Go Into the Vineyard

Sometimes, when people repent at the last minute, we can find ourselves a little resentful. They spent their entire lives doing what they wanted, and now, at the very end, they seem to get the red-carpet treatment into heaven.

On the other hand, someone might spend an entire life devoted to God and then, at the last minute, decide, “No, this isn’t for me.”

This problem is not new. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God challenges the way we think about his justice. A lifetime of sin does not prevent someone from turning back to God, but neither does a lifetime of righteousness make our final response to him irrelevant.

God does not imprison us in our past, but neither does he allow us to hide behind it. He takes seriously our decisions to turn toward him or away from him.

That should be a source of hope, but also a call to humility.

The psalmist asks God to remember his mercy, to teach him the right path, and to forgive the sins of his youth.

And I think we all know where he is coming from. There are not many people who have no regrets. We can probably all look back and see times when we chose ourselves over God and neighbor.

Yet the mercy we readily ask for ourselves can be surprisingly difficult to welcome when it is given to someone else. We want God to remember our struggles and overlook our failures, while we remember someone else’s failures and overlook their repentance.

The trouble, of course, is that we are often motivated primarily by love of ourselves. We want what we want. We want our sacrifices recognized, our efforts rewarded, and our place secured.

Saint Paul directs us toward something very different:

“Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory;

rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves.”

That is easy to say. It is much harder to do.

But that is precisely what Christ did. He humbled himself, taking on our humanity and entering into our suffering. He became one of us not because he had anything to gain, but because he loved us.

He made the love of God concrete by giving himself for us, even to the point of death on a cross.

His love was not merely spoken. It was lived.

Jesus then gives us a simple parable that brings us back to the question of our response to God.

A father asks his two sons to go work in his vineyard. One says yes, but does not go. The other says no, but later changes his mind and goes.

Talk is cheap, as they say.

The son who began by saying no ultimately obeyed his father. The son who began by saying yes ultimately failed to do what his father asked. What mattered was not simply what they said, but what they actually did.

At different times, most of us have probably been both sons.

We have resisted what God asks and later repented. We have also said yes to him in prayer, at Mass, or in moments of enthusiasm, only to discover that our actions did not match our words when obedience became difficult or inconvenient.

That means our past does not have to determine our future.

If we have said no to God through our sins, we can still repent, turn around, and go into the vineyard. But neither can we become complacent simply because we have said yes before.

Our yes to God must continue to become concrete in the way we live.

The Father calls each of us into his vineyard. He asks us to love him and to love our neighbor. And each of us must answer, first with our voice, but more importantly with our lives.

Saint Paul tells us what that answer should look like: putting aside selfishness and vainglory, humbling ourselves, and learning to regard the good of others before our own interests.

That might mean setting aside our plans to help someone. It might mean forgiving someone we would rather resent. It might even mean rejoicing when someone returns to God instead of complaining that they came too late.

This is a hard teaching. Humanly speaking, we cannot live it perfectly by our own strength. But through the gift of grace and the Holy Spirit, we can learn to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ, the perfect example of self-giving love.

So let us neither despair over our past refusals nor become complacent about our past obedience.

The Father is calling us today.

Do not act out of selfishness or vainglory.

Do not merely say yes to the Father.

Go into the vineyard.

Let your yes become something you live, and let all your actions be motivated by love.