This Sunday, Christianity Is Like Work Before It Is Like a Party

Jesus tells the Parable of the Laborers in the Gospel Reading for Mass this Sunday, describing how workers in his kingdom get the same wage, no matter how many hours they put in. The parable tells us a lot about how Jesus operates, our vocations, and what God has in store for us.

Here are takeaways from the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A taken from Sunday Readings columns at this site and The Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: Jesus seeks us to bless us with his invitation; we don’t find him and bless him with our presence.

The Gospel begins, “The Kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard.”

If we think of Jesus only as waiting patiently for us to find him, we’re wrong. In fact, Jesus here describes how he himself takes the initiative. He is up early, looking for us, approaching us and inviting us. It can seem to us that, whether we converted or just kept our Catholic faith, that we did all the legwork, decided that Jesus met our standard, settled on the Catholic Church despite some incompatibility, and then graced it with our presence.

That’s not how this works, according to Christ. He went out, found us idle, and — through the circumstances of our life and the natural and supernatural channels he has at his disposal — chose us to come and join him.

And he doesn’t give us credit for being “early adopters” either. Maybe you have been tithing for years. Maybe you were a youth leader in high school. Maybe you stuck to your faith when others fell away. It doesn’t matter. Jesus likes new followers, longtime followers, child followers and elderly followers all the same — in fact, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last,” he says.

Second: The parable is meant to teach us that our Christian life is more like work than a party.

The landowner “sent them into his vineyard,” Jesus says, and later we hear from the laborers themselves that they “bore the day’s burden and the heat.”

When Jesus finds us and welcomes us into his company, he sends us into his Church and his world — not to enjoy a reward, but to get to work.

In other parables, Christ invites people to a party. That’s a vision of heaven, the wedding banquet at the final coming of the kingdom of God. This and a few other parables have to do with our mission now, building the kingdom — the hard work before the party. If our Christian life doesn’t feel like taking on challenging tasks (joyful effort, but effort nonetheless), we’re doing something wrong.

St. Paul gives a great accounting of both kinds of life Jesus recruits us for when he says, in the Second Reading:

“For me life is Christ, and death is gain. If I go on living in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. And I do not know which I shall choose. I am caught between the two. I long to depart this life and be with Christ, for that is far better. Yet that I remain in the flesh is more necessary for your benefit.”

In other words, life both here and in the hereafter happen side by side with Christ. Either we are working with him in his vineyard, or we are resting with him when the work is done.

When Pope Benedict XVI was elected Pope, he greeted Catholics with the words, “After the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple and humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord.”

Benedict later explained how our labor on behalf of Christ on earth is like our reward with Christ in heaven: “[T]o be able to work in the Lord’s vineyard, to put oneself at his service, to collaborate in his work, is in itself a priceless recompense that repays every effort.”

With God, fruitful labor is its own reward.

Third: And it isn’t just priests, bishops, or consecrated people who labor in the vineyard.

The Catechism teaches that lay people are “the front line of Church life” and says “it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will” (Catechism 899; 898). That means we are supposed to work in the vineyard of our own workplace, home and neighborhood.

Sometimes we think the “work” of our faith life is our prayer time, or our time at church, or our time reading the Bible. But those times aren’t the work. They are the workplace training sessions and the words of encouragement from our Boss, where God heals us and enlightens us so that we can refuel and more effectively do the work of building his kingdom.

The work we are responsible for is clear in Matthew 25 — it means making the most of our talents, giving them to God, and it means doing the works of mercy, serving him in those all around us who bear his image and likeness.

Which brings us to the landowner in the parable, who is the “master of the house” in the original Greek.

Fourth: The “master of the house” is God, and the parable tells us a lot about him.

God is busy seeking us out, early and late, inviting us to work, never stopping. If you feel like you are “standing idly” awaiting your vocation, hold on! He’s coming.

We often pray as if we want God to transform our world the way we want it. No. He wants us to transform his world, his way. But this is neither a labor camp nor a children’s day camp. God doesn’t give us slave labor or busywork. By calling our world his vineyard, he makes it clear that our work is preparing the world for his heavenly banquet, and that he intends to turn our daily labor into wine.

That means our work is a work of love.

When Pope Benedict said our work is its own reward, he added, “Only those who love the Lord and his Kingdom understand this: those who instead work only for the pay will never realize the value of this inestimable treasure.”

Mother Teresa was a master at adding love to work. “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love,” she said. She even provided a way to check our work: “The miracle is not that we do the work, but that we are happy to do it,” she said.

Fifth: We do it for love, and eternal love is our wage.

At the beginning of the parable, the landowner tells laborers, “Go into my vineyard, and I will give you what is just.” A just day’s wage at the time was a denarius.

“What then, say they, is the meaning of that denarius, which is given in payment to all alike when the work of the vineyard is ended?” St. Augustine asked. The payment, he said, is “life eternal itself, the kingdom of heaven itself.”

And what is heaven?

After the banquet of new wine that receives us, we will find ourselves in a “new heaven and new earth,” says the Book of Revelation, where “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

Then, after all our work, we will rest in a dwelling place Jesus prepared just for us, saying “in my Father’s house, there are many mansions.”

So, for the God who gave us every good thing we experience and every benefit we have ever enjoyed, a “just wage” goes way beyond justice. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,” says the Lord in the First Reading. His “just wage” is greater than our generosity.

That wage is unearned, no matter how much we have worked. But we will have to do the work to receive the wage, serving the hungry and homeless and multiplying our talents for souls.

Sixth: And at every Mass, we see in front of us what workers in a vineyard produce.

At each Mass, we offer the “fruit of the vine and work of human hands” to God — and see how the product of human work, united with Christ, becomes divine.

The Body of Christ that we worship and then receive into our own bodies demonstrates how Christ wants to transform every one of us into himself.

And, as the Lord himself told us, it is never too late to join him in his work.

By Tom Hoopes