“CHRIST: LABOURER AND FRUIT”
Saint Matthew 20: 1-16
Septuagesima: 28 January Anno Domini 2018
Father Jay Watson SSP
The classroom, boardroom, amphitheater, lecture hall, sports arena, or for that matter the resort cabin on the lake, are not pictures or “types” of heaven. And they may well be, if not used in a ministerial way for The Word of God, only pitstops of mammon on the road to hell.
Even the small country marketplace in preindustrial Judea is not “where it’s at.” It too in Christ’s parable is an anteroom to perdition; damnation.
Heaven, i.e. to be in the presence of The Lord God and to behold the beatific vision of love and peace in the face of The God/Man Christ Jesus, is to be in His vineyard. This grove of grace is nonother than the garden of His gifts forever and ever. Gifts cannot be earned they are simply given from the heart of the giver. One cannot choose to be born. One cannot decide to be hired. The activity of selection, adoption, inclusion, and freedom for a slave, a prisoner, a head on the chopping block or a criminal about to be nailed onto a cross, comes only from the Mercy of The Master.
The men did not become “workers” until they were hired by the householder. They were passive. They were dead without sustenance.
Rather than parse all the seeming differences between the various shifts of labourers, when exactly they were “hired” and how long, how many hours, they “worked”—“borne the burden and heat of the day” Jesus makes His words, His point, clear. He speaks in His Law to your sinful self: “Augsburgers…I do thee no wrong.” Stop your jealousy, envying, bitterness towards those you think have harmed you (and those who HAVE harmed you). Cease your small-hearted, Midas-like hoarding of your gifts and your stinginess in giving your works of love to God and neighbor as abundantly as you have been loved and given to by God.
Place into the vineyard of God by Jesus you are “laborers” like the “12” were workers. The Disciples and the Apostles, like the Prophets, Kings, and Patriarchs before them, did not in fact work but rather guarded, protected, and Gospelled, the gifts of Salvation that had been bestowed upon them by God’s Grace—free and boundless. You like they, like the parables’ labourers, simply “work” the new-found status that you have been chosen for. Chosen by the Chooser—The Messiah. This vineyard is the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation. The Church is The Lord’s Bride. To be one with Him means to be that Church: period. The Church is his vineyard, but He is the vineyard—He is the Vine—you are His branches. Jesus is the soil, He is Eden, both garden and gardener. You are His fruits by Him giving you The Fruit of Redemption and Eternity by giving you Himself.
It’s not about working longer hours, bringing in more bushel-baskets of “grapes” or doing more labor under the sun. All of this has been done by the householder…it’s His house, His kingdom, Church, family, flock, Bride, Church, and Vineyard.
Jesus has hired you by predestinating you to be His own. Period. It’s done. It’s finished. But Christ did not do this in abstract but only through His Person and Work, ALONE, which He gives you through His Word and Sacraments, ALONE.
The soil of the vineyard was worked by Christ alone for His entire visible life from conception to Ascension. His perfect obedience to His Father’s Holy Law was backbreaking and arduous and difficult to His humanity. He was hungry, thirsty, and tired. His muscles were sore and He was dirty and sweaty and exhausted for all you who think you’ve borne the brunt as compared to others. No, We are all those hired at the eleventh hour. There is not one of us who does good, no not one. We are all unfaithful (from time to time, daily in thought, word, and deed) and wasteful and unproductive. But you are not chosen to “produce” but to simply do what vineyard “workers” do. Be about you Father’s business. And when you’re “written up” for your failings, repent and be forgiven. The harvest has already been brought in by Jesus. He is the Grape and He was beaten, mashed, squeezed, and bruised. He produced the juice—The Blood. His flesh was discolored and cast away, aside, into the ground. But He rose again for you after His work.
Jesus took what was His, Life and Light and Communion with The Father and The Spirit and gave it all the last—the lost, dead, and condemned—you. He is Good. He is God. You the last are now the first; the first fruits of all those buried by + Baptism into His death. Raised again to immortality In Him just like Jairus’ daughter. You too are now hungry. And this day He again feeds you. You are few, but you are chosen
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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