The Work of the New Adam | S4 E4

In this episode of The Extraordinary Story, when the incarnation of Jesus meets its most dramatic moment, Jesus urgently decides to tell some stories. We’ll learn why they are actually so urgent, and why he focused on stories about work, what kind of boss God is, what kind of work he expects us to do, and what’s at stake if we fail. This is The Extraordinary Story, a podcast that tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ. God himself entered the confusing maze that is our world to transform it into a path that leads to him, today and always. The Extraordinary Story is brought to you by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I’m Tom Hoopes. I’m a writer in residence here at Benedictine College.

This episode is all about the work of the kingdom of God and what exactly Jesus wants us to do to re-edinize the world, to till the garden, as it were. We’re going to start in Matthew 20 with the parable of the workers in the vineyard. “For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire laborers in his vineyard,” begins Jesus. And he says, “after agreeing with the laborers for a denarius day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour, he saw others standing idle in the market place and said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right, I will give you.’ So they went. And he did the same later in the day. And at the end of the day, he paid them all. So they went.”

Well, to cut the story short a little bit, he did the same thing again and again throughout the day. And I’ll jump to the end of the day when he paid them. “And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now, when the first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received just a denarius. And on receiving it, they grumbled at the householder saying, ‘these last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us, who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to the last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity? So the last will be first and the first will be last.’ And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way said to them, ‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.”

So this parable comes from actually a chapter earlier, before the grand entry into Jerusalem. But I wanted to talk about it today because we have two other parables about work and they all go together. Jesus does point out at the end there that he is going to die, and that’s why he’s telling them this parable. We’ve been talking about Jesus taking on himself the great project of re-Edenizing the world. We talked last week about how Jesus uses metaphors to compare himself to the Garden of Eden, starting with the garden-ness of the garden, as I put it a little bit ineptly, with the plants themselves, in other words. But now we go to another part of the Garden of Eden story, and Genesis says, “The Lord God formed a man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.”

So here is God creating the man, and only after he created man, planting a garden, and only after that, putting the man in the garden to till it and keep it, and to do his will. This is the master text of humanity, of what it’s all about. And it’s all about working and obeying. We were made for God, and the garden was made for us to work on behalf of God. So parables about work, get to the very meaning of mankind from the very start. That is why parables about work were really urgent for Jesus to tell at the high point of the drama of the incarnation. Ever since Jesus gave his big reveal about who he is, and what he will have to suffer, which Moses and Elijah themselves called the Exodus, Jesus has been resolutely headed to Jerusalem. Then we saw him enter the city in triumph with the people crying “Hosanna.” And now we see him getting ready to give his life for our sins.

He’s ready to glorify the father, to become the grain of wheat that dies and rises again. He’s ready to give us the ability to live his life on earth. So what does he do next? Well, he’s got a very strict schedule that we’ve seen. First he cleanses the temple, reclaiming the sacred space that belongs to him. Then he confronts Jewish leaders who question his authority. We’ll see more about that in a future episode. Then he has important teaching questions to wrap up, about his authority, about the authority of Caesar, about the nature of the resurrection. But the first priority for Jesus is to tell important stories about plant life and how to work plants, and as we’ll see next week, about marriage. In this episode, we’ll hear three work stories, stories that are increasingly triggering to the Pharisees. And we started with the laborers and the vineyard.

So what’s triggering about the parable of the laborers and the vineyard? We can start to see it, maybe by focusing on the laborers, the work and the landowner. First, look at the laborers. Who are they and why are they angry? At first glance, we may think we would never be like these laborers who complained that someone else was getting money for less work. Many of us can even think of cases where we saw someone get the same reward as us unexpectedly, and we were probably happy for them, not angry. But even on the literal level, there may be a greater challenge than we recognize. One denarius was basically a living wage per person. Did the landowner recognize how great the need is for all of these laborers and just pay them based on need, like a miniature ancient welfare system? Many of us might object at paying those who stand around idly all day as much as those who worked hard all day when it comes to the same situation in modern life. On the literal level, Jesus is simply telling us, “relax, be generous, not exacting and demanding with people in need.” But it would be wrong to overemphasize the literal level of this parable.

