Today’s readings: Isaiah 55, 6-9; Philippians 1, 20-24.27; Mat 20, 1-16.

The prophet Isaiah in the first reading is addressing the deported Jews on their return from exile. They were dreaming just of restoring things as they were before. This is always a temptation even for us today when we’ve witnessed the dismantling of a Christian culture and civilisation which for centuries had supported our belief system.

If we want to make sense and really connect as believers today we cannot remain bound to the past. This is what actually makes our Church and our liturgies backward looking. We seem always in the mood of re-enacting the past, risking, of course, irrelevance. We have to acknowledge that we are in new times with new demands.

John Caputo, professor emeritus of Religion, in his book The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps, writes that in our postmodern condition we acknowledge the instability of traditional foundations and the ambiguities of the old absolutes. Many of us, of course, tend to become confused in the face of all this. We have been brought up to think God in terms of absolutes and certainties and to think of attaining His salvation as the sum total of merits we accumulate as we go along in life. As with the Jews after the exile and at the time of Jesus, our having been born in a culture imbued with God’s imprint can easily become a liability where belief is concerned.

Caputo writes that God emerges here and there, often under other names, not in the bound volumes of theology but in the loose papers that describe a more underlying and insecure faith, a more restless hope. This is the dominant theme in today’s readings. The Scriptures constantly call on us to revise our theologies and our doctrines, not the other way round, as many still seem to think.

There are believers by birth and believers who for some reason or other become believers even at an 11th hour. Believing remains always quite a big challenge in life. Isaiah says in today’s first reading: “Seek the Lord while He is still to be found.” As long as we live, the Lord can still be found and it’s never too late with Him.

The gospel parable shows how Jesus needed constantly to justify with the Pharisees his new way of seeing things. Our differences and prejudices mean nothing to God. This was the crossroad situation of the first Christian communities still resisting new entries among them with no baggage of Jewish formation. It is the same crossroad situation we are finding ourselves today. It took us 50 whole years since Vatican II to put on the Church’s agenda what the next Synod of Bishops is about to discuss. Unfortunately many still look on such debates as leading nowhere.

Today’s parable raises debatable questions but confirms that God transcends our way of seeing things and that our understanding of Him can never be caged in rigid concepts. There are some who in life celebrate God’s gratuity and discover His truth without any baggage of formation. Just as there are others who in spite of their baggage, fail to connect spiritually and remain always on the periphery of what faith is all about.

In the cultural ruins of our age, it is to no avail to dream of a restoration. We are challenged to think big, to think differently about our faith, to be creative and innovative, to dream of other visions and values that we are called to discern in the present age. God is always new and He is creator not because He created things in the beginning, but because He is still in the process of creating.

In the parable, those who started working at daybreak ended up grumbling, envious of those who were late comers but who, nevertheless, received God’s gratuitousness to the full. We can boast of having been a truly Christian nation. But we do well to beware not to let our baggage render us spiritually poor and unable on our part to connect simultaneously with the divine and with the present age.

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