Today’s readings: Is. 55, 6-9; Phil. 1, 20-24.27; Matt. 20, 1-16.
Today’s parable of people joining the landowner’s workforce at different hours of the day and getting the same pay completely demolishes the concept of reward and punishment that has always inspired in Christian life a sense of dutiful response towards God. What matters in life is not how someone begins, but how the story ends.
Matthew is driving home the message that the Kingdom of Heaven is never to be taken for granted by those who had their mind at rest simply because they were religious-minded. The kingdom is God’s gift, and as a gift it is gratuitous, not merited or expected by right. God is infinitely merciful at the cost of appearing unjust. Jesus is not giving a lesson in justice here.
The summons in Isaiah to “seek the Lord while He is still to be found” is not a generic summons to faith or to worship. It specifically summons the displaced who have lost their identity through accommodation or compromise to reclaim that identity. It is a prophetic summons to those who have distanced themselves from their roots and have found more accommodating ways to live.
Israel was prisoner in Babylon and was dreaming of its return to the homeland, restoring everything as it had been before. But God’s way of restoring things is not to return back in time. If they were truly to return to their homeland, to where they belonged, that would happen in a radically different way.
At times, considering our reading of the times and of the situation of Christianity in today’s culture, we seek to uphold the way we’ve always conceived reality and ignore God’s ways of irruption in history and in the lives of people.
In this way we render the Church unchangeable, rigid, immobile. In this way we also pretend to create God in our image and likeness, not vice-versa.
There is a big difference between this God we imagine and the God of the prophets. Isaiah’s words are highly significant: “Seek the Lord while He is still to be found, call to Him while He is still near.” Isaiah is implying that the moment will come when the Lord cannot be found and when He is no longer near.
We insist on labelling our culture as void of God but which in reality it may be challenging us to reconstruct from the roots our ways of perceiving God and the divine. If only we open our eyes, we can have the power to discern signs of God which are not evident to the naked eye.
The Jewish story is our story. Without acknowledging it, even in the midst of an apparently most religious culture, we ourselves could be perpetuating the ‘death of God’.
As long as we remain rooted in our thoughts and our ways, not venturing to discern God’s ways, we will continue to be confused by His ways. It is simply unbearable on our part to hear Jesus reiterate: “The last will be first and the first, last”. That sounds terribly unjust to our ears.
In like manner, Jesus had to justify all the time his behaviour and attitude towards sinners and those the Jews held as estranged from God’s mercy because of their misplaced sense of justice where God was concerned.
It is God Himself, not modern science or the Enlightenment philosophy, that deconstructs our theologies. Jesus was crucified precisely because his relationship with the Father shook the foundations of established religion. The God of Jesus Christ is not the God of reward and punishment. That is the god of our infantile religion.
The God we proclaim is not the God we approach with the bill on our hands of what we’ve done to merit the kingdom. If that were our God, then as believers we would have so much to lament about.
Today’s parable opens the way for us to experience God as He truly is. It confirms that where our religion is concerned we need to undergo open-heart surgery to have a new heart and shift our understanding of Christian life from dutiful response to delighted enjoyment.