The Shepherd Who Pays Too Much

Most of us keep a ledger without admitting it. We tally the years we have gone to Mass, the sins we resisted, the money we put in the basket, the children we raised in the faith. And somewhere in that tally we start to believe God owes us. Then someone gets baptized on their deathbed, or a man who wasted forty years walks out of the confessional forgiven, and something in us tightens. We would never say it out loud. But we feel it.

Today’s readings put a name to that tightening. Ezekiel indicts shepherds who ate the flock they were given to feed, and then announces that God is going to come do the job himself. Matthew gives us a landowner who pays a full day’s wage to men who worked an hour, and workers who cannot stand it. Both readings ask the same question, and it is not a comfortable one: whose sheep are these? Whose money is that? Because the moment we answer “mine,” we stop being sons and start being creditors. Today the Church also keeps the memory of Saint John Eudes, a priest who spent a plague living in a barrel in a field so he could bury the dead without infecting his brothers. He was not keeping a ledger.

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 34:1-11

The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord God: Ho, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the crippled you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.

“Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As I live, says the Lord God, because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild beasts, since there was no shepherd; and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep; therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my sheep at their hand, and put a stop to their feeding the sheep; no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them.

“For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.”

Gospel: Matthew 20:1-16

“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

Start with the word “shepherd,” because we hear it wrong. We picture a gentle man in a field with a lamb over his shoulders. An Israelite hearing Ezekiel pictured a king. Across the ancient Near East, the title belonged to rulers and to gods, and in Israel it attached to kings in particular, probably because David began his life keeping sheep (1 Samuel 17:34; Psalm 78:70-72), and it attached above all to the Lord himself (Psalm 23:1-6).^[1] So when Ezekiel says “shepherds of Israel,” he means the princes, the priests, the elders, and the professional prophets. He means the men with power. A shepherd in this sense was authorized by God to govern, to punish wrongdoing, and to defend the land.

Ezekiel is speaking from Babylon, to a people already deported, and this is his first address to them on the subject. The oracle follows the standard shape of a condemnation: the charges come first, in verses 2 through 6, and then the sentence, which opens with that heavy “Therefore” in verse 7.^[2] Read the charges slowly, because they are specific. The shepherds ate the fat, wore the wool, slaughtered the fatlings. Every product of the flock went into their own mouths and onto their own backs. Then five failures in a row: the weak not strengthened, the sick not healed, the crippled not bound up, the strayed not brought back, the lost not sought. And the manner of their rule, “with force and harshness,” is the exact phrase Scripture uses for Israel’s treatment under Egypt (Exodus 1:13). The rulers of the covenant people had begun to govern like Pharaoh.

The result is exile. The flock scattered “because there was no shepherd,” and became food for wild beasts. Ezekiel is making a claim that runs through the books of Kings and that we would rather not hear in any century: what leaders do lands on the people. Notice also how often God says “my sheep.” Five times in these eleven verses. The shepherds handled the flock as though it were inventory. It was never theirs.

Then comes the sentence, and it is personal. “Behold, I am against the shepherds.” God will require his sheep at their hand and rescue them from their mouths. Saint Jerome read this passage as a word to bishops, and he did not soften it. He wrote of leaders who seek “not so much to save the lost as to devour those who are in the churches,” men who take the office as an honor rather than a burden.^[3] Saint Josemaría Escrivá pressed the same point toward what shepherds actually owe: the water of baptism, the oil of confirmation, the tribunal that pardons, the food that gives eternal life.^[4] A shepherd who withholds those things has taken the wool and left the sheep hungry.

And then verse 11, which changes everything: “Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.” The doubled pronoun is the whole point. The picture is of the Lord rising from his throne, coming down, and personally tracking the strays, exactly as he promised Moses he would do if his people were scattered (Deuteronomy 30:4).^[5] Later in the same chapter, he adds something that ought to be a contradiction: he will set one shepherd over them, his servant David (Ezekiel 34:23). Which is it? Does God come himself, or does he send someone? Origen answered flatly that the promise landed on Christ, not on the patriarch.^[6] John’s tenth chapter holds both halves together without strain. Jesus is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, and Jesus says, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:11, 10:30). God came down, and David was raised up, in one person.

Which brings us to the vineyard, and the two readings are closer than they look. Jeremiah joins the images in a single line: “Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard” (Jeremiah 12:10). The vineyard has meant Israel since Isaiah sang about it (Isaiah 5:1-7), so Matthew’s parable and Ezekiel’s oracle are set on the same property, and both turn on the same question of ownership.^[7]

Jesus tells it while walking to Jerusalem to die. A landowner hires at dawn and settles on a denarius, the standard day’s wage for manual labor in Palestine. He hires again at nine, at noon, at three, and finally at five, an hour before quitting time, and to those later crews he promises only “whatever is right.” At sundown he pays, as the Torah required for hired help (Deuteronomy 24:14-15), and he pays the last men first, which means the dawn crew has to stand there and watch.^[8] The eleventh-hour men get a full denarius. So the first crew does the math and expects twelve. They get one, which is exactly what they agreed to.

