25th Sunday 2023
Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20-24, 27; Matthew 20:1-16
I am tempted to say “Hands up, anyone who sympathises with the shop stewards of today’s parable in their complaint about pay differentials”. They have a point, don’t they—or do they? In fact, they are being paid fairly. A denarius was the usual rate for a day’s work. They would have been entitled to complain about the iniquitous system by which people were expected to wait around in the hope that someone would deign to hire them, but not about their rate of pay.
In one sense, the people who were treated unfairly were the late arrivals, who were paid more than they deserved, but they were unlikely to complain; and it was really no one else’s business how much the vineyard owner chose to pay them. There are exploitative employers today, no less than in biblical times, but the employer in the parable cannot be counted among them.
As a sideline, this parable may remind us of our obligation to be concerned about social justice, especially as we approach a General Election, when politicians on all sides will appeal to our self-interest, and indeed to our selfishness, with little concern for the good of society, and indeed of the world. As Christians, we must be actively interested in matters of justice, and must be prepared to hold candidates’ feet to the proverbial fire. In my previous parish, the local Council of Churches used to organise hustings for the candidates, which made it possible to quiz them on issues which, in the normal course of events, they would have been happy to ignore. Ideally, similar events would occur in every neighbourhood in every constituency.
In the build up to the General Election of 1997, the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales produced a magnificent document entitled “The Common Good” which raised questions about a whole range of matters relating to justice, including, though by no means limited to, the killing of the unborn. The then editor of “The Times”, himself a Catholic, by the name of William Rees-Mogg, denounced it as “economically illiterate”: I trust that voters in the constituency of his son, Jacob of that ilk, will wish to know whether the son’s views differ from those of his late father.
Important, indeed vital, as social justice issues are, they are not the principal concern of today’s parable. It is essentially a parable of the Kingdom. The workers who have borne the heat and burden of the day represent the Jewish people, who have indeed laboured long and hard in their struggle to be faithful to the covenants. Before we criticise them for their failure, we need to look in the mirror, and ask ourselves how often both individual Christians, and the Church as a whole, have failed over the past two thousand years.
Where, or perhaps, when, do we Gentiles enter the parable? We are the eleventh hour workers, called way down the line of history, yet rewarded as if we had served God as His people from the outset. Far from having justifiable complaints about God’s unfairness, we have cause to rejoice in it because He, like the owner of the vineyard, has chosen to pay the last comer the same as the first.
Indeed, we have been, and are being, paid more. We have been given knowledge of God’s Son, and of His Holy Spirit. We are conscious of having God dwelling within us. We have the sacraments, and especially we have the sacrifice of Calvary made present on our altars. We have the abiding presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. We have the joy of belonging to the Body of Christ, which is the Church, nourished by the Body of Christ, which is the Eucharist.
We are paid far beyond anything that we deserve, but we are also given responsibilities. We need to recognise and give thanks (literally “make Eucharist”) for all that we have been given. We are called to be faithful to the Christ who has given His life for us. And we must recognise our responsibility to work for justice, and not simply to seek our own self-interest, especially when the politicians come knocking.
