Homily for the 25th Sunday, Year A
Isaiah 55:6–9 · Psalm 145 · Philippians 1:20c–24, 27a · Matthew 20:1–16a
Grace Is Not a Wage: The God Who Keeps Coming Back
My brothers and sisters,
There is a detail in today's Gospel that we almost always rush past on our way to the argument about wages. Listen again to how many times the landowner leaves his house.
At dawn, he goes out. At nine o'clock, he goes out again. At noon, he goes out again. At three in the afternoon, he goes out again. And then — and this is the one that should stop us — at five o'clock in the evening, with one hour of daylight remaining, when any sensible businessman has long since closed his ledger for the day, he goes out one more time.
Five times. Five journeys to the marketplace. This is not a man managing a labor shortage. This is a man who cannot stay away.
And in this valley, of all places, we do not need the parable explained to us. Many of you know exactly what that marketplace looks like, because some of you have stood in it. You know what it is to wait in the early dark for work that may or may not come. You know the particular ache of the eleventh hour — when the trucks have gone, when the crews are full, when you are still standing there, and the sun is going down, and you begin to do the math on what you will bring home to your family tonight. Jesus did not choose an abstract image. He chose the most familiar economic reality of his listeners' lives, and it remains the most familiar economic reality of many of ours.
Now hear what the landowner asks the ones still standing at five o'clock: Why do you stand here idle all day? And their answer is the most honest sentence in the entire parable: "Because no one has hired us."
Not: because we are lazy. Not: because we did not want to work. Because nobody chose us. All day long, they watched other men get picked. All day long, they were passed over. And the wound of that — the slow, public humiliation of being the one nobody wanted — is a wound many of us carry in forms that have nothing to do with agriculture.
The young person who has applied for forty positions and heard back from none. The widow whose phone stopped ringing three months after the funeral. The parent whose adult children no longer call. The man who left his own country and discovered that his credentials, his experience, his whole professional life, did not transfer. The person sitting in this church right now who has quietly concluded that everyone else received something from God that was somehow not available to them.
No one has hired us. Some of you know that sentence from the inside!
And into that wound, the Gospel speaks its scandal. Because when evening comes, the landowner does something that has offended every reader of this parable for two thousand years. He pays the eleventh-hour workers first — deliberately, publicly, where everyone can see — and he pays them a full day's wage.
The men who had been working since dawn watch this happen, and something reasonable and entirely human stirs in their chests. If he gave them that much for one hour, imagine what we are about to receive. And when they receive exactly what they agreed to, exactly what was just, exactly what they were promised — they grumble.
I want us to be careful here, because it is easy to make villains of these men, and they are not villains. They are us. They worked hard. They bore the day's heat. Their complaint is the complaint of every decent, faithful, hardworking person who has ever quietly kept score with God — and I include myself in that number. The one who has served at every parish function for thirty years, watching someone who returned to the sacraments last month receive the same welcome. The lifelong Catholic watching a deathbed conversion and feeling something complicated move in the heart. We understand these men perfectly, because we have been these men.
And the landowner's reply is one of the most searching questions in all of Scripture: "Are you envious because I am generous?" Or as it reads more literally in the Greek: Is your eye evil because I am good? The problem was never the wage. The problem was that they had been measuring a gift as though it were a paycheck. This is precisely why Mother Church gives us Isaiah this morning: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways."
We hear that verse most often at funerals, offered as consolation in the face of mystery. But today it arrives as a correction. God is telling us that our entire accounting system — the one where grace is earned, where standing is calculated, where we quietly rank ourselves against the people in the next pew — that whole system is not merely imperfect. It is from a different economy altogether.
Because here is the truth this parable is protecting: grace is not a wage. It cannot be. If it could be earned, it would not be grace; it would be compensation, and God would be our employer rather than our Father. Nobody in that vineyard earned what they received. The ones hired at dawn did not earn the dignity of being chosen — they were chosen before they had worked a single hour. Every one of them received the same thing: not payment, but the landowner's goodness.
And this is where Saint Paul meets us in the second reading, writing from a prison cell, of all places, with his own death a live possibility: "For to me, life is Christ, and death is gain." Hear what Paul is not doing there. He is not counting up his apostolic accomplishments and presenting the invoice. He has stopped calculating entirely. His whole life has collapsed into a single relationship — life is Christ — and a man who has found that has nothing left to grumble about, because he has stopped measuring what he is owed.
3 takeaways:
First — if you have been standing in the marketplace, hear this: He is still coming out. It is not too late. It has never been too late. That is the entire point of the fifth journey. There are people in this church who have quietly decided that their moment with God has passed — that they waited too long, wandered too far, failed too publicly, returned too late to matter. The landowner went out at five o'clock specifically for you. Whatever hour you think it is in your life, He is walking toward the marketplace right now, and He is not checking how long you have been standing there. He is only asking whether you will come.
Second — if you have been in the vineyard since dawn, guard your eye. Because the great danger of a long and faithful life in the Church is not that we will stop working. It is that we will start counting — and the moment we start counting, the generosity of God toward someone else begins to feel like an injustice toward us. Do not let your years of faithfulness curdle into a ledger. You were never being paid. You were being loved, from the very first hour, and the gift of those years in the vineyard was the vineyard itself.
And third — become one who goes out. Because the deepest invitation of this parable is not only to receive the landowner's generosity but to imitate it. Every parish, including this one, has people standing at the edges of the marketplace at five o'clock in the evening. The newcomer nobody has spoken to. The family that stopped coming and thinks no one noticed. The teenager who is here because a parent insisted and is quietly certain there is no place for him. The grieving widow four months out, when the casseroles have stopped. Somebody has to go out again. Somebody has to notice the ones still standing there and say: there is room for you, and there always was.
My friends, in a few moments the altar will become the clearest proof of everything I have said. Not one of us here has earned what we are about to receive. Not the daily communicant of sixty years, and not the person who walked in this morning after a long absence, hoping nobody would recognize them. We will all come forward with empty hands, and we will all receive exactly the same thing: the whole Christ, undivided, unearned, and completely given.
That is what the landowner has been carrying out to the marketplace all along. “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call him while he is near." He is near. He is very near. He has come out for the fifth time today, and He is standing in front of you right now.
Come and be hired. The wage is His own life!
Have a splendid week!
