25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 24th September 2017)
God gives us all our needs – (Matthew 20:1-16)
Have the workers a point in this Sunday’s Gospel? It is easy to sympathise with the objections of the workers who have worked the long hours in the vineyard under very difficult circumstances. But when dealing with God we must remember that we are not dealing with economics, we are dealing with people.
The wage of one denarius was the acceptable wage for a day’s work. It was the amount needed to keep a family fed for one day. Anything less would have been pointless in the sense that it would not have covered the expenses for that day. The land owner understood what people needed to survive.
In God’s dealings with us he doesn’t treat us all the same. He loves each of us personally and understands that each has his or her own story. God sees what each one needs for their well-being. He isn’t interested in what we might claim to be fair or not. He sees deeper into each of our stories and sees how best to care for us.
At times it can seem very unfair. Why do some people suffer more than others and why do some people go through life with little problems or pressures? Why are some people born with a silver spoon in their mouths and others seems to have to battle just to keep going?
This Sunday’s Gospel asks us to trust in God and to realise that he knows what he is doing, He knows how best to care for people even when it all seems a bit unfair. He is fundamentally the one who is caring for us all.
Just like the workers in the Gospel we will have to wait until the last day to discover what God was really at. How he was actually caring for everyone’s needs.