Laborers in God’s Vineyard

As Jesus’ followers, each of us has been called by Jesus at different moments to carry on his mission of salvation. It is an invitation to work for the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth as it is in heaven. Through his earthly ministry, Jesus already inaugurated the kingdom of heaven but it has not yet been fully realized. We have to work for its fully coming every day of our lives. The gospel of this twenty-fifth Sunday is focused on us as laborers in God’s vineyard for the coming of his kingdom. Indeed, “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard", says Jesus in his parable.

The landowner hired day laborers at various times throughout the day for a standard daily wage. Those hired in the morning worked the entire day while some of those hired in the evening worked only an hour. However, the landowner paid everyone the same amount, a full day’s work. Unsurprisingly, the full-day laborers complained. They should receive more as they worked longer and bore the day’s burden and the heat. But the Landowner replied to one of them: “‘My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what is yours and go. (...) Are you envious because I am generous?’”

Jesus did not give an explicit interpretation of this parable as he did with some of them. Therefore, many interpretations are possible. Paying all laborers the same salary re-gardless the number of hours they worked is a questionable business practice. Has the landowner's conduct violated justice as he had promised the laborers to give them what is just? It calls to my mind John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness. In his book A Theory of Justice, this American philosopher provides a moral theory to address the problem of distributive justice through two principles of justice. According to the second principle, called the Difference Principle, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of the society. We live in the world with many inequalities. For example, one cannot pay the same salary to a university professor and a high school teacher. However, this last one deserves a salary that can, beyond the inequalities, help him to satisfy his needs as well as those of his family. We will continue to live with those social and economic inequalities. Jesus' parable is not a lecture about how to eliminate them. More than a lecture on distributive justice, Jesus' parable is a manifestation of the goodness or the generosity of God toward all of us.

It is a matter of theological fairness that involves grace and a free gift from God who is the landowner. God is still looking for laborers.

There is always work for everyone for the coming of the kingdom of heaven. We are all co-workers in the kingdom of God (1Co 3:9). It does not matter how long I have been a Christian but what I have been doing since I committed my-self to follow Jesus: how we give expression to our faith in the world and how we reflect the coming of the kingdom of heaven. We are all equal recipients of God's grace and gifts. There is no reason to be covetous, jealous, or resentful of what God in his goodness chooses to give to others. All of us have not been baptized at the same time but God entrusted to us the same mission to bear witness to the Gospel.

I am so grateful to God as he called me close to Him since I was a child. Many are called as adult. They missed that closeness with God and working for Him. But they are still co-workers for the kingdom. Maybe that is why the parable displays a reversal of expectations: “the last will be first, and the first will be last”. Jesus himself, who is the King, is the first and the last (Rv 1:17). He is the coincidence of op-posites. There is nothing to fear when we belong to him. First or last, he sent all of us, each one at his appropriate time, to work for the coming of his Father's kingdom. We are all in God's payroll for the same salary: the Kingdom of heaven. What is each of us doing to build the Kingdom of heaven in our midst?