Love at the Eleventh Hour (25th Sunday Ordinary A)

Nothing is too late for this loving God.  His love and his grace are freely given to those who seek him even at the eleventh hour.  He is ready to offer his love just anytime.  To those who come at the last hour, he showers his underserved love just the same.

This loving God turns our world upside down.  We order our values and priorities this way; He shows us what is essential to life quite another way--oftentimes, the exact reversal of our human reckoning.  We establish consistent and obliging norms for our individual and communal acts; He intervenes in our lives beyond these norms we set.  In humility, then, we ought to listen to this God through his Prophet Isaiah:  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways... As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Is 55: 8-9). God’s ways are simply beyond us.

These words of the prophet in the first reading prepare us for the unpredictable God of the gospel today.  He is the landowner in the parable who hired labourers in his vineyard at five different intervals and paid all of them equally with the customary day’s wage.  In other words, those who came in early to work and those who came in at the last hour of the day received the same amount from him as their wage. 

Isn’t it unfair?  Our impeccable human sense of equity is tempted to say, “Yes, unfair! It is a complete disregard of commutative justice.” But we hesitate.  The parable invites us to ponder more deeply and come to a deeper insight into the free and loving acts of God.  Allow me to offer two points for our reflection:

First, God’s moment is not governed by chronos but is manifested in kairos.  Chronos and kairos are two helpful Greek concepts of time. Chronos is clock time. Calendar time.  Sequential time.  This helps us organize our lives well.  With a Rolex watch on our wrist, we can be precise with our time management... or so the advertisement goes.  We can quantify time and execute our plans by the hour from day one to the day we die.  With chronos, we have an accurate sense of who came early and who got in real late.  We even invented the Bundy clock to monitor and quantify work time.   Since we benefit so much from this time category we also take it for granted that God works within the same paradigm forgetting that He is eternal... timeless... hence beyond chronos. 

God’s actions in history are manifested in kairos which is use in the New Testament to mean “the appointed time in the purpose of God.”  It is any moment when God acts.  Freely.  Lovingly.  Not imprisoned by the rigidity of our time inventions.  If we come to think of it, the precision of Rolex time doesn’t matter much to the eternal God.  God’s only time is the one and lasting moment of the now.  The time that matters to him is every moment that his lost son or daughter finally comes home to accept his mercy and love.  It even doesn’t matter to him who came in early or late, who served him the longest or shortest.  He does not use the Bundy clock. All, including him who comes at the eleventh hour, receive the same grace He intends for his people. 

We have developed acute sense of chronos.  We have become time conscious in its chronological sense for our human purposes.  We even blow our tops when time is not observed as planned. But are we time conscious in the sense of kairos?  Can we go past the familiar tic-tac of the clock and recognize instead the glorious moments when God acts in our lives to accomplish his purpose?  Have we celebrated these precious moments in life when God bathed us with his grace?    

Second, God deals with us not with strict justice but with love.  If God were to use our human standard of justice in dealing with us sinners, who would survive?  Yet we expect God to be just.  While listening to the parable, what makes our eyebrows meet with disbelief is the part when the landowner gives the same wage for everyone.  We feel there’s lack of equity. Others have worked longer. How come those who worked for the last hour receive the same amount as those who worked the whole day? This smacks of injustice, so we think.  Again, we are invited to think deeper.  Justice is rendering whatever is due by right. Those who worked the whole day actually received what is due as agreed upon beforehand.  So, there isn’t a real justice problem here. The issue at hand is actually this: that those who worked in fewer hours received more than what they deserved.  The issue here is not of justice but of our sense of envy in the face of God’s generosity to those whom we believe are undeserving.  God’s action is beyond justice. God deals with us with love. And God’s love is gratuitous. God renders not just what is due by right but grants even what is undeserved!

The landowner in the parable asks, “Are you envious because I’m generous?”  Oftentimes we cannot believe that God still acts lovingly to those who do not deserve his love.  All too often we wish that God be the strict God of justice.   We want him to be like us—calculating and exacting.  But sorry, or shall I say, thank God, God’s ways are not our ways.

Again, I would like to say what I have said: Nothing is too late for this loving God.  His gratuitous love shines even more at the eleventh hour.  He is ready to offer his love just anytime.  To those who come at the last hour, he showers his underserved love just the same.