Clearly, working in the vineyard is a metaphor for the life of faith and not just a random example of work. If you think of it that way, the parable comes alive with relevance to Jesus’ time and our own. The Jewish people were rightly proud of being the chosen people of God. But even within Jewish circles, there was pride at being one kind of Jewish person and not another. There were Pharisees and Sadducees and Essings and a lot more designations. But we often make the mistake of thinking that we are different from others in exactly the same way. You hear people say, “I was an altar boy growing up,” as if that confers a special status on them. Or “I went to Catholic schools my whole life,” as if that makes them a higher level Catholic in some way.

Or we think about ourselves as, “I’m a serious Catholic, a real Catholic.” We are a special breed, we think, not like ordinary Catholics. We are a faithful Catholic, a devout Catholic, a traditionalist Catholic, a conservative Catholic. But that is not at all how God interacts with anyone. He doesn’t distinguish one kind of Jewish person from another or traditional Catholics from progressive Catholics. He sees only those who are working in my vineyard and those who are idle. So which of us are working in his vineyard and which of us are idle? We now know more than the Apostles did about what working in the vineyard entails. And it isn’t that hard to figure out. We are working in his vineyard if we are doing his will on earth as it is in heaven.

There are the Ten Commandments, there’s the Beatitudes, there’s the parables about tending the poor people at your door. And I’ll share more in the minute. If you’re a traditionalist Catholic, progressive Catholic, conservative Catholic or whatever Catholic, that’s great. But what Jesus wants to know is, are you serving the needy as if they were Christ himself? Who have you brought to the sacraments? Have you consistently brought Christ’s commands to bear in your home, workplace and community? Lay people, no matter how they hyphenate Catholic, are expected to be on the front line of God’s effort to build the kingdom in the world. The church sees the kingdom as the goal of the lay vocation and scripture uses the vineyard as a cherished metaphor for the kingdom. Isaiah says, “The vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting.”

The prophet Amos describes Israel’s restoration after exile in an extended vineyard metaphor, saying, “I shall plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up.” In the Song of Songs, the vineyard is the place where God pursues his people and vice versa, where we say, “Your love is better than wine.” Vineyards are a beautiful metaphor for the kingdom of God. We saw it last week. They are the place where we do what Jesus does at the wedding feast at Cana. We turn water into wine by filtering it through grape plants and human work.

Vineyards are places where God takes his creation, adds our work, and makes something amazing. Apply that analogy to religion. There are ways we add love to our own plain life and to those of others and transform them. We give people loving attention and turn their dire straits into connection and joy. We give people new life and baptism. We help people know what the church teaches and take their lives from darkness and confusion into beauty, truth, and goodness.

Which brings us to the landowner in the parable. Who is the householder or master of the house as many translations have it? The master of the house is God, and what does this story show us about God? First, God is busy seeking us out, early and late, inviting us to work. Second, he takes personal interest in each of us and is fair and generous. Third, he sends us into his vineyard. He doesn’t want to transform our world as we want it. He wants us to transform his world his way. And how does God see our lives? God wants us to do work, not in a labor camp to keep busy, but in his home to welcome us in. We aren’t in charge of our work, God is, but life isn’t an alienating, absurd ordeal like Sisyphus. We aren’t slaves, but coworkers with God on a common project.

It also shows us that God rewards us as individuals, but that life is not individualistic. We are producing something, wine, to bring joy and energy to others. And that means that human beings are more than animals. We have a high dignity, giving us the ability to share in the life of God. The most important thing to notice is that we don’t just work for God, but work with God. Jesus will later say, “I am the true vine, and my father is the vinedresser.” Working in his vineyard is like working with the father, working with the Trinity, to be part of the work of the vinedresser. “Truly his thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are his ways our ways,” as Isaiah puts it. We are both the vineyard workers and the branches of Christ the vine at the same time. We are both envoys working on Christ’s behalf and the body of Christ through whom he is working. And at every Mass, we see exactly how this intersection of work and laborers in the vineyard and the laborers in the kingdom comes together.

At each Mass, we offer the fruit of the vine and work of human hands, the product of human beings whose work is transformed into the divine life of Jesus, the vine. Add the work of the Lord himself and with the winemaker produced becomes Jesus Christ himself, constituting us into “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of your own possession, to proclaim everywhere your mighty works, for you have called us out of darkness into your own wonderful light,” as the prayer goes. That’s a fair wage no matter how long you’ve worked.

