“My friend, I am not cheating you.
Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?
Take what is yours and go.
What if I wish to give this last one the same as you?
Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?
Are you envious because I am generous?”

The following is Fr. Dennis’ homily from Sunday Mass on September 20th.

The Gospel was the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.

What makes this Sunday’s parable work is that God, in the person of the landowner, precipitates a crisis. Nothing much would have happened if the landowner had followed the usual course, paying the full-day laborers first and then, in turn, the workers who came later. Having received the agreed upon wage, the first group would have left the vineyard content that they had been treated fairly. They got what was coming to them. But instead, the landowner reverses the expected order and pays the latecomers first, giving them the full daily wage. Not surprisingly, those hired in the morning cry foul that these others, who were spared the searing heat of the midday sun, not to say the weariness of a full day’s work, were given the same wages.

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