Their complaint has a phrase worth hearing: “you have made them equal to us.” The equality is the wound, and the coins are only where it showed. And the landowner’s answer takes their contract seriously before it takes anything else. “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius?” Justice has been satisfied down to the coin. What offends them is the gift given to someone else, and eleven-twelfths of that gift was pure gift, owed to no one.^[9]

Saint Thomas Aquinas reads the parable with the whole tradition behind him. The householder is God, whose family is the world. Chrysostom took the vineyard to mean justice; Gregory took it to mean the holy Church.^[10] The marketplace where the idle men stand is this present life, a place of buying and selling and quarrels, and Thomas adds a line that stings: those are called idle not only who do evil, but who do no good.^[11] The denarius signifies eternal life, because that coin bore the likeness of the king stamped on it, and what is promised us is to be made like God when he appears (1 John 3:2).^[12]

Then Thomas takes up the obvious objection. If everyone gets the same coin, is heaven the same for everyone? He answers with a distinction and an image. As to its object, there is one beatitude for all, since all will possess the same God. As to participation in that object, we differ, because we will not all see with the same clarity. It is like many people going down to a river with vessels of different sizes. The river pours out its whole self to every one of them. What differs is the size of the vessel we bring, and charity enlarges the vessel.^[13]

So the parable ends where Ezekiel’s shepherds began. “Or do you begrudge my generosity?” reads literally in the Greek, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” The evil eye is a Semitic idiom for the envious, grudging, stingy heart (Deuteronomy 15:9; Sirach 14:8; Matthew 6:23). Envy has a precise definition, and it is worth getting right. Jealousy wants what someone else has. Envy grieves that they have it, and Scripture traces that grief back to the devil (Wisdom 2:24).^[14] Thomas puts it in one sentence: a man is properly called evil who sorrows over goodness.^[15] The shepherds of Ezekiel consumed what was not theirs. The workers of Matthew resent the owner for spending what is theirs. Both have forgotten whose vineyard they are standing in.

Daily Application

The honest question today is whether you want a Father or an employer. An employer is safer. With an employer, the terms are clear; you know what you are owed, and nobody can humiliate you with a gift. That is the arrangement the dawn workers thought they had, and it is the arrangement a great many faithful Catholics quietly prefer. It lets us feel secure. It also makes every act of God’s mercy toward somebody else feel like theft.

You can find out which one you actually want by paying attention to a very particular moment. Someone comes back. A cousin who left the Church at nineteen and lived however he wanted comes home at sixty and is received with joy. A man who broke his family gets absolution and starts showing up at daily Mass. Watch what rises in you. If it is gladness, your eye is sound. If it is the thought that he got off easy, that is the evil eye, and it is not a small thing, because it means you have been serving God for wages and resenting the hours. Bring that to confession by name. Envy is a sin against charity, and it hides better than most, because it dresses itself up as a concern for fairness.

The remedy is to enlarge the vessel. Aquinas said we will all stand at the same river and carry away as much as our charity can hold, and charity grows the way a muscle grows, by being used on people who cannot pay you back. So pray for the person whose return bothers you, by name, for his perseverance, every day this week. It will feel false for about four days. Keep going. You cannot resent someone you are seriously interceding for.

And if you are reading this as the eleventh-hour worker, hear Saint Gregory the Great, who preached on this parable in the sixth century and turned the hours into the seasons of a life. Some are called in childhood, some in youth, some in old age, some in infirmity. To the man who has stood idle until the last hour, he says: come to the ways of life, even though you will not labor much now, and are late.^[16] Late is not disqualifying. The landowner walked out to the marketplace a fifth time when there was one hour of daylight left, because he wanted those men in his vineyard more than he wanted the labor.

Today’s saint understood both halves of this. John Eudes was ordained at twenty-four, and when plague swept his diocese twice, he volunteered to care for the sick, living in a huge cask in the middle of a field so he would not carry the infection back to his brothers. Then he spent the rest of his life in seminaries, forming the very shepherds Ezekiel had indicted, because he saw that the flock is fed or starved by the men who stand at the altar. And when Madeleine Lamy told him to his face that what was really wanted of him was a decent house for women trapped in prostitution, and the room laughed, he took it and founded one. He was the eleventh-hour laborer’s advocate. Ask him today for the grace to want other people saved more than you want to be paid.

The vineyard is not yours. The wage is better than you earned. Go stand in the field and be glad when the gate opens again at five.

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Notes

1. Commentary on Ezekiel 34:1-31 and 34:1-10, in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, notes at Ezekiel 34:1-31 and 34:1-10. ↩
2. Commentary on Ezekiel 34:1-31 and 34:1-10, in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, notes at Ezekiel 34:1-31 and 34:1-10. ↩
3. St. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel 11.34.1-31, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, Ancient Christian Writers (New York: Newman Press, 2017), 397. ↩
4. St. Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, no. 81, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, note at Ezekiel 34:1-10. ↩
5. Commentary on Ezekiel 34:11-16, in Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: Ezekiel, comment at 34:11-16. ↩
6. Origen, Commentary on John 1.146, quoted in Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: Ezekiel, comment at 34:17-24. ↩
7. Interpretation of Matthew 20:1-16, in Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Matthew, interpretation section at 20:1-16. ↩
8. Commentary on Matthew 20:1-16, in Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of Matthew, comments at 20:2, 20:8, 20:13-15, and the Reflection and Application section at 20:1-16. ↩
9. Commentary on Matthew 20:1-16, in Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of Matthew, comments at 20:2, 20:8, 20:13-15, and the Reflection and Application section at 20:1-16. ↩
10. St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 20, lect. 1, nos. 1623 and 1629, citing St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Great. ↩
11. St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 20, lect. 1, nos. 1623 and 1629, citing St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Great. ↩
12. Ibid., no. 1627. ↩
13. Ibid., no. 1640. ↩
14. Commentary on Matthew 20:1-16, in Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of Matthew, comments at 20:2, 20:8, 20:13-15, and the Reflection and Application section at 20:1-16. ↩
15. Ibid., no. 1646. ↩
16. St. Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies 19, trans. Dom David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 79-80. ↩

Books Cited

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• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, 2005
• St. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, Ancient Christian Writers 71 (Newman Press, 2017)
• Daniel A. Keating, Ezekiel, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2024)
• 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)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic)
• St. Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. Dom David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 123 (Cistercian Publications, 1990)