Wednesday in the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time, August 18, 2021

Matthew 20:1-16

Jesus told his disciples this parable: “The Kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with them for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. Going out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You too go into my vineyard, and I will give you what is just.’ So they went off. And he went out again around noon, and around three o’clock, and did likewise. Going out about five o’clock, he found others standing around, and said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They answered, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You too go into my vineyard.’ When it was evening the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Summon the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and ending with the first.’ When those who had started about five o’clock came, each received the usual daily wage. So when the first came, they thought that they would receive more, but each of them also got the usual wage. And on receiving it they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last ones worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us, who bore the day’s burden and the heat.’ He said to one of them in reply, ‘My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what is yours and go. What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous?’ Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Over the last hundred years, various theories have arisen to explain how our solar system came to be.  One of the first of these held that a passing star drew out enormous amounts of energy and mass from our sun and that over time these settled into the planets and moons.  Later came the idea that the sun came into being through a gradual accumulation of gases, and that the planets resulted from streams of these gases that remained outside the core that became the sun in a rather orderly manner.  Lately, a theory holds that the gases that eventually coalesced into the sun originated from the explosions of other stars, and that the planets and moons we know today are the result of multiple titanic collisions, and that rogue bodies roaming the galaxy may have joined it.  Similarly, one theory has replaced an earlier theory in trying to explain such things as the origin of the universe.  Each theory has its day in the sun and everyone knows that it is the final word, and then a scientific discovery provides more or better data and the old theory has to be modified or discarded for a newer one.  Right now, the so-called Big Bang Theory is promoted as explaining the origin of the universe, but some scientists have recently begun to challenge it.  The universe is so vast and either so simple or so complex that it is not easy to understand, despite all we think we know.

If this is true of the natural world, how much more it is of the supernatural world.  St. Thomas Aquinas famously declared that it is easier to say what God is not than what he is.  We can rule out, for instance, that he is a physical body or that a human can hide something from his knowledge.  We do know that he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and infinite.  This makes him so utterly different from us that we must admit that we cannot know how he thinks.  And this is confirmed for us when the Lord reveals to us in the Scriptures that, “My thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways . . . for as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Isaiah 55, 8-9).  Try as we might in our pride, we cannot guess his thoughts nor anticipate his ways.

The Lord Jesus makes this clear in his Parable of The Generous Landowner.  The landowner has his own system of payment to those whom he hires.  He is responsible to no one for how he elects to pay his workers, for it is his own money.  He pays them all the same wage regardless of how long they worked.  He is eminently fair, paying the accepted daily wage of the time in exchange for their labor.  Some of the workers register complaint because they think they should get more than that for which they agreed, but they are themselves unjust in this.  At the conclusion of the parable, the landowner states that he has acted out of his own generosity.  Yet his generosity seems absurd.  If the landowner had come to the workers and told them that he was going to give them extra wages because of the unusual heat of the day, that would be generous.  But to give the same payment to a worker who put in two hours as one who had worked all day is beyond generous.  It does not seem to make sense.  It is extraordinary behavior.

The ways of Almighty God are always extraordinary as we tend to measure them.  How do we explain the Father sending the Son to die for us?  How do we explain the Son’s zeal to die for us?  How do we explain how God loves even the worst sinner with a love beyond all telling?  How is each of us so important to him that he counts the hairs of our heads?  

If we cannot understand the universe, we can scarcely imagine that we understand God, who created it.  We stand in awe and gratitude before the mystery, knowing that the fact that there is mystery tells us much about our God.