Workers’ Sunday: God keeps working, so must we!
Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a; Matthew 20:1-16a
Our God is a WORKER God! Whether it be the question of the Creation accounts in Genesis, the salvation of humanity under Noah, the covenants with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or the liberation from slavery in Egypt and freedom from Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, respectively, God keeps working. In Jesus Christ, we see God’s spectacular work—suffering, death and resurrection—the work of salvation! Apart from the busy schedule God has for corporate human needs, as individuals, we are keeping him extremely busy everyday and super-busy on Sundays: there is not an idle moment for God. If God is busy working always, our readings this Sunday invite us to keep busy doing good just like our busy God is doing.
“Seek the Lord while he may be found, call him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:7), from our first reading, has to be understood in the Hebrew sense and not from the English language. For the biblical Jew, the “knowledge of God” is not what one has in one’s brains, but what one does; for them, KNOWLEDGE IS ACTION: “Blessed is the man who WALKS not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way [THEORIES] of sinners, nor sits in the seat [AUTHORITY] of scoffers; but his delight is in the law [WAY] of the Lord, and on his law [PATH] he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:1-2). This is the example of knowledge as action. The one who knows God is the one who WORKS to conform his life to God’s commandments. “Seek the Lord” and “call him” are reminders to us to practice God’s commandments, to prove with one’s life that one is a faithful servant of God. Isaiah’s quest is a MORAL WORK, to put into action the knowledge of the Lord. Little wonder the next verse says: “Let the scoundrel forsake his way [BEHAVIOR OR MANNER OF LIFE], and the wicked his thoughts [FEEDERS OR SOURCES OF HIS WICKEDNESS]” (Isaiah 55:7): these practical steps amount to “seeking” and “calling” on God.
God is measured by what he does, by his actions. Correspondingly, God’s children must be known by what they do. For God’s children, their morality is the clearest way by which they prove their knowledge of God. “Morality” is not the question of the avoidance of sin alone, it is the power and the display of love, service and compassion (virtuous acts) that animate human relationships. Isaiah takes up this definition of morality, in our first reading, when he ties it to God’s love and compassion: “Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked his thoughts; let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving” (Isaiah 55:7). It is the mercy of God and his forgiveness that the human person must imitate as practical morality or good works.
In the language of a parable, our gospel reading teaches us, first, that God is a WORKER and, second, how he WORKS. God is compared to a farmer who needed laborers to work on his farm. First, as a worker, he goes out to the job-market to hire laborers for his farm. Since he hires many laborers at different times, he must have made several journeys to and fro the job-market. This is a worker who works by seeking and employing laborers for his farm. It also means that his farm is a large one for him to need as many workers as he could find. Second, the only condition he needs in laborers is the readiness to work, because he employed all those who were ready to work, those who showed their readiness to work by presenting themselves at the job-market. This is our WORKER God!
We need to extrapolate our gospel reading for its message to sync with our reality. God is the farm owner and the earth we dwell on is his farm. Human beings are shown as God’s potential workers, those whose responsibility it is to make the WILL OF GOD to be done on earth as it is in heaven. According to our gospel, those who sought work presented themselves at the job market; they got employed at different hours of the day and were sent to work on the farm. For you and I, God invites us to become co-workers with him. Just like the parable, the readiness to work matters much for God, so he kept returning and hiring those he found jobless! He does the same with every generation including ours. Today, it is our turn to present ourselves at the job-market as ready and willing workers of righteousness. We already know our reward from the gospel reading—heaven!
On the one hand, God puts to work, all those ready to work; on the other, all those who were taken to the farm proved their worth by working hard. You and I, how do we fare? Some of us have been Christians for a century, some just last Easter: what good works do have to show for our Christianity? Of course, we need to remember the difference, in the gospel, of the number of hours of labor they each put in. But that was not a problem for God: to all the workers who worked hard, God gave them pass mark, no matter the number of hours for which they worked: they all received the same pay—Heaven! This is the lesson—no one comes late to heaven or starts late working for heaven! The workers who complained of injustice understand payment in monetary terms, instead of eternal life. To make it to heaven is what matters, for there are no superior or inferior parts of heaven—heaven is heaven!
For now, our earth is God’s farmland and we are his potential laborers. Our job/work is to replete the earth with truth, justice, peace, love, kindness, etc. “Workers’ Sunday” eschews laziness and considers laziness a capital sin. If our society today is replete with sin, it is not surprising because we have imbibed the culture of laziness. Laziness is a sure recipe for Hell of Fires, the opposite of Heaven. Anyone who is lazy is a sinner because our God is a worker and not a sloth. The idea of “workers’ Sunday” is to promote hard work and industry. A worker produces fruits, a sloth is fruitless. On earth today, lazy people and those who work the least are richer than hard working people: either they steal from workers (capitalist/market economy) or they depend on others for their survival (irresponsible welfare). This is the idea most Christians have extended to God’s commandments: we memorize God’s commandments in order to pass sacramental examinations and have theological degrees but remain morally bankrupt—no good works!
Our second reading teaches us what it means to be a human being. To be human is to be a worker; to be a Christian is to be a hard moral worker. Like the workers on the farm in our gospel reading, Paul makes himself a willing worker, in our second reading: “If I go on living in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me” (Philippians 1:21). Human life, for Paul, is a life of labor or hard work; that is, laboring for the good news or working out one’s salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12b). To be alive is to be offered an opportunity to do good, to show Christian practical morality in the full view of all peoples.
Morality is what shows our identity as God’s children. Paul puts it this way: “Be citizens (politeuesthe) worthy of the gospel of Christ”. We lose our citizenship or heaven (Phil 3:20) and identity as God’s children (Phil 2:15), when our moral lives do not conform to God’s commandments and the teachings of Christianity. This is an instance of laziness, because a lazy person hates work! You and I are workers of righteousness, if our lifestyles prove it. Our God is a worker, let us keep up our work of moral transformation of ourselves and our world!
Assignment for the Week:
Display your moral work and rectitude this week through an act of charity to a known enemy of yours; if you have no enemies, do something good for any needy person.