Living WORD – The Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
Isaiah 55:8
           
“Showing up is 80% of life” according to filmmaker Woody Allen.  Most of us have heard that, or some version of it, at one time or another.  In today’s Gospel, according to Jesus, showing up, it seems, is worth 100%.  We hear in the parable that the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who hired five groups of laborers standing in the marketplace and agreed to pay them all the usual daily wage.  The rub is that he hired some at dawn and continued to hire others at various intervals during the day, all of whom received 100% of the usual daily wage at day’s end.  That those who had started last were paid first, whetted the expectation of the early workers that, in fairness, they would receive more at the end.  As we know, they did not.  This is not our usual way or our usual thinking!
           
Clearly the kingdom of heaven is different from the kingdom we spend most of our days in right now.  We expect to get paid according to hours of labor, competency, or some other measure of what it takes to get the job done in combination with the value the world places on the task we perform.  That is probably what first elicits our resistance to the parable.  But Jesus isn’t trying through this parable to effect a change in the economic system.  He is trying to make known the character of God.  Jesus is trying to tell us that God is like the gracious landowner in the parable; someone who is abundantly generous and who is utterly free to be generous.  The extent to which we resist the generous actions of the landowner may well reflect the extent to which we believe we merit or we have earned whatever we possess or have received, perhaps even including our very breath.  We may resist the idea of a God whose ways of unmerited generosity and immeasurable goodness cannot be controlled, whose ways are not our ways.
           
The striking picture of divine generosity in this parable shows that neither time nor efforts in discipleship are decisive.  What is decisive is God’s grace beyond human expectations, beyond human imagining that makes possible whatever meagre time and effort we put forth.  The question and challenge for us, as always, is how do we make God visible in the kingdom we spend most of our days in now.  How do we resemble God in our own relationships and dealings with others?  Do we treat first and last with equal generosity; those who are slow, less attractive, the immigrant, less educated, less connected? 

When we choose to operate on what is “owed” we cut ourselves off from true fellowship with God and others, instead of rejoicing in all that God has graciously chosen to give us.  We cut ourselves off from the possibility of joy in our own participation with God in abundant, unconditional, unmerited generosity.  In the wisdom and mind of God it is all grace.  May we pray to remember all are invited and all receive 100% when we show up and say yes in the marketplace.