Labors of Love

One of the first songs that I remember learning is the classic spiritual, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” If you’re like me, just saying the title immediately brings to mind the tune, and it’s hard not to start singing it. I must have first heard it when I was very young, perhaps in preschool, or perhaps as one of the songs that my grandmother taught me. But wherever I learned it, I remember how the song conjures up for me a particular mental image – a great crowd of people, clothed in white, marching on clouds into the sunlit gates of heaven.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes this same scene, although in a different way than I imagined it. The purpose of a parable is to use things we are familiar with to describe something that we are not familiar with. And the purpose of today’s parable is to describe a day we might imagine but which none of us has yet experienced – the day when the saintly men and women from all time will go marching into the kingdom of heaven. It’s that final day that we should all be striving for, that all of our lives on earth should be directed toward – to being counted, as the song goes, “in that number” of the righteous in the life to come.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent (12th c.), St. Catherine's Monastery, Egypt

As nice as that sounds, there’s something about this parable that bothers us. It kind of messes with our sense of justice; it doesn’t seem fair to us that those who worked all day in the vineyard should receive the same as those who worked only one hour. That discomfort that we feel is important to pay attention to. This parable comes as part of Jesus’s response to a question from Simon Peter of exactly what the disciples are going to be rewarded with, having left everything to follow him. Perhaps like Peter, we can sometimes think of our relationship with God in terms of a reward system: we do what God commands and therefore he will reward us, perhaps in this life, but definitely in the life to come. That's the basic equation of a lot of people's faith. But today’s parable puts a different spin on this idea. In the kingdom of heaven, the righteous are rewarded, but not according to earthly notions of fairness and equity. Instead, a different principle seems to be at play. 

The key to understanding this parable, I think, is to focus on the landowner. Time and again, he goes out to hire more and more laborers. He is intent upon bringing as many of them into his vineyard as he can. And in the end, he gives them compensation for their labors. But notice that what defines his actions and motivations is not strict justice but something greater. The distinguishing characteristic of the landowner is love. It is love for his vineyard that leads him to go and find out laborers who will work it. It is love for those who have been standing idly by that makes him go out again and again to bring them in and give them work. And in the end, it is love – generous love – that prompts him to reward a full daily wage even to those who had only worked one hour.

So what is Jesus telling us? That love is the best lens through which to view our daily lives and especially the daily labors we offer in service to the kingdom. It’s love that helps best understand what might be happening around us – what the Lord is doing and what we are doing in response. Our God is a just God, and so we do believe that he sees all and will reward us accordingly if we labor for his kingdom and make sacrifices in this life in order to be with him in the next. But if we look at our relationship with God strictly in terms of earthly notions of justice and fairness, we are going to miss the deeper purpose of love that motivates all that God is about. And if we think of our spiritual lives as only a kind of eternal reward system, then we will fail to see the invitation the Lord is offering to us right now to participate in the work of his vineyard with joy and thanksgiving.

Friends, perhaps you and I today can think about the labors of love that we are offering – the work that we are doing right now in the vineyard of the Lord. For some of us it may be caring for children or the elderly; for others of us, it is donating our time in service to the needy and to worthwhile causes. Maybe it is working for understanding between friends who are squabbling, or forgiving from the heart a person who has not asked to be pardoned. Perhaps our labors are resisting the temptation to gossip that arises in the workplace, or accepting graciously injustice or hardship when it comes our way because of what our faith teaches. Whatever it is, the question we must ask is, what is motivating us? What is underlying what we are doing? Jesus invites us, like he invited Simon Peter and the disciples, to try to understand love as the key to all that happens – to comprehend the love of the Lord who is providing for his vineyard, who time and again calls us out of idleness and invites us to imitate his love by sharing in the work that he is doing. At times, we will be challenged, we will grow weary and discouraged, we may even find ourselves momentarily jealous of what is happening in the life of someone else that seems to be better than what is going on in our life. But when that happens, remember that your labors are given to you as labors of *love* first and foremost. It is the Owner of the vineyard who has entrusted that work to you, and if you are faithful to it, he will see it to completion.

It will be a great day, indeed, when the saints – after their long labors, their faithful hardships born out of love – go marching into the heavenly gates. May the Lord make us part of their number.