Summary: A story of envy leads us deeper into this Gospel today. We could spend all kinds of time exploring the ideas of Justice with talk about equal pay for equal work. We could study the details of this text noticing that the landowner has the foreman do the paying. There are curious details about what each group is offered: one group is offered the usual day’s pay, and another is offered “what is just.” The last group is offered nothing. However, all those details and more only stay on the surface while we need to go deeper into this story that comes right after Peter asks Jesus what the disciples are going to get out of his mission; what they are going to get for their sacrifice and work. The whole parable is a challenge to an attitude and an expection that God owes us something. The grumbling group thinks that they are the center of everything, and the parable makes us uncomfortable because it exposes us when we quietly and inwardly side with those grumblers who evaluate everything that happens from the point of view of their own comparitive well-being. They think they are special because they worked all day, so the owner owes them big time. Whatever protects and promotes them is good, and they like it. But if someting happens that makes them equal to others, they begin to whine and complain that it isn’t fair. The first hired complain because the salary difference or the reward did not benefit them. Their real problem is that they value themselves by comparing themselves to others: bad business! Even more so, they think they deserve something special. Here lies a deeper meaning to this parable. What matters is not what we get. What matter is that we work in the vineyard. The problem addressed in this parable is idleness. Doing nothing is what the owener is concerned about. He keeps going out to those who are doing nothing and calling into work. That is his concern. Notice that there is no mention of wage for the last hired, he just wants them to get productive in his vineyard. A world of envy and it’s inhabitants can never get to the truth of this parable. They are only concerned about getting what they deserve. We are called to a world of abundance and goodness. In that world, we who work in the vineyard get the usual day’s wage, just enough for today. Our prayer calls it “daily bread.” We are, in the end day laborers doing God’s work. We have no job security at all, and here we see the heart of this parable. We are dependent upon a call everyday and we have no claim on God. But each day we respond to God’s call to work in the world. We must avoid Peter’s mistaken assumption that by sacrificing a lot, we are going to get a lot; and that those who give up the most will get the most. It is not going to be that way. We never hold God in debt and God never owes us anything. We have to get that right. Working in the vineyard of this world for God is not a burden for which we deserve some just reward, but a privilege. If we have responded early, we are not treated unfairly, we are favored. I once read something by St Teresa of Avila who put it this way: “We should forget the number of years we have served him, for the sum total of all we can do is worthless by comparison with a single drop of the blood which the Lord shed for us.” Jesus told this parable on his way to Jerusalem where he would be handed over, suffer, and die. When we finally begin to do some of God’s work in the vineyard of this world, we might stop thinking it’s all about us and what we’re goint to get out of it and what God can do for and give us. Then we might concentrate more seriously on what we really owe God, and that might well stir up a generosity in us that is more remarkable and surprising than what we see in the owner in this story.
