For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard (St. Matthew 20:1).
Today’s gospel reading features one of a series of parables which including the tale of the wheat and the tares. There we learn that our victorious Savior has sown His fruitful children into a world beset by the evil children of the Devil, in order to ensure, as St. Peter puts it, “…that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold … may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 St. Peter 1:7). A startling aspect of this parable is its classification of all humanity into what seem to be impossible to escape categories. The natural law God created and preserves makes it impossible to plant a sunflower seed one day and find an orange tree growing the next. Are we then to conclude the same for us, or our neighbors, or our enemies? Were we planted in this world with an end as surely defined as the sunflower seed: eternal death or eternal life an inevitable reality from the moment we were conceived in our mothers’ wombs?
Whenever we ponder questions such as these we should always consider the great peril of attempting to understand the, for now, incomprehensible nature of God and His will. We do not ever stand in judgment of God; we are humble servants simply attempting to better understand the God we say we love so as to better live in the perfect freedom known only in loving obedience to Him. With that in mind, we must conclude that, if we take God’s omniscience or “all-knowingness” seriously, then we cannot limit His knowledge of the eternal destiny of His creatures. God knows the names of all those written in the Book of Life—which should be a great and abiding comfort to us creatures because it means the world upon which we stand isn’t adrift in a sea of ultimate randomness; it is guided and made sure by the divine sovereign who is the source of all being and love.
And it is that love which is on full display in today’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Jesus compares the Living God to the master of a house whose bountiful harvest requires waves of laborers to reap the massive gains. This is the second time in St. Matthew’s account wherein we hear our Lord refer to the great harvest; earlier, in chapter 9 we read, “When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest’” (St. Matthew 9:36-37). Immediately following this prayer, Jesus establishes the apostolic office and bestows it upon the twelve. When God calls for laborers, His Word never comes back empty. It is the Lord who takes the initiative and goes out in the world to find His sheep, His shepherds, His laborers. This reality is emphasized again and again in today’s parable. Once we are alerted to the importance of the God who spoke creation into existence speaking the new creation into existence in our hearts, we can begin to understand why praying to God is the most important evangelical act we can do. Far from being, the last desperate deed of the man who has exhausted all other avenues of hope, praying to the God who opened St. Paul’s eyes, called St. Peter from his fishing boat, and dragged John Newton from his slave ship, is the most powerful means we have of turning the hearts of the lost toward the God “…who desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). And to that end, many of the ancient commentators of this passage saw the various hours when the master of the house goes out to find workers as a metaphor for the various ages in which God calls us to find our rightful place among the truly free servants laboring in His vineyard. We are never too young of too old to become the blessed, holy instruments through which God saves the world of another immortal soul. After all, Abraham was 75 years old when he departed on the way that would lead to Jesus, on the way that would save us all. To paraphrase St. Paul, when you are weak God is strong.
So, the call to salvation—heard in the Word of God, experienced in the sacraments, lived in the sacrificial love poured from your heart onto others—that call is unmistakably a call to labor. Recapturing the high Christian view of work may be one of the most important tasks of the 21st century church, but we are assaulted on every side. To our right, we have a culture which tells its captive subjects to work and struggle for ultimate fulfillment at a job they quite often hate, or that at least causes them incredible stress, until they can quit this job and live in a retirement world focused upon themselves. The other side sees work as the enemy of the limited creative or leisure time we have until we die and so avoids work like the plague. How far are these two small and paltry visions of the glorious sharing in creation work we are called to in Genesis 2:15: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” To lose work in our lives is not to be set free; it is to be dehumanized. The idle men called to labor by the master of the house are poignant reminders that human beings are created to work, and without work—without purpose—there is something pathetic and heart breaking about humanity.
So Christian, to what work does the master call us? Well, to what work were the apostles called? If we understand that the controlling metaphor for laboring in the harvest fields (see St. Matthew 9) is to act as the living representatives of the kingdom, we begin to understand what our true calling is in this world. Far from seeking ultimate fulfillment in the careers we are placed, or the retirement we are temporarily privileged to enjoy, our purpose until the end of our days is to seek out the ripe fruit of the kingdom and bring them home. God will of course use our valuable secular work to bring us into contact with His people, to build beautiful things, and provide us means of helping others, but we must be constantly aware that all of the important, temporary work we do at our jobs and careers is in service to the all-important labor we render to the God who found us, saved us, and is continuing to save us through our thankful participation in the Master’s will.
What is the good life then? Jesus has already told us, “As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (St. Matthew 13:23). Our good life is to bear witness to the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ to which the Holy Spirit has connected us in the waters of baptism and in the real Spiritual food of the Eucharist. We all were dead, and God has made us alive; we were without purpose, and God has given us the blessed task of a lifetime. And decisively, no one can take away our holy purpose. We could lose our jobs, all our children could die, a husband could leave, a wife could cheat, we could find out retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, we could get cancer or we could be crucified and none of those evils would change the call of our Master nor the eternal life He freely offers to His children.
And there lies what could be the hardest part of this parable: the unfairness of God’s gratuitous mercy. The master of the house awards those who labored all day the same wage as those who labored but an hour. And, the Lord knowing our sinful hearts, we are meant to recoil and say, “That’s not fair.” It is truly amazing how this reaction to God’s grace ripples across the ages and never fails to rise up from the sinful hearts of men. We, of course, are steeped in a culture which defines success as money and worships those who have it like they are priests in a suicide cult. We are encouraged at almost every level to mold our lives around the examples of the rich and famous in one way or another: a process through which we are either punished by getting what we want or left as bitter and angry as the laborers cursing the master of the house for not giving them more. The Christian gospel pulverizes every ounce of this poisonous nonsense in a way I’m not sure we are fully ready to accept. Not that it matters whether you or I are ready to accept it or not. As the master says, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” (St. Matthew 20:15). And what is it that belongs to God? Life belongs to God. Not some trinket or gadget or toy peddled to us by some ad designed to entrap us, not some false life made to seem appealing through Instagram filters or deceptive editing; no, God has made the real life of the new heaven and new earth an inevitable human future, and so all of our labors in this life must find their ultimate end in the worship of His holy name and the joyful search for His wheat in the harvest.
If we have heard the words of our Lord today, then we can never again say we haven’t heard that call.