And that brings us to our second parable. This happens after the entry into Jerusalem, after the cursing of the fig tree. And Jesus says, “What do you think? A man had two sons, and he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not.’ But afterward he repented and went. And he went to the second and said the same. And he answered, ‘I will go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of the father? They said ‘the first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, but you did not believe him. And the tax collectors and the harlots believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterwards repent and believe him.”

So here’s another vineyard parable, another description of the New Adams who are working in the vineyard or not working as the case may be. This time, Jesus ups the ante. Instead of being unrelated laborers who are being rounded up for a day of labor, this time we are sons. That would have irked the Jewish people who heard this for the first time. They knew that God had made all human kind. So they would see what Jesus was driving at here. This parable comes right after the cursing of the fig tree. So they are already braced for verbal blows from Jesus. And this certainly is one of them. They were accustomed to think of themselves as the chosen sons of God, not sons on the same footing as other sons, other creations of God. But note here that this is an image of God the Father inviting his children to do exactly what God the Creator in Genesis invited Adam to do. Work in the garden, in the vineyard that he planted.

“Adam” in fact is a play on words. “Adam” comes from the same word that means “earth, dirt.” It means “the one who comes from the earth.” Here the nature logic of the garden comes together with the worker logic. We are sons and daughters of the earth being invited to work with the logic of God to keep the growth principle of nature going. We should feel invited by Jesus to ask the same question the original listeners had to ask. Which son am I?

The story is deceptively simple. It seems so slight and so obvious it almost isn’t worth talking about. A man tells his two sons to go work in the vineyard. One says he’ll go but doesn’t. The other says no, but goes. Which did the father’s will? Well, clearly the one who went to the vineyard. My natural reaction when I hear this is to shrug my shoulders and say, “got it. Thanks.”

But then I remember two things that make me shiver and want to beg for mercy and grace.

If the parable of the laborers is right, and our life on earth means working for God, and our work is, first, to love God by following Christ’s commands, and to make disciples and teach His commandments, and second, to love our neighbor through the works of mercy, then I might have more of a problem. I hate to say it, but I spend my week loving myself above all else, exaggerating my own importance, and looking for ways to get people to serve me, not vice versa. If the message of the parable of the workers was, there is no special status among vineyard workers, this parable’s message might be, there is no special status among vineyard shirkers. So let’s take a deep dive into this, starting with that first son. Why did the first son say no?

We can assume this man’s son said no for the same reason our children say no. They either think they know a better way to spend their time, or simply don’t want to do the thing that they’re being told to do. Those who say no to the church, those who say no to God, probably have the same reasoning. They don’t need God. Putting him in their lives gives them nothing but more emotional baggage, rules and headaches. With or without him, they figure they will still have to get what they need on their own. They have to earn money, find love and secure their future. Above all, they say no because they don’t trust God. The religious lives that they have seen are unattractive and unconvincing, which suggests that maybe God is not really a force for good.

So they say, “no way, I’m good with what I have. The church is the last thing I need.” And why did the second son say yes? Says Jesus, the man came to the other son and gave the same order. He said in reply, “yes, sir,” but did not go. That “sir” is new and it’s key. The guy who said no didn’t say “no, sir.” That is where many of us are. If God wants something, we don’t just say yes, we say “yes, sir.” It’s called “fear of God.” We know God deserves our respect and awe. So we show up at church and we say amen when we’re supposed to say amen. But the real test comes after the amen. How do we spend our week? Do we share his commandments? Do they guide our workplace discussions? Do we find the most effective ways to share his social teaching at work, his marriage teaching in our advice to friends, and to follow his moral teachings in our entertainment habits?

And what works of mercy do we do? Do we shelter the homeless, bear wrongs patiently, give food and drink to those in need, admonish sinners? Do we instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the afflicted daily? Many of us, if we are honest, will say no to many of those questions or worse. Instead of working in the vineyard, we tend to want to police the vineyard. We criticize liberals or conservatives, or both if we are extra special, and congratulate ourselves as if by critiquing others, we have done something wise and bold. We criticize Pope Francis for being ambiguous, our bishops for being spineless, and our pastors for being superficial, and we have lots of evidence that we’re right. Then when we’re done criticizing, we feel satisfied.

