Lectio Divina: A Meditation on the Gospel for Sunday

With the Gospel reading from the upcoming Sunday Mass as its principal source-text, each Lectio Divina (“Sacred Reading”) essay offers a prayerful meditation of the Sacred Scriptures—one which draws from the wealth of biblical literature, as well as the prayer life of the individual author.

It was a freshman humanities class in college, and the paper was finally due. But the professor, making some allusion to our unpreparedness, offered a class-wide extension—he wouldn’t collect any papers until next week. Perhaps he could see it in our faces, or maybe he did this every semester, but it was a welcome surprise for us. Or, at least, to many of us.

I remember well the protest of a young woman in the row behind me. This was hardly fair, she complained, to the responsible ones who had finished their papers on time! Shouldn’t there be some reward for being ready now, for those who weren’t asking for mercy?

Maybe it’s a pious mis-remembering, but I recall the teacher making an allusion then and there to the Gospel we hear this Sunday. “Are you envious because of my generosity?” Perhaps the tired, all-day workers in this parable would have felt much the same indignation as this young woman. Equal work, equal pay, so less work, less pay, right?

The point of the parable—the Lord’s lesson—is to prod us out of our meticulous ledger-making. If we sometimes feel this indignation when others get better than we think they deserve (a classic form of envy), consider these two remedies:

1. Put yourself in the other’s shoes. In other words, “love your neighbor as yourself.” A symptom of original sin is to be focused on our own advantage so much that we hate to see others getting something for free. Sure, maybe you are more hardworking than the next guy, but it doesn’t hurt you when his idleness isn’t held against him. When the other guy gets a free pass, I don’t lose anything but my “better-than-that-guy” vision of myself, which was rotten of me in the first place.

2. Remember that we don’t “earn” our reward from God in the way that someone earns a paycheck at the office. Sure, it is vital that we make some response to God’s call to us. But our response—the work we do—is such a little token compared to the magnitude of the gift. Imagine if you and a friend were in Space Force, being transferred to the moon base (your childhood dream). You stay up all night ready to go, and he gets a good night of sleep in the barracks. In the morning, you protest that you should be allowed to board first because you proved that you wanted it more. Maybe you did want it more, but does your restless night really get you to the moon any faster than his sweet dreams? No way. Christ crosses an infinite gap to come to us and call us to him, and that gap isn’t shorter just because one of us holds his hand out farther.

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Photo by Kim Gorga on Unsplash