Twenty-Fifth Sunday In Ordinary Time (Year A)

Isa 55.6-9;  
Phil 1.20-24, 27;  
Mt 20.1-16

THE LORD IS KIND TO US ALL, SHOW GOD’S KINDNESS TOWARDS OTHERS!

We should never underestimate the riches of God’s grace, mercy, and kindness. Today’s parable in the Gospel is about the unfathomable purposes of God in his distribution of grace.  And what is grace?  It is God’s own life, his own energy, his own love, in a word, himself.  He gives himself.  Now, God is infinite, and therefore his gifts cannot be measured, cannot be quantified.  Nor should they be analysed in the carping way we so often haggle over the material things of this world.  God’s own life is his to give, and he gives it as he pleases, with what sometimes seems like reckless generosity.  

We have just heard in the Psalm: “The Lord is just in all his ways and loving in all his deeds.”  It is not for us to question God’s motives.  We might feel that we personally have done more for God that many others.  Perhaps we have done a lot for our parish.  We may have helped the poor, or visited the sick.  We may feel that we have laboured and sweated for the Lord, rather like those who worked all day in the heat of the sun.  We can never enter God’s kingdom with our merits alone, probably most of us don’t even put in a full hour at that!

If we were truly honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that there have been times in our lives when we have made comparisons in our own minds between ourselves and other Christians, usually in our own favor.  But this sort of thinking makes us like the mealy-mouthed Pharisees, who criticised Our Lord for mixing and eating with sinners.  Being jealous over what God gives to others makes us like the Prodigal Son’s dog-in-the-manger older brother, grumbling because the father throws a party when the no-good younger brother comes to his senses and returns to his father’s house.
 
Today’s parable therefore is telling us that we must never begrudge what God gives to others. On the contrary, we should rejoice at his infinite generosity to all and sundry.  After all, we are all the beneficiaries of divine grace.  We do better to count our blessings.  Without God’s grace we would have no life at all.  We would have no physical existence if he did not sustain the entire universe in being, and we would have no spiritual life if he did not constantly uphold us with his grace.

Think of all the grace lavished upon us in the sacraments, especially those two sacraments which we can and should make use of over and over again: the sacrament of the Eucharist and the sacrament of Reconciliation – confession.  God gives his grace to all who seek him, however late or slow they are in asking for it, just as the landowner gave the same wages to each worker who came to him at the end of the day.  Instead of begrudging others the grace of God, we should keep constantly in our hearts those words we say just before Holy Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy to have you under my roof; to receive you.”

Fr Joseph Osho