What we forget is that God didn’t ask us for a critique, accurate or not. He asked us for work. And he asks us for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. When we die and face him, he won’t applaud how observant and cutting our take on the synod was. He’ll look at what we did for others. Did we attract people to Christ? Or did our critical attitude tend to drive people away instead? Did we serve people in need? Or did we spend our energies obsessing about world politics and church problems while the needy waited outside and inside our own doors, getting nothing from us?

God says to us, “stop saying, ‘yes, sir,’ and please just do something. My people need you.” Or in Jesus’ words, “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you. When John came, you did not believe him, but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not change your minds and believe him.”

To us, he might say, “Welfare moms and alcoholics, drifters and post-abortive women are entering the kingdom of God before you. And you met them, but you still didn’t change. You met the welfare mom with her dead child’s footprints tattooed on her arms and you didn’t share Christian hope. You met the alcoholic who knows exactly how long it has been since his last drink and didn’t learn from his struggle. You met the drifter with his mom in the doctor’s office waiting room and chose a seat far away. You met the post-abortive single woman who struggles to make ends meet and cries whenever she sees small children playing, but you didn’t even notice her.”

St. John Chrysostom said, “You should have repented long before they did, but you did not do so, so you are deprived of all excuses. He came to you and you did not receive him. He did not come to them and they received him anyway, and you did not even learn from their example.”

And yes, we have fear of God. Our “yes, sir,” shows that. But as one early Christian commentator put it, at the beginning of the commandments of the law, he did not say, “You shall fear the Lord with all your heart,” but “you shall love the Lord with all your heart.”

So what will happen to us if we say “yes, sir,” and do nothing? I love what St. John Henry Newman says in his sermon, Knowledge of God’s Will Without Obedience. Newman points out the awful predicament so many of us will face when we die: “Go before God’s judgment seat and there, plead that you know the truth and have not done it. How will it be taken there? Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, says our judge himself, and who shall reverse his judgment?”

Newman is a master of the psychology of religious people as well as theology, and he points to the root of the problem in his sermon, Profession without Practice. “This then is hypocrisy, not simply for a man to deceive others, knowing all the while that he is deceiving them, but to deceive himself and others at the same time, to aim at their praise by a religious profession, without perceiving that he loves their praise more than the praise of God, and that he is professing far more than he practices.”

In other words, this temptation of being the wrong one of the two sons is central to almost everything that we do in our faith life. For the record, here are some of the ways Jesus has stressed this lesson so far in The Extraordinary Story. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven, end quote. Later, when he talks about building on rock instead of sand, he says, “everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.”

He says over and over again, starting the Sermon on the Mount and continuing last week, “by their fruits, you will know them.” This is even true of what he says about the Blessed Mother. She isn’t great because she bore him, he says, but, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”

And when he wants us to be like Mary, he says, “My mother and my brother are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” He says he’s going to surprise us one day and, “Blessed is that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing his will.” So it’s safe to say that he really means this. Outward signs of holiness mean nothing to him. He will only care if we do the things that he’s asking us to do. And that’s how we will re-edinize the world, to return to a time when his will is done on earth as it is in heaven. The archangels and the great saints are simply those who do what God says.

St. Therese’s little way is about simply doing the small things you’re supposed to do. And St. Francis is known for preaching first by his actions, not his words. So the way to be a great saint is to just simply do what you’re supposed to do. And that brings us to the last of the three work parables that we’re going to hear from Jesus today. This comes right after the other one.

He says, here another parable. “There was a householder who planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and let it out to tenants and went into another country. When the season of fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than the first, and they did the same to them. Afterward, he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ They took him and cast him out of the vineyard and killed him. When, therefore, the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures, ‘The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner? And that was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.’ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it, and he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces. But when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.’ When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. But when they tried to arrest him, they feared the multitudes because they held him to be a prophet.”

