Most of us keep a ledger with God, and we’d be embarrassed to see it printed. Decades of Sunday Mass, tithes paid, kids raised in the faith, the fish fry worked every Lent. Then the man who spent his whole life ignoring God makes a good confession on his deathbed, and something in us tightens. We’d agree out loud that he should be forgiven. Underneath, we feel that we should get more. That reflex is the whole subject of today’s readings, and Jesus doesn’t treat it as a small thing. He puts the words in the mouth of a landowner and asks the men who worked all day, “Do you begrudge my generosity?” The Greek is blunter: is your eye evil because I am good?
Isaiah had already answered the question 7 centuries earlier. “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” We usually read that as a line about God’s mystery in general, and it is. But in Isaiah 55 it is a line about mercy. The Lord who “will abundantly pardon” is telling a people that his arithmetic is nothing like theirs.
Today the Church also remembers Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and their companions, the Korean martyrs. Korea is the one place on earth where the Church was founded by laymen who read some books and baptized each other, and where 4,000 Catholics waited a dozen years before a single priest arrived. If anyone came to the vineyard at the eleventh hour, it was them. So the question for you and me this Sunday is a hard one. When God pays the latecomers in full, whose side are you on?
The Readings
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 his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither 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.
Gospel: Matthew 20:1-16a
For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the market place; and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing; and he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’ And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his steward, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ And when those hired about the eleventh hour 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 on receiving it they grumbled at the householder, 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 as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So the last will be first, and the first last.
Scriptural Analysis
Isaiah 55 closes the great consolation of chapters 40 through 55, addressed to Israel in exile. The Navarre commentary reads it as an epilogue that gathers up everything before it: an invitation to a covenant banquet (vv. 1-3) recalling the meal on Sinai (Exodus 24:5-11), the renewal of the promises to David (vv. 4-5), the transcendence of a God untouched by the sins of men (vv. 8-9), and a word that does what it says (vv. 10-11). Originally it summoned the exiles in Babylon to come home. The Church has always read it as a summons to everyone, which is why verses 1 through 11 are proclaimed at the Easter Vigil. [1]
Our four verses are the call to conversion inside that summons. To go back to their homeland, the Navarre editors note, the exiles must first go back to God. “Seek the Lord while he may be found.” The Hebrew verb is darash (dah-RASH), the word for consulting an oracle or searching something out on purpose. And the reason they can search with any confidence is in verse 7: the Lord “will abundantly pardon.” The Hebrew is yarbeh lisloach (yar-BEH lis-LO-akh), literally “he will multiply to forgive,” and the Vulgate kept the sense with multus est ad ignoscendum, he is much given to pardoning. The call to repent rests entirely on the goodness of the one being returned to. [2]
Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote a commentary on Isaiah as a young bachelor of theology, and his treatment of these verses is a small masterpiece of order. First the counsel: seek the Lord while he may be found, which Thomas glosses as “before adversity or death comes,” with Proverbs behind it, “they shall rise in the morning, and shall not find me” (Proverbs 1:28). Then the manner: the wicked, who sins against God, forsakes his way; the unjust man, who sins against his neighbor, forsakes his thoughts. Then the fruit, which is mercy. And then, in verse 8, Thomas says the prophet “excludes the obstacle to mercy.” That is what “my thoughts are not your thoughts” is doing here. Thomas paraphrases it: “you are wicked, I am loving; you think of vengeance, I think of mercy.” [3] The gap between heaven and earth in verse 9 is the gap between how we would settle accounts and how God does. The Navarre editors add that Paul echoes verse 8 when he cries out at the depth of God’s wisdom (Romans 11:33), and that the verse reminds us “just how narrow-minded we can be and how we can fail even to imagine the great things that God has in store for us.” [4]
Hold that thought about narrow-mindedness. Matthew is about to show you what it looks like on a payday.
