REWARD BEYOND COMPREHENSION

SUNDAY, TWENTY FIFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Isa 55:6-9; Ps 145:2-3,8-9,17-18; Phil 1:20-24,27; Mt 20:1-16

The Reward of Eternal Life

God made us in his image and willed from all eternity to bless us with his own life. The divine gift would make us like God. This was the decision of the Triune God from the very beginning, when he said in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” Making man in divine image means giving him free will, which arises from the rationality of our nature. Our rationality demands that we freely choose to be like God. To be truly free to make the decision, man needs the enlightenment of knowledge of God, which comes from the Word of God. Man’s knowledge of God requires time to engage with the Word. But the Word is God. Man needs to be guided to divine knowledge through creation, which manifests God’s glory and his divine attributes. For this reason, man needs to work in God’s vineyard to discover himself through knowledge of creatures and be open to God’s life. The earthly creation was God’s vineyard before the fall. The fall corrupted man and the visible creation, necessitating a new vineyard furnished with God’s grace for man to attain divine end. The Church of God is this new vineyard of the Lord.

The necessity of our employment in the vineyard of the Lord is already clear from our previous reflections, especially last week’s reflections. We presented the Church as a privileged ambience of grace, conducive to the germination of divine life in us, which is contained in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The existence of sin in the world made it unfit to be the vineyard of God. Because sin is basically disobedience to the will of God, its abundance in the world causes darkness, which makes the will of God invisible to people. God expressly states the divergence between his divine will and human will through Isaiah. “Let the wicked man abandon his way, the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn back to the Lord who will take pity on him, to our God who is rich in forgiving; for my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways—it is the Lord who speaks.” To live and not enter the new vineyard of the Lord is to be deprived of the knowledge of God and his will for us, which is our eternal life. The people of Israel were a type of the Church as the vineyard of the Lord. God gave them the Law and the Prophets to lead them to knowledge of God’s will and promise of eternal life offered in Jesus Christ. Israel served to awaken men’s desire for God’s life and presence.

The desire for God’s life and presence is a desire to know and do the will of God. This desire characterises all those who seek to be hired for the day’s labour. God himself seeks such labourers. “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner going out at daybreak to hire workers for his vineyard.” Whenever and wherever he finds anyone who hungers to work and earn the day’s salary, he brings such into his vineyard. “He made an agreement with the workers for one denarius a day, and sent them to his vineyard. Going out at about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace and said to them, “You go to my vineyard too, and I will give you a fair wage.” So they went. At about the sixth hour and again at about the ninth hour, he went out and did the same.” The world is like a marketplace where many things are taking place in a confused manner. Many who seek to know and do the will of God cannot be gainfully employed for eternal life in this world; they must be in the vineyard of the Lord. We all have limited time in the world to earn our eternity with God. “Then at about the eleventh hour he went out and found more men standing round, and he said to them, “Why have you been standing here idle all day?” “Because no one has hired us,” they answered. He said to them, “You go into my vineyard too.”

It is only in the vineyard of the Lord, the Church of Jesus Christ, that we know the will of God and work according to it, and earn eternal reward. God rewards all those who work according to his will with his own life—eternal life. He gives us a wage or reward that is adequate for our eternal day. We call it a wage or reward, not because we merit it, but to show that we receive the divine life only when we harmonise our wills with God’s. Our cooperation with divine grace, which is abundant in the Church, is rewarded. Saint Paul expresses this perfection in his letter to the Philippians. “Christ will be glorified in my body, whether by my life or by my death. Life to me, of course, is Christ, but then death would bring me something more; but then again, if living in this body means doing work which is having good results—I do not know what I should choose.” For Paul, living in the body means continuous work in the vineyard of the Lord; departing the mortal realm means receiving his reward in Jesus Christ, which is eternal life in heaven.

Therefore, all the labourers in the vineyard of the Lord receive the wage—one denarius—adequate for the day of eternity with God. Our God is just and generous with us. To comprehend the generosity of God, our focus should be on the divine wage, divine life, which is a mystery beyond our comprehension, and not on what others have received. “The Lord is just in all his ways and loving in all his deeds. He is close to all who call him, who call on him from their hearts.” Indeed, the generous souls have started the enjoyment of their eternal reward, even while still at work in the vineyard. To enjoy this foretaste of heavenly reward, Paul advises us: “Avoid anything in your everyday lives that would be unworthy of the gospel of Christ.” In other words, we are to give ourselves to the work in the vineyard as he did.

Let us pray: O God, who founded all the commands of your sacred Law upon love of you and of our neighbour, grant that, by keeping your precepts, we may merit to attain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.