The human face of God

Today's readings: Isaiah 55, 6-9; Philippians 1, 20-24. 27; Matthew 20, 1-16

The issue in today's parable about the workers in the vineyard, known also as the parable of the good employer, is raised mainly because those who worked for only one hour and those who had done a heavy day's work were treated equally. At face value, the protesters against the employer were right because the employer was being unjust. But the theme of the parable is not industrial relations or fair wages.

The key to interpreting the parable is God's inclusiveness and Jesus' persistence to call everyone to discipleship. The central theme here is that the reward for coming to know God is God Himself, and that, at the end of the day, what we receive from Him is always gratuitous, not something which is ours by right. With this parable, Jesus was addressing people who had been religiously observant all their lives but found God's gratuitousness, particularly with outcasts, difficult to accept.

The institutional path in Judaism and likewise in Christianity has always been the safest path in our frame of mind. But being Christian by birth is in itself no guarantee for reaching heaven, or even for being a disciple. Isaiah in the first reading says, "Seek the Lord while He is still to be found, call to Him while He is still near." We've been brought up to think of the world as being filled with God, with really no need of seeking Him. But finding God is not mechanical.

This parable helps to ground the Church's ministry to the marginalised, estranged, lapsed, drop-outs in society, those who are spiritually on the edge. Basically, they are the ones who give reason for the Church to exist. One of the most significant letters addressed to the Milan diocese by Pope Paul VI when he was still Archbishop Montini in the late 50s, was the famous 'Lettera ai lontani'. Today's parable reminds us that there are the so-called 11th-hour people who may even be in our black books but whom God may still be chasing.

God is rich in mercy. Rich to the extent of standing there as a loving and merciful father waiting for the prodigal son to return home. Rich also to the extent of promising to a criminal at the moment of his execution, "today you will be in paradise with me". God is rich in mercy to the extent of being scandalous to our religiosity. As in today's parable where, rightly so, he is being accused of injustice. But again, Isaiah says, "Our God is rich in forgiving; for my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways".

The Pharisees, whom Jesus was addressing among others, had a sense of justice of a strict, commercial type, and submitted God to their rigidity. With this parable, Jesus drives home the message that in God's presence our distinctions of class or category, even of spiritual intensity, are irrelevant. It is not God who is created in our image and likeness, but vice-versa. We'll all be surprised to find out one day that in heaven there is no protocol or reserved seats, that there are no first or second class citizens. That's our way of categorising. God's ways are different, to the point of putting the last first and the first last.

C.S. Lewis notes in The Great Divorce that "There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him". We need great wisdom before judging people, the world, or even the times we are in. Often our judgements are very superficial and deficient, lacking the understanding and the depth that the Scriptures constantly transmit to us.

The 'God is dead' philosophy marked heavily our recent cultural past in the West. But with hindsight, we really have queries about the God who actually had been declared dead. Maybe many people do not need the God we preach to them. Maybe many are not even posing the questions we continue to provide answers for. At times and without really discerning what's happening, we enter dead-ends with our official theologies about God and His qualities.

We hardly notice that Jesus died as a blasphemer, but dying revealed to us the true human face of God, a God always evasive and never captive to our systematic formulations of doctrine. God is not all that we say about Him. He is always beyond our representations of Him.