Are we the Pharisees of today?

September 24, 2023

The parable that Jesus recounts in today’s Gospel troubles many of us.  Isn’t it completely unfair that those who worked so little were treated on par with those who worked the whole day in the heat.  And trying to justify this perceived ‘unfairness’ by quoting the line found in the first reading:  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord”, may also not satisfy us. Of course there is truth in that teaching too, as I have repeatedly stressed in many of my reflections, namely that we do have to re-think our understanding of how God works.  But still, perhaps we can reflect more on this parable.

First of all, let us remember that parables are not meant to be interpreted beyond the lesson intended, just like it would be wrong to interpret the Parable of the Last Judgement as a prophecy of a final common judgement day when God will judge everybody. Having said that, we might be aware that there are other parables and teachings of Jesus that could be considered to go along with the parable in today’s Gospel, in that they go along parallel or similar lines. We have the story of the widow’s mite, where Jesus teaches that the poor widow’s tiny offering was greater than that of all the rich people who put so much gold in the temple treasury. Which of course might make us question why people who give large donations to the Church are given so much more importance than those who offer their widow’s mite.  Or the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, and the fact that the Pharisee who has spent all his life fulfilling the law is put down by Jesus as compared to the publican who has done much wrong but is now repentant.  Or the story of the elder son in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who complains that his father never once had a celebration for him but was quite happy to have one for his prodigal brother who had wasted his inheritance in an indulgent life. All these and many other stories and teachings in the Gospels seem to go together with Jesus’ teaching that the tax collectors (those oppressive collectors of tax) and prostitutes (Matthew 21:31–32) will enter the kingdom of heaven before all the ostensibly  religious people who avidly follow the law, and that the last will be first and the first last.

So obviously this is a general theme in Jesus’ teachings.  It is like a musical phrase that repeats itself with slight variations and nuances but comes up repeatedly in a musical composition, and around which the rest of the musical  composition is built.

And if it is a refrain that punctuates Jesus’ teaching throughout his missionary years, we need to see each of the times this teaching bursts forth within the context of those individual uses of the refrain. It is only within such contexts that we can find the meanings that Jesus intended. But beyond those individual contexts, we also have to look at the context of Jesus’ entire life to understand this differently nuanced and yet repeated theme in Jesus’ teachings.  

Coming back to trying to understand the parable in today’s Gospel, we can note that when Jesus bursts on the itinerant preacher scene, we already have John the Baptist proclaiming to the Jews that they need to ‘repent’, which means to turn back, to change, from the path they have been following.  But John’s call to repentance was built around the breaking of the Ten Commandments and the Jews’ failure to follow them. And that is how most of us normally judge the religiousness of others, - based on whether they keep the religious laws of our Church or whichever other religion we belong to.

But when Jesus came he sensed a far far greater and more insidious evil, namely that religion itself was being subverted, so that instead of religion becoming a means of liberation, it had become a means of enslavement (see my reflection, Has Religion become a burden, July 9, 2023). What Jesus was terribly upset and angry about was that the very  upholders of religion (the priests, the Pharisees, the Scribes etc) had destroyed religion itself.  Something that was meant to be a loving relationship with an Abba Father, had been substituted by a religion of laws.  So the Gospels tell us that Jesus calls them  hypocrites and whitened sepulchers (i.e. like tombs looking white and sparkly on the outside but are filled with rottenness within) even though they dutifully fulfilled the letter of the Jewish law.  Therefore, according to Jesus, these who claimed to be the upholders of the law all their lives (worked the whole day as it were) were actually not any better and perhaps even worse than the prostitutes and tax collectors who came in ‘late’ but who genuinely repented, and who were just grateful that they were accepted by the Master (allowed to work in the vineyard, however late they came in).  And so Jesus repeatedly proclaims that  the last or least will be first and the first or the greatest would be last.

We too need to ask ourselves who is truly religious.  We glibly use the term ‘practising Catholics/Christians’ and generally mean by that those who go to Church regularly and fulfil all the rules of the  institutional Church.  But is that a valid criterion?  

We need to ask ourselves, what is our criterion of “Christian-ness’, because obviously Jesus’ parable was not about how we should pay our workers, but about what it means to be truly faithful to God.

A friend of mine recently wrote to me bemoaning what he called the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement in the USA which is supported by many Catholics.  He pointed out that pro-life stalwarts did not speak up when black people were killed by police officers in full public glare for no valid reason, or when they support the right of Americans to own guns, even assault guns, and so keep completely quiet even when a gunman walks into a school and kills many children. As he concluded: “No, they've decided that the only ‘life’ that is sacred is of the unborn.”

In a similar manner, in a recent interview in September 2023, Pope Francis challenged our way of judging what is sinful, when he said: “What I don't like at all, in general, is that we look at the so-called 'sin of the flesh' with a magnifying glass. If you exploited workers, if you lied or cheated, it didn't matter, and instead (all that is) relevant were the sins below the waist”. So too, many of us would judge those who have sex before marriage, those who choose to live with another of the same sex,  or take recourse to abortion, and so on and so forth, more harshly than we would judge ourselves who might exploit those who work for us, by paying them below minimum wages or take advantage of their helplessness, so long as we fulfil the ‘duties’ of a Catholic - like participating in the Sacraments as prescribed by the Church, contributing to the Church and to charity, remaining faithful to our marriage vows, etc etc.  Perhaps if we had told Jesus that we do all these Catholic duties, he might have said to us as he did before: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former”.(Mathew 23:23) The reference Jesus makes was to how carefully they kept the Jewish law of tithing, so much so that they even carefully counted all the leaves on their mint plant, or cumin, or dill to ensure that they gave one-tenth of each of them to God, but they forgot the far more important duties that God was calling them to do.

So, we really need to ask ourselves:  Who really is a practicing Christian?  Who are the ‘prostitutes’ and ‘publicans’ in our lives whom we condemn, and who may in fact enter the kingdom before us?

First Reading: Isaiah 55: 6-9

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way and the unrighteous (unjust) their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

 

Second Reading: Philippians 1: 20c-24, 27a

Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.  For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.  If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know!  I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far;  but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.

 

Gospel: Matthew 20: 1-16a

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.  After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace,  and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’  When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received a denarius.  Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius.  And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’  But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.  Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’  So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”