Laborers in the Vineyard

The main point in the parable from the Gospel for today’s Mass (Matthew 20:1-16, 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time) can be summed up in a single word: collaboration. God wants to engage our freedom, our capacities. He wants us to work with Him in His vineyard. He doesn’t want us to be idle. And that in itself is the real value, privilege, reward: collaborating with the Lord, being coworkers with Him, realizing the potential He has placed within each one of us.

The inherent worth of collaborating with the Lord is very similar to the way St. Bernard of Clairvaux describes the inherent worth of love in the commentary on the Song of Songs from the Office of Readings for his feast day (August 20): “Love is self-sufficient; it is pleasing to itself and on its own account. Love is its own payment, its own reward. Love needs no extrinsic cause or result. Love is the result of love, it is intrinsically valuable. I love because I love; I love in order to love.” The privilege of collaborating with the Lord, of being a coworker with Him carries with it its own value to which nothing need be added.

Pope John Paul II said something very similar, commenting on the words of Jesus about the ‘treasure’ we will have as a ‘reward’ in heaven: “Christ says: ‘You will have treasure in heaven.’ This treasure is not so much a ‘reward’ after death for the good works done following the example of the divine Teacher, but rather the eschatological fulfillment of what was hidden behind these good works here on earth, in the inner ‘treasure’ of the heart” (Apostolic Exhortation Redemptoris Donum [1984], no. 5). Our labors undertaken for the love of Christ, the good deeds that we do because of our faith in Christ, already contain within them the seed of the reward and the treasure we will experience fully in heaven. This is what Monsignor Luigi Giussani refers to as the “hundredfold;” it is “true fulfillment, that already begins in this world, and is completed in eternity” (Is is Possible to Live This Way?: An Unusual Approach to Christian Experience, trans. Dino Gerard D’Agata, et al, ed. Michelle Riconscente and John Zuccchi [Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press] p. 130).

This is exactly St. Paul's perspective in today's second reading: "For to 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." For him Christ is everything: the life he is now living, the motivation for his ongoing labor, and the reward that awaits him.

Given God's desire for our collaboration, idleness becomes the real threat: inactivity, atrophy, stunted growth, wasted potential – these constitute the real tragedy in the life of the Christian. This is what motivates the owner of the vineyard in the parable to hire workers he doesn’t really “need:” because he wants them to be engaged, to experience the dignity and the “reward” of their own labor.

We tend to make two mistakes in our response to this parable. First (like the older son in the parable of the prodigal son) we overlook the incredible privilege of being God’s collaborators, coworkers, and focus too much and wrongly on “payment,” thus distorting the true nature of our reward. We focus instead on quantification, calculation and comparison. We reduce our relationship with God and our service of Him to a mechanism, a function that’s supposed to “work” the way we want in terms of payback. And when it doesn’t, we get all upset like the first crew of workers in the parable. Somehow in our calculations, if others have more I have less even though I didn’t lose anything (and conversely, if others have less somehow I feel that I have more, even though I haven’t gained anything). This causes us to end up in the undesirable position of envying God’s generosity. Jesus forcefully challenges this greedy and self-centered way of thinking!

Second, we tend to fall into the trap of automatically identifying with the first group of laborers instead of the last. This is because most of us are really closet Pharisees: we are convinced that we deserve to be richly compensated for our valuable service. When we deceive ourselves in this way, though, we deprive ourselves of the joy and gratitude of the last shift of workers: receiving as a free gift not only so much more than we could ever deserve, but often exactly the opposite of what we deserve. We often deserve punishment, but instead receive mercy and blessing.

God wants us to collaborate with Him, not because He needs us or because of some mercantile motivation for a mechanistic payback on our part, but rather so that we can experience the incredible joy and privilege of working with Him – a treasure and a reward that will explode in eternity into something far surpassing anything we can ask, imagine, hope for, desire or deserve.