Ordinary 25

The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 55:6-9; Psalm 145; Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a; Matthew 20:1-16a

This parable has so many issues.

Doesn’t the landowner know how many daily workers he will need?

            He goes out five times throughout the day to get more workers.

 

And there’s the issue of payment.

 

But something doesn’t sit well I expect with most of us.

Those who worked an hour receive the same full daily wage,

it just doesn’t seem fair.

 

Yet the men hired at dawn did receive what they agreed to.

Would you expect to receive more, if you were them?

 

It’s the treatment of the workers hired at five in the afternoon that is at issue.

Fairness is at the heart of the parable, is it not?

Or is it.

Are fairness and justice the same thing?

Are justice and grace the same thing?

 

Do the stories of Jesus reveal the virtue of human fairness or God’s grace?

 

Of all the workers hired that day, we are privy only to an exchange between the landowner and group hired at the last hour: “Why do you stand here idle all day?” “Because no one has hired us.”

Why were they not hired?

Are they incompetent? Lazy? We are never told.

All we know for certain is they are not wanted.

 

Unwanted.

Have you ever felt unwanted?

 

As a kid, always chosen last for the pick-up baseball game.

Passed over for a job promotion - multiple times?

Not asked to the prom?

Not invited to a major life event…a wedding, graduation, Thanksgiving Day dinner…

Do people when they find out they were put up for adoption feel like they were unwanted?

 

They are many people not wanted by society and the church today

 

Gay people are fired from positions in Catholic institutions because they are gay

            or in a committed relationship.

 

Do you remember the two-year-old Syrian boy, Alyan Kurdi washed up on the shores of Turkey?

The world does not want refugees and asylum seekers. We build walls, detention centers, or watch them drown in the waters that surround our continents.

 

With the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia throughout the world;

Muslims and Jews, again, are not wanted.

 

From abortion to apartments to wedding invitations to immigrants;

children are not wanted.

 

Palestinians are not wanted as the world watches a genocide occur before our eyes

and we do nothing.

 

Still dealing with the history of buying and selling human beings from West Africa, the Civil War, the gutting of the Civil Rights Act, and gerrymandering; black and brown people are not wanted.

 

As we move them from camps they create under bridges and in our parks and design park benches you can’t lie down on to sleep; the homeless, people suffering from mental illnesses and the abandoned are not wanted.

 

What about those family members on the wrong side of the political aisle from us that we no longer invite to the family gatherings?

 

Are you or I one the many groups of people who are not wanted?

The reasons are abundant from selfishness to bigotry and convoluted reasons

 all expressed in legalese or arguments over what is empathy.

 

With all the people who are not wanted in the world, who is wanted?

And who makes these decisions about human dignity?

 

As followers of Jesus, did we ever consider that in the end Jesus was one of the unwanted?

He became and was treated like the many people he mingled and ate with: tax collectors, public sinners, women, people who did not/could not fulfill the Mosaic Law, Samaritans, the poor, the sick and lepers.

 

Jesus would have been one of the workers no one hired.

He is still unwanted in the lives of many of his sisters and brothers.

 

But Jesus is also the landowner who says to many of us

expressing the generosity of God who acts not out of fairness or justice

but from the depths of grace:

“Though unwanted, I want you. You too go into my vineyard.”

 

20 September 2026