Today’s Scriptures present us with a riddle and a parable. Jotham, the sole surviving son of Gideon, presents a riddle to the people of Shechem who have anointed Abimelech as their king after he had killed all the other sons of Gideon. Jotham alone survives. Suffice it to say that God does not look kindly on their choice. The riddle foretells their eventual destruction.
The Gospel tells us a familiar parable. In recent gospel readings, such as the feeding of the multitude with only five loaves and two fishes, we have seen a clear disproportion between what we can contribute and what God can do with our contribution. Today’s reading presents us also with a disproportion, but this time it is between what we can do and the reward offered for what we do. In both situations there is no one-to-one correspondence and today the Lord is telling us that the reward will never be less than promised and that we do not have to earn strictly our recompense.
The problem on our side in accepting such disproportion seems to be based upon a contract understanding of our relationship to God. In a contract, everything has to be clearly specified if it is going to hold, and that is why contracts include a fair amount of small print to cover all foreseeable eventualities. But God is calling us to a covenant relationship based on a spirit, not on a legally binding agreement. The moment we start looking at who is doing more than who, as the vineyard workers did, we are back to contract, to one-to-one correspondence. God, the master of the vineyard, thinks covenant, while the workers think contract.
The people of Shechem break their covenant relationship with God and worship Baal, something that would happen over and over again in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. The story of the vineyard workers reinforces the need to see our relationship with God in terms of the covenant God has made with us in Jesus. Jesus tells us: seek first the kingdom of God... within yourselves and let things flow from a covenant relationship. Never mind what others do or “how late they came to the vineyard.”
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator