The gospel for today is about the landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard. Have you ever thought about the labors of the landowner? The landowner has a foreman who he calls upon to issue the pay at the end of the day. You’d think that part of the foreman’s job was to secure laborers for the harvest. Maybe so, but in this parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, it is the landowner who labors first and most fundamentally throughout the parable.

He goes out to the marketplace at dawn, nine o’clock, noon, three o’clock, and five – it seems to be an unrelenting activity. He too bears the heat and burden of the day, searching for ever more laborers to come into his vineyard. There is no idleness about him. He is on task and the task, the mission, is primary – the harvest is at hand and laborers are needed. Money does not seem to be a critical item for him.

The US Marine officer and senior enlisted training makes the point that the leadership role is to take care of the people and then the people will take care of the mission. That seems operative in this parable. The landowner does not complain nor draw attention to his work. His outreach is why the laborers are working in the vineyard. His tireless labor rescues them from Blaise Pascal’s insight: “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair” (Pensées, #131).

The workers who put in a full day do not appreciate that the landowner hires without need, promises what is just, and goes beyond justice in bestowing the rewards he promised the first also to the last. The first batch of workers fail to understand their situation within the larger framework of the landowner’s gratuitous hiring. All of this flows from the landowner’s freedom and wealth: “Am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?” (Matt 20.15) His freedom and wealth, moreover, converge in a generosity that liberates and enriches those whom he chooses. The long-haul workers fail to marvel at this. They fail to grasp the unforced generosity that moved the landowner to rescue them and each subsequent influx of workers from empty idleness. Instead, his generosity stirs them to jealousy.

What about us? Is God not free to do as He wishes with his grace? Nothing we do can ever earn the grace of justification. Without this grace we are in Pascal’s milieu. With the grace of justification, we are rescued – and not on our own efforts. Justification is totally the work and gift of God, granted to whomever He wills, whenever He wills it, early in the day of our life or very late indeed. The saint who perseveres in the grace of his Baptism after a long and arduous life in God’s service is just as justified as the wretched sinner who is baptized on his deathbed.

Perhaps the question for all believers is whether we rejoice with the angels over the at-the-last-minute and late-life conversions.  If we do, then that gratitude and joy is a sign we are living in the Kingdom of Heaven as it grows in this life. If we do, then we understand it was always the landowner doing the “heaving lifting.”

Image credit: Laborers in the Vineyard, icon | Public Domain | found on Flickr Fr. Ted