A reflection on Matthew 20:1-16a for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A.
We usually hear the parable of the laborers in the vineyard from the point of view of the people who worked all day. They are tired, hot, and angry, and I have to admit that their complaint makes perfect sense to me.
But lately I have been thinking about the people who were still standing in the marketplace late in the afternoon.
Imagine waiting there all day while employer after employer comes and goes. Younger workers are chosen, stronger workers, perhaps those with better connections or a better reputation. Morning passes into noon, noon into afternoon, and still no one asks for you.
By five o’clock, perhaps you have stopped expecting much. You may not even be hoping for a full day’s wage anymore; perhaps you simply want someone to notice that you are still there.
Then the landowner comes back.
There is something deeply moving to me about that. He does not decide that the late hour makes the remaining workers irrelevant. He goes out again, finds them still waiting, and asks them why they have been standing there all day.
Their answer is simple: “Because no one has hired us.”
I wonder how many people could say something similar about the Church.
No one has asked us. No one has made room for us. No one has trusted our gifts. No one has really listened.
Women know something about this. Many have given their lives to the Church, taught its children, cared for its sick, studied theology, led ministries, held parishes together, and carried communities through difficult years, while still being reminded in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that certain doors remain closed to them.
Others stand at the edge for different reasons. Divorced and remarried Catholics may wonder where they belong. LGBTQ Catholics may ask whether welcome is real or merely conditional. Young adults who have drifted away may assume no one wants to hear what drove them away in the first place.
Older people, too, can find themselves overlooked. In a culture that prizes youth and speed, experience can become invisible surprisingly quickly, even though wisdom often comes slowly and at considerable cost.
The Gospel gives us a landowner who keeps going back out.
Morning. Noon. Afternoon. Even at five o’clock.
There is something wonderfully stubborn about that image of God. God seems unwilling to accept that anyone is too late, too unwanted, too complicated, or too far outside the respectable boundaries of the vineyard.
That is where the reading from Isaiah speaks so beautifully alongside Matthew: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” We count hours, compare effort, measure contribution, and quietly rank who belongs where.
God sees people.
That can be unsettling, because most of us are more comfortable with systems we can understand. We like effort to be rewarded, rules to be clear, and outcomes to make sense.
Grace is not always tidy.
The workers who came late did not receive generosity because they had earned it. They received it because the landowner chose to be generous.
Perhaps that is what is hardest about grace: it refuses to stay inside the boundaries we draw for it.
The Church can be very good at deciding who has arrived early enough, served long enough, believed correctly enough, or lived cleanly enough to belong at the center. Yet the Gospel keeps showing us a God who walks back toward the edges.
Again and again, God goes looking for the people still standing there.
I find that both comforting and challenging. Comforting, because there are times when any of us can feel overlooked, left behind, or spiritually late to the vineyard.
Challenging, because if this is how God behaves, then the Church must ask whether we are behaving the same way.
Are we going back out? Are we noticing the people who have been waiting a long time to be invited in? Are we listening to those who have concluded, perhaps with good reason, that no one really wants them?
The parable is usually described as being about generosity. I think it is also about attention.
The landowner notices the ones who are still there.
Perhaps that is one of the holiest things we can do for another person: notice them before deciding what they deserve.
And perhaps that is the grace of the vineyard.
God comes back at five o’clock.
God comes back for the people everyone else has passed by.
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