So this story’s allegory is pretty clear and pretty tight. There’s a one-to-one ratio between the story and real life. The landowner is God, the tenants are sinful humanity, his chosen people in particular, and the servants he sends are the prophets. We could spend hours spelling out what this parable says about each of these characters, but here’s a very brief overview. First, the landowner, God, does everything for his people. He plants the vineyard. He plants the hedge around it to protect it. He digs a wine press in it, and he builds a tower. God provides all the goods we need, keeps us safe, and even provides a way to turn those goods into intense delight, wine. But notice how he gives us the means to get all the good we can, but leaves the rest to us.

We have to work for him in the vineyard. We have to trample and ferment the wine with him, and we have to man the tower under him. Second, the servants he sends, the prophets, are prevented when they attempt to obtain his produce. Even though it is God’s world and his goods, we tenants don’t want to give up the goods to God. In the story, tenants seize and beat up the servants. This is a perfect icon of sin, where we use God’s goods for ourselves, and we manhandle our consciences to prevent God having his way.

Third, Jesus Christ is the son he sends. The tenants, the Jewish leaders then, or you and me now, kill him in order to own the produce of the vineyard. This casts the crucifixion not just as Jesus’ self-sacrifice, but the rejection of his plans by his own friends. The know of our sin forces him to change his plans and stops his progress in the world as definitively as if we nailed him to a cross. There is perhaps no more unsettling feeling than knowing you have lost fundamental trust from somebody important, especially from Jesus Christ himself. But that’s what this parable does.

Jesus addresses this parable to the chief priests and the elders, and they know exactly what he means when he says, there was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, built a tower and leased to tenants. To make sure we also know what he means, when this reading comes up in the church year, the church not only gives us Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard as the first reading when this parable comes up, but has us repeat its key line four times in the psalm, “The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.” The parable gives us a great analogy for life on earth.

The world is God’s, and we are here only tending it while he’s away. The fathers of the church point out that he’s not truly away. He just acts as if he were for our sakes. He wants us to trust him, and he wants to be able to trust us. But he doesn’t leave his people alone with this gargantuan task. He sends help, his grace, which is like the rain and special servants, the prophets or the church in our day. Nevertheless, the Jewish leaders, like the tenets in the story, mess this up royally. They kill the prophets, and then when God sends his own son, they kill him also. So God takes the vineyard away and gives it to people who will produce fruit.

We go from “The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel” to “I am the vine and you are the branches.” The kingdom of heaven moves from Israel to the body of Christ, the church. It’s taken away from them, it’s given to us. The parable is not just a history lesson, however. It’s a warning about our own time. St. Thomas Aquinas quotes one of the fathers of the church saying, “A vineyard has been let out to each of us to tend when the mystery of baptism was given to us, to be cultivated by our action. Servants have been sent to help us, namely law, psalm and prophecy. The church’s morality, worship and doctrines. If we reject these, we lose. The vineyard is given to another,” he says. “The gift of grace which the proud has scorned is given to the lowly.”

When many of us neglect our vineyards in the same way, the effect is massive. In the history of the church in America, wherever Catholics have rejected the church’s authority, we have quickly lost our credibility and our ability to attract followers. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many Catholics were afraid to offend the world and so downplayed or rejected the church’s teaching against slavery and the dignity of all people. The church lost huge credibility and we handed our moral authority to others. In the 20th century, when the church taught against abortion, Catholics gained credibility whenever they stood for the right to life, but suffered huge losses when prominent Catholics in public life, medicine and academia embraced and advanced the culture of death.

The landowner in Jesus’ parable is amazingly patient with the tenants, up to and including sending his son to his death for them. And he’ll be patient with our vineyards as well. But his patience will eventually run out. But of course, it’s not a story about our time. It’s a historical story. And we can feel the tension mounting as Jesus Christ moves through Jerusalem after his triumphal entry. We have one more major step to make with Jesus as he sets the stage for what he’s about to do, for what he’s come to earth to do. And the next step is a surprising one, as we turn from the Garden of Eden itself and the tilling of the Garden to Adam and Eve themselves in our journey through Jesus Christ’s Extraordinary Story.

The Extraordinary Story is written by Tom Hoopes and produced by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Benedictine College is transforming culture in America through our mission of community, faith and scholarship. If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Leave a review and share with a friend. Help us tell others about The Extraordinary Story.