First and Last
The house of Israel is the vine of God – who planted and watered it, preparing the Israelites to bear fruits of righteousness (see Isaiah 5:7; 27:2-5).
Israel failed to yeild good fruits and the Lord allowed His vineyard, Israel’s kingdom, to be overrun by conquerors (see Psalm 80:9-20). But God promised that one day He would replant His vineyard and its shoots would blossom to the ends of the earth (see Amos 9:15; Hosea 14:5-10).
This is the biblical backdrop to Jesus’ parable of salvation history in today’s Gospel. The landowner is God. The vineyard is the kingdom. The workers hired at dawn are the Israelites, to whom He first offered His covenant. Those hired later in the day are the Gentiles, the non-Israelites, who, until the coming of Christ, were strangers to the covenants of promise (see Ephesians 2:11-13). In the Lord’s great generosity, the same wages, the same blessings promised to the first-called, the Israelites, will be paid to those called last, the rest of the nations.
This provokes grumbling in today’s parable. Doesn’t the complaint of those first laborers sound like that of the older brother in Jesus’ prodigal son parable (see Luke 15:29-30)? God’s ways, however, are far from our ways, as we hear in today’s First Reading. And today’s readings should caution us against the temptation to resent God’s lavish mercy.
Like the Gentiles, many will be allowed to enter the kingdom late – after having spent most of their days idling in sin.
But even these can call upon Him and find Him near, as we sing in today’s Pslam. We should rejoice that God has compassion on all whom He has created. This should console us, too, especially if we d ones who remain far from the vineyard.
Our task is to continue laboring in His vineyard. As Paul says in today’s Epistle, let us conduct ourselves worthily, struggling to bring all men and women to the praise of His name.
St. Gregory the Great
Homilies on the Gospel, 11
At no time did the Lord cease sending his people workmen to cultivate his vineyard..:. through the patriarchs, and later through the teachers of the law, and then through the prophets, and at last through the apostles, he labored at the cultivation of his vineyard as if by his workmen. Everyone, though, who had the right faith with good works… was a workman in his vineyard.
And so the Hebrew people is meant by the workmen who came to the vineyard in the morning and during the third, sixth and ninth hours. In the persons of their elect, they eagerly worshipped God with right faith from the very beginning The Gentiles were called at the eleventh hour, and it was said to them: “Why do you stand here the whole day idle?”
Those who neglected to labor for the whole of their lives, while so much of the world’s history passed by, were like those standing by the whole day. But consider, my friends, what they answered when they were questioned. They said: “Because no one has hired us.” In truth no patriarch and no prophet had come to them. And did they mean when they said, “No one has hired us to labor,” if not “No one has preached to us the ways of life”?
What, then, are we to say, to excuse ourselves for our having ceased from good works? We have come to the faith almost from our mothers’ wombs, we have heard the words of life from our cradles, we have received divine preaching from the breasts of holy Church together with our mothers’ milk!
Pope Benedict XVI from Angelus Address, September 18, 2011 In today’s liturgy we have the beginning of St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, that is, to the members of the community that the Apostle himself established at Philippi, an important Roman colony in Macedonia, present day northern Greece.
Paul arrived in Philippi during his second missionary journey, sailing from the coast of Anatolia and crossing the Aegean Sea. That was the Gospel’s first entrance into Europe. We are near the year 50, so about 20 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.
And yet, in the Letter to the Philippians there is a hymn to Christ that already presents a complete synthesis of his mystery: incarnation, “kenosis,” that is, humiliation unto death on the cross, and glorification.
This mystery itself became one with the life of the Apostle Paul, who wrote this letter while he was in prison, awaiting a sentence of life or death. He writes: “For me to live is Christ and die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). It is a new sense of life, of human existence, that consists in living communion with the living Jesus Christ; not only with a historical person, a master of wisdom, a religious leader, but with a man in whom God dwells personally.
His death and resurrection are the Good News that, starting from Jerusalem, is destined to reach all people and nations, and to transform all cultures from within, opening them to the fundamental truth: God is love; he became man in Jesus and with his sacrifice he ransomed humanity from slavery to evil, giving it a trustworthy hope.
St. Paul was a man who brought together three worlds: the Jewish world and the Greek and Roman worlds. It is not by chance that God entrusted to him the mission of bringing the Gospel from Asia Minor to Greece and to Rome, building a bridge that would take Christianity to the very ends of the earth.
Today we live in an epoch of new evangelization. Vast horizons open up to the Gospel, while regions of ancient Christian tradition are called to rediscover the beauty of the faith. The protagonists of this mission are the men and women who, like St. Paul, can say: “For me to live is Christ ” — persons, families, communities, who decide to work in the vineyard of the Lord, according to the image of this Sunday’s Gospel (cf. Matthew 20:1-16).
Humble and generous workers, who do not ask any other recompense than participating in the mission of Jesus and the Church. “If living in the body,” St. Paul continues, “means working and bearing fruit, I do not know which to choose” (Philippians 1:22): full union with Christ beyond death or service to his mystical body on earth.
Dear friends, the Gospel has transformed the world, and it is still transforming it, like a river that waters a great field. Let us turn in prayer to the Virgin Mary that in the whole Church priestly, religious and lay vocations ripen in service to the new evangelization.