The parable comes right after Peter’s question about what the disciples will get for having left everything (Matthew 19:27). Jesus promised them a hundredfold and then added the line the parable exists to explain: “many that are first will be last, and the last first” (Matthew 19:30). The same saying closes the story (Matthew 20:16), so the parable sits inside a frame, and Daniel Harrington notes that the one real point of contact between frame and story is the order of payment, which the plot needs anyway: paid first, the dawn men would have gone home never knowing what the others got. [5]
The setting is an estate at harvest. The landowner goes out himself at dawn and agrees with the first group on a denarius, the Roman silver coin that was the going rate in Palestine for a day of manual labor. He goes out again at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, roughly 9:00, noon, and 3:00, and hires more men on “whatever is right.” At the eleventh hour, 5:00, he finds men still standing there and hires them too. [6] The Torah required day laborers to be paid before sundown (Deuteronomy 24:14-15; Leviticus 19:13), so evening brings the steward with the money, and the last are paid first. [7]
The vineyard is Israel, from Isaiah’s song of the vineyard (Isaiah 5:1-7) and Jeremiah’s lament over the shepherds who destroyed it (Jeremiah 12:10), and Harrington adds that in Matthew’s own vocabulary the harvest is the last judgment (Matthew 13:39). A landowner who keeps needing more hands is a landowner whose harvest is close. [8] Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri survey the readings: a story about the final reversal of first and last, a summary of salvation history in which Israel labored for generations and the Gentiles arrived in the messianic age, and a lesson about conversion at different stages of life. Their own reading is the second: the Gentiles placed on an equal footing with the Jews as members of God’s people, which is exactly the complaint in verse 12, “you have made them equal to us.” [9]
Then the payment, and the grumbling. The 5:00 men expected a twelfth of a denarius and got the whole coin. The dawn men then expected more, and got what they’d agreed to. Mitch and Sri put it in arithmetic: the latecomers’ coin was “eleven-twelfths pure, unearned gift.” [10] The landowner answers one of the complainers as “Friend,” and Harrington observes that all three times Matthew uses that address (Matthew 22:12; 26:50) the person addressed is in the wrong. [11] But notice what the landowner actually says. “I am doing you no wrong.” He kept the contract. Justice was satisfied with the first group, and justice is never violated when a man who has met his obligations chooses to be generous to someone else. That distinction matters, because the Church has never read this parable as permission to underpay anyone. Leo XIII wrote that “to defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.” [12] The parable presupposes that. The full-day men were paid in full. Their trouble was with what the others got.
“Is your eye evil because I am good?” The evil eye is a Semitic idiom for envy, the same one Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:23), and Mitch and Sri draw a line worth memorizing. Jealousy wants what another person has. Envy is upset that another person has it at all, and Scripture traces envy to the devil himself (Wisdom 2:24). [13] Saint Thomas, in his commentary on Matthew, puts the definition in one sentence: the man is properly called evil “who sorrows over goodness.” And he answers the objection the grumblers are really making, that God plays favorites. There is no acceptance of persons, Thomas says, in what is given out of mercy. A magistrate can only pay according to merit; a king can give without it. God, who is Lord of all, does what he wills with what is his. [14]
The Fathers in the Catena Aurea read the hours two ways, and Saint Gregory the Great gives both. On the scale of history, morning is Adam to Noah, the middle hours run from Noah through Moses to Christ, and the eleventh hour is the calling of the Gentiles, “who through so many ages of the world had neglected to labor for their living.” When they say “no man hath hired us,” Gregory hears them saying that no patriarch or prophet had ever come to them. On the scale of one life, morning is childhood and the eleventh hour is “that age which is called decrepit.” Even these the master calls, Gregory says, and often rewards them first, since they leave the body for the kingdom before those called in childhood. [15] Saint Jerome looks at the denarius and asks what more the grumblers could want: the coin bears the image of the king, so what they received is the image and likeness of God. “It is not that thou shouldest have more, but that another should have less that thou seekest.” [16]
The obvious objection is whether heaven is really the same for everyone, and Thomas answers it with an image I love. Beatitude, considered as its object, is one for all: everyone sees God. Considered as participation, it is unequal, because not everyone will see as clearly (John 14:2). It is like many people going to a river, one carrying a bigger vessel than another. “The river puts forth its whole self, yet not all carry equally.” The soul more enlarged by charity carries more. [17]
So what is the parable defending? Harrington’s answer is that it defends Jesus himself. The running accusation against him was that he ate with tax collectors and sinners, and he never denied it: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13). Like the prodigal son, the good employer answers the charge by appealing to God’s generosity; Harrington suggests we might as well call it the parable of the prodigal employer. [18] The Catechism draws the doctrinal line underneath it. “With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, for we have received everything from him.” No one merits the initial grace of forgiveness; God’s initiative comes first, and only then does our collaboration begin, so that even the merit of good works is credited first to grace. [19] The dawn workers were never owed the vineyard. They were invited into it.
Put Isaiah beside Matthew, and the seam shows. Isaiah tells a people who have earned exile that God’s thoughts run toward pardon while theirs run toward vengeance. Matthew tells men who have earned a denarius that God’s thoughts run toward gift while theirs run toward comparison. It is the same gap in both readings, the height of heaven above earth, and in both cases the thing we cannot imagine is how generous God is willing to be to someone who is not us.
Daily Application
The parable asks you to find yourself in it, and there are only two places to stand.
