Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Matthew 20, 1-16

I’d like to borrow a very good story from Miguel de Umanumo, a Spanish philosopher and novelist from the 20th century about the origin of hell. The setting was at the gates of heaven. There were a lot of people waiting to be admitted. Some were rather confident, some were rather nervous, some were feeling quite hopeless whether they would be admitted in heaven or not. Then almost suddenly, there was an angel who was coming from heaven. The angel had awesome news coming from inside heaven. The angel said, “God admits everybody inside!” This news spread like wildfire to all the people who are waiting outside the gates. And while a lot of people were celebrating this fact, a number of people rebelled against this news. They can’t accept that they’ll share heaven with sinners. And with this, hell was created, to accommodate these people who can’t accept the lavish generosity and graciousness of God.

The gospel for today is about who God is and how he can be very generous to his children. At first glance, we tend to side with the first workers. They are the ones who worked from early in the morning and finished late in the afternoon and they only got the usual daily wage. While those who worked for barely an hour were given the same daily wage. For us, would it be just that the owner of the vineyard give those who worked the whole day a bit more, since he has given those who worked one hour the same wage? Before we grumble in protest over what seemed to be some injustice done by the landowner, if we have listened carefully to the gospel we should note one little detail that made the difference of the whole story. For the first batch of workers, they have agreed on the usual daily wage. But for the next batches of workers, the landowner said, “I will give you what is just.” So it was only with the first batch of workers that they had an agreement, and for the rest, it depends on the generosity of the landowner.

If you think that the sins that would send us to hell are lust, murder, gluttony, we maybe wrong. I think it is envy that would send us to hell. Jesus wanted to point out to the Pharisees and the scribes this tendency to be envious of our neighbour. Because we think that heaven would only admit people who have lived a life of holiness and wouldn’t accept the possibility that even hardened sinners who only asked for forgiveness at their deathbed would be sharing heaven with them.

In the gospel, Jesus is actually making a description on what our heavenly Father is. For many of us, we think that admission to heaven is a reward that we must work for. And for many Jews, especially the Pharisees and scribes, admission to heaven is based on one’s faithfulness of the law. They, and sometimes even we, think that we can work our way to heaven. And while our heavenly Father appreciates this, we sometimes forget the admission to heaven is based on the generosity of the heavenly Father. While we do believe that good works are important because it is the manifestation of our faith, it is still the grace that God provides that leads us to eternal life.
Let this gospel for today remind us that instead of looking only at our good works and disregarding the efforts of our brothers and sisters or even worse, we think that our heavenly Father could not possibly admit people who are “less holy than us”. This is the attitude of the Pharisees that Jesus wanted to get rid of.

Our attitude should be of welcoming and happiness. We should experience joy if any of our brothers or sisters has received any grace or blessing from God instead of being envious of them. We should stop making assumptions that there are certain people who are destined to hell and can’t be saved. Let us remember that it is the prerogative of our generous God to decide with whom he wants to share his kingdom. What we should do is to be happy because we have a lavishly gracious and generous God!