while questioning the worth of their fellow servants. In all, they forget their identity as workers and aspire to play the role of the master. 

This parable is addressed to those who feel privileged about their enviable position while regarding the latecomers as less fortunate. The reversed order of pay which ‘prioritizes the last and ends with the first’ is Divine Justice in action. 

Jesus condemns those who insinuate what God does or what God must do. As humans, we are too shortsighted and incapable of speculating the Divine Thought. The first and second readings render us some help with the needed corrective for our attitude and approach. 

The first reading asserts that God has His reasons for why someone needs forgiveness and acceptance. What we need is the humility to accept the Holy Will of God whose generosity has reasons that we don’t or cannot know. If we learn to inherit the attitude of St. Paul, we will joyfully cooperate with the Divine Plan. Though he is torn between his life and death, there is no confusion in him to accept either. The willingness to keep discerning God’s will is key to the Pauline approach. 

‘The heart has reasons the head knows not of’ observed Blaise Pascal. Let us bow to the Divine Will and accept our brethren in love and generosity. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar