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Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 24 September 2017


25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The parable about the vineyard owner who hires labourers at different points of the day to help tend and care for the vines is perhaps one that does puzzle us. The reason is of course that he does something no astute merchant would ever do, pay the same wage to everyone no matter how many hours they had worked that day. Now I’m aware that in some sense we can turn the parable around and say, since the vineyard represents the kingdom of heaven, God is opening a door of access and happiness to people of all different kinds, and the wage represents the unconditional love God has for each and everybody.

Well we can stop there and mediate on that passage and see if we feel that it speaks to us of the unconditional mercy of God, but something niggles me at any rate, there’s something not quite right with that analogy. So musing on this I thought to myself: ‘what is it that makes me annoyed with the story?’ because if I can tap into that I might find another way into the message Jesus is giving me.

It took a while, but as always it came through things happening around me. It was actually the mess we have made of the world and the terrible uncertainty and instability many people find themselves in, of climate change, of spectres of war dotted across our globe and also the nastiness that seems to permeate our media especially in the growing lack of civility in comments on blogs, Facebook and Twitter, particularly alas, amongst religious people who should know better.

I realized that life isn’t fair, and happiness is not a commodity we can demand, nor peace nor love, we have to work for it like those vineyard labourers.

So what is the problem you may ask? Covetousness and resentment leapt out at me. We covet so much, we want things, we demand things and in that innate selfishness we resent those who have what we want or who we perceive as being better off than ourselves. Just do a self rain check and see if you haven’t got those things hidden in you. I have!

The scandal of this parable, and it is a true scandal in the sense of our stumbling block, is that we cannot force God to do what we want. In Baptism in Confirmation and in that constant reception of the Holy Eucharist we are affirming that unbreakable (at least from God’s side) new Covenant. Grace, mercy and love are freely given; all are equal in Gods sight even if we judge them not to be so. Now that’s something to pray about and think on isn’t it?


The Vineyard. A Poem by Rudyard Kipling. c 1919.

At the eleventh hour he came,
But his wages were the same
As ours who all day long had trod
The wine-press of the Wrath of God.

When he shouldered through the lines
Of our cropped and mangled vines,
His unjaded eye could scan
How each hour had marked its man.

(Children of the morning-tide
With the hosts of noon died,
And our noon contingents lay
Dead with twilight's spent array.)

Since his back had felt no load,
Virtue still in him abode;
So he swiftly made his own
Those last spoils we had not won.

We went home delivered thence,
Grudging him no recompense
Till he portioned praise of blame
To our works before he came.

Till he showed us for our good--
Deaf to mirth, and blind to scorn--
How we might have best withstood
Burdens that he had not born!



Fr Robin is an Eastern Rite Catholic Chaplain for Melkites in the UK. He is also an Ecumenical Canon of Christ Church, Oxford

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