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Readings: |
Isaiah 55:6-9 Philippians 1:20c-24,27a Matthew 20:1-6a |
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Date: |
September 20, 2026, Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A |
In Matthew's Gospel alone, Jesus uses 12 different parables that start with the explicit phrase, "The kingdom of heaven is like..." Did you ever ask yourself why Jesus uses so many different stories to try to explain what "the kingdom of heaven" is like?On one level, it was pretty clear to me that Jesus uses so many different analogies because like most divine mysteries, the kingdom of heaven is so different from our human way of thinking that it can't be described explicitly. We need to use different analogies to even begin to get a sense of what this mystery entails. On a completely different level, it occurred to me that Jesus really wants us to start to understand what the kingdom of heaven is really like because God's plan is for us humans to bring it to completion here on earth. Remember that Jesus instructed us to pray that God's kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, become reality here on earth as it already is in heaven. And it is certainly harder for us to accomplish that mission if we have no idea what it is that we are commissioned to bring into existence here on earth.
In order to better understand what Jesus is trying to reveal to us with this story about a landowner going out to the marketplace to hire workers for his vineyard at various times during the day, we have to have a little understanding of how this kind of day laborers worked in Jesus time. In essence, these workers hired themselves out to be able to purchase food for the families that day. If they were not hired then they and their families often did not eat that day.
So when the landowner, who represents God, gives each of them the usual daily wage no matter what time they started working, he is fulfilling another thing that Jesus told us to pray to God for: our daily bread.
More than once I have had someone say to me that they don't read the Bible because since it was written so long ago, it really doesn't apply to life today. I suggest that today's Gospel story proves that the Bible has everything to do with life today. We are being asked right now as a nation to decide whether we want to live in a world where you only get what you have 'earned' according to some arbitrary set of rules, or whether we want to live in the kingdom of heaven? You see the kingdom of heaven is not some vague description of what things may be like after we die and go to heaven. If we understand what John the Baptist and then Jesus mean, the kingdom of heaven is a way of living here on earth, this side of death. That is why both Jesus and John said the kingdom of heaven is here.
In short, the kingdom of heaven is a way of human beings living together where there is no war, there is no hunger, there is no sickness, there is no power over or oppression. It is the way that God designed creation to be for humans from the very start. But we humans decided that we know better than God and after generation after generation of living that way, here we are in a world that is filled with all of those evils.
I would suggest that trying to understand today's parable of the workers in the vineyard brings us right up face to face with that gap between how high God's ways are above human ways and God's thoughts above our thoughts. Some 1600 years ago, St. Augustine boiled that gap down to the difference between a culture of a market economy versus a culture of a gift economy. In today's parable, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is a gift economy. The good news is that we humans are very familiar with how a gift economy works; we use it in a wide array of circumstances. For instance, we don't make babies earn their meals, do we? We don't check every driver's tax record before they are allowed to drive on our roads to make sure they helped pay for them? And when the EMT's showed up at my door a few months ago because a family friend had tripped and hit her face on my doorstep, they didn't check to see if she was a resident of Stow before taking her to the hospital. I am sure you can think of many more examples of the way this works. In a gift economy, what drives each exchange is whether the recipient needs something, rather than whether they can pay for it. The exchange is rooted in relationship rather than in money.
So in today's Gospel story, the landowner is not being charitable in giving the workers who started at 5 the usual daily wage; he is being just. Acting out of the principles of a gift economy, he is giving those workers what they need: food for their families today.
God has called on all of humanity, but especially and explicitly those of us who have been baptized to actively help God in establishing this kingdom of heaven here on earth. I pray that each one of us, and all of us as a community, take to heart what this parable of the vineyard workers calls us to. We are called to be the instruments through which God answers all who pray that they be given their daily bread, today. Let us obey Paul and conduct ourselves in a way that is worthy of this Gospel of Christ.