Twenty-fifth Sunday In Ordinary Time
MATTHEW 20:1-16a (Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a)
The one year which Matthew assigns to Jesus’ ministry in Galilee is over. Jesus and his disciples are moving south on the east bank of the Jordan River. Their destination: Jerusalem. In Matthew’s plan for his gospel, Jesus is using this time for private instruct-ion of his disciples. One of Jesus’ favorite means of instruction is through parables. This Sunday’s gospel reading is a parable about laborers in a vineyard. The owner of the vine-yard goes out early to find laborers. He and the laborers agree on the standard daily wage of the time – a denarius. He goes out to find more laborers at 9, at noon, at 3, and at 5 o’clock. To all these hired later he says simply, “You go into the vineyard too, and I will give you what is right.” However, he scolds those he hires at 5 p.m. for being idle all day, but they have a legitimate excuse, “No one hired us.”
At the end of the workday the owner of the vineyard calls his manager (steward) and instructs him to pay a denarius to each of the workers. The first hired get their agreed upon denarius, but so do all the others, even those who worked only one hour. The first hired grumble, “These last worked only one hour, but you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” The owner reminds them of the verbal contract they made – one denarius for a day’s work. He points out that he is merely being generous to all those hired later by paying them a full denarius also. He asks, “Am I not free to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” A more literal translation of the final question is this: “Is your eye evil because I am good?” “Evil eye” expressed stinginess or envy, as in Mark 7:22.
Is Matthew justifying unfair labor practices? The parable began with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like….” The values of the kingdom of heaven, that is, God’s rule over us, are not necessarily the same as the values of the world. Today’s first reading expresses the difference, “My thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts,” Isaiah 55:8-9. The parables now in our gospels floated freely long before the authors of the gospels used them for their own purposes. If this parable goes all the way back to Jesus, it was probably his appeal to his critics to see themselves as the first hired. They should not be critical, stingy or envious when God through Jesus reaches out toward the despised and the outcasts. The Good News is that the Father loves all and has a special love for those who have no standing in society, a love which must be extended by the hands of those hired first.
When Matthew incorporated this parable into his gospel, he directed it not to Jesus’ critics but to a situation in the Christian Communities at the time, the eighties of the first Christian century, when he composed his gospel. In that context we have to search for the meaning of the parable. It is reasonable, from a study of Matthew’s gospel, to conclude that he was commissioned, most likely by the Christian Church at Antioch, to compose a compromise document to unite Christian Jew and Christian Gentile in the Church at Antioch. This parable speaks to that divisive situation.
The earliest Christians were all Jews, just as Jesus was. So were also the apostles, the disciples and Jesus’ family. It is too often forgotten that along with Jesus they were faithful Jews throughout life and to their death. For them the Christian “Way,” as they called it, was another way of living their ancient faith but with the addition of accepting Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah. When Gentiles (non-Jews) began streaming into the Churches in huge numbers in the forties, fifties, etc. of the first century, it caused problems. The Christian Jews brought with them a certain strain of exclusivism of Gentiles which was based on the Torah, on the Law of Moses. They carried the baggage of their background just as we carry ours. An example: it was not long ago, and it is still happening today, that some Catholics and some Protestants, both in their thoughts and actions, excluded and still exclude each other from salvation.
The Christians Jews would have had in mind passages like Deuteronomy 7:5, which says of the non-Israelites, the natives of Palestine, “Thus shall you deal with them, you shall break their altars, dash in pieces their pillars, chop down their idols, and burn their graven images.” One can of course find the opposite theology in the Books of Ruth and Jonah, both of which seem to be directed against that particular theology of Deuteronomy. Ruth and Jonah teach outreach to other peoples and that God loves all his human creatures. Matthew seems to direct the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, most of whom were latecomers, to that same kind of instruction. Not only were the Gentiles to be “hired,” that is admitted, but admitted as equals. The early Christians are asked not be envious but to rejoice that they were joined in God’s plan for salvation by those whom they would have thought unacceptable. They should have said, “What a wonderful surprise!” In the same way, we should say of immigrants, of people of color, or of different nationalities, of all God’s children equal to us, “What a wonderful surprise!”