Start with the more uncomfortable one. If you’ve been a practicing Catholic for a long time, you are the dawn worker, and you need to watch your eye. Envy of mercy is a specific sin, and it hides well, because it wears the costume of a concern for fairness. It shows up as the small sourness when the relative who left the Church for 30 years comes back and is welcomed as if nothing happened. Gregory the Great, preaching on this Gospel, drew two lessons from “many are called, but few are chosen”: that none of us should presume anything about ourselves, since being called is no guarantee of being chosen, and that none of us should despair of our neighbor, “even though he see him lying in vices; because he knows not the riches of the Divine mercy.” [20] That second lesson is the cure for the evil eye. The interior movement this reading asks of the longtime Catholic is to rejoice at the liberality of God shown in other people’s lives, and the practice is simple: pick the person whose forgiveness bothers you, and thank God for it out loud. [21]
Now the other place to stand. If you’ve been idle, this parable was written for you, and so was Isaiah. Maybe you fell away at 19, and you’re 50. Maybe your idleness was Thomas’s kind, doing nothing much for God while standing in the marketplace of a life full of buying and selling. [22] Gregory’s homily is still addressed to you: “Even though you have not been willing to live for God in your childhood and young adulthood, at least come to your right mind in the final time of your life.” [23] The landowner is still going out. Isaiah says to seek him while he may be found, and Thomas glosses that as before adversity or death comes, which is a way of saying there is an hour after the eleventh, and no one is hired in it. The Navarre editors quote Augustine on exactly this: God promises forgiveness for your conversion, but he does not promise you tomorrow. [24] So go to confession this week. Don’t wait to feel ready; the Catechism says conversion is first of all God’s work in you, and that he “gives us the strength to begin anew.” [25] The men at 5:00 didn’t earn their hire. They said yes when they were finally asked.
The Korean martyrs are worth carrying with you today, because they were the eleventh-hour people of an entire nation. No missionary founded the Church in Korea. Around 1777, a group of educated Koreans got hold of Christian books from Jesuits in Beijing, studied them, and started a home Church. When a Chinese priest finally slipped into the country a dozen years later, he found 4,000 Catholics who had never seen a priest. Then came the persecutions of 1839 to 1867: Paul Chong Hasang, a married layman, died at 45; Peter Ryou, a boy of 13, was strangled; Andrew Kim Taegon, the first native Korean priest, was beheaded at the Han River a year after his ordination, at 25. Of the 103 John Paul II canonized in 1984, most were laypeople: 47 women and 45 men. [26] They came to the vineyard late in the day of the world, with no patriarch or prophet behind them, and God paid them the full denarius in the coin of martyrdom. Nobody who worked from dawn will look at them in the kingdom and think they got too much.
The Church’s reflection on them makes one last point. The Korean Church survived a dozen years without the Eucharist because it had a living faith first, and the sacraments increase grace and faith “only if there is something ready to be increased.” [27] Somewhere in the long day, the dawn worker’s heart stopped being ready. That was his whole problem. So whichever worker you are today, do the same thing. Seek the Lord while he may be found. And when he pays someone else in full, be glad you work for a God whose thoughts are not your thoughts.
Preparing for Sunday
This reflection is part of the daily readings. Every week I also write a full prep guide for the coming Sunday: all four readings in full, the Fathers, Aquinas and the Catechism cited properly, and three developed themes worked out at length.
I’m a permanent deacon and I write it because I need it myself. You don’t have to preach to use it.
Notes
- The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Isaiah, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 241-242. ↩
- Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 242. ↩
- Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute; Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), no. 991. ↩
- Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 243. ↩
- Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 283. ↩
- Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 253-254; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 282. ↩
- Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 253; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 283. ↩
- Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 284. ↩
- Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 253. ↩
- Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 254-255. ↩
- Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 283. ↩
- Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 254-255; Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 1891), no. 20, vatican.va. ↩
- Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 255; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 283. ↩
- Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), nos. 1645-1646. ↩
- Saint Gregory the Great, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), 680-681, 686. ↩
- Saint Jerome, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, 684-685. ↩
- Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1640. ↩
- Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 284. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 2007-2008, 2010. ↩
- Saint Gregory the Great, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, 686. ↩
- Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 256. ↩
- Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1629. ↩
- Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies 19, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 79-80, quoted in Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 256. ↩
- Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, no. 991; Saint Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 144.11, quoted in Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 243. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1432. ↩
- “Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed September 19, 2026, franciscanmedia.org. ↩
- “Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions,” Franciscan Media. ↩
Books Cited
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- University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005
- Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire, The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic
- Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1, Liturgical Press
- Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, Baker Academic, 2010
- Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia, The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic
- Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set, Baronius Press
- St. Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, Cistercian Studies 123, trans. Dom David Hurst, Cistercian Publications, 1990
- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., Doubleday / Image, 2003
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