Bishop Barron's Sunday sermon on loving God rather than His rewards
Bishop Barron delivers a Sunday sermon on the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.
Summary
Bishop Barron reflects on the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard — the story in which laborers hired at different points in the day all receive the same wage — and addresses the discomfort many feel with its apparent unfairness. His central argument is drawn from the great spiritual masters, particularly John of the Cross: the spiritual life matures when we stop seeking the benefits God can give us and begin loving God himself, and his will, for their own sake. He illustrates this with two baseball analogies — one from professional baseball and one from his own childhood — to show that when a person is genuinely absorbed in a great shared purpose, petty concern about individual rewards falls away. He closes by urging listeners to stop looking around at what others receive and instead look upward together toward the one great goal.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard
Bishop Barron: Peace be with you, friends. For this 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time, we have this parable from Jesus that kind of bothers everybody. It's sort of the way the parables tend to work. Parables aren't just nice little moral tales. Parables tend to upset the world that we're used to. They throw us off balance. That's what they're meant to do. And this is a really good example.
You know the story well — about the man who goes out at the beginning of the day and hires some workers and says, "I'm going to pay you this wage," and they work all day. And he goes out mid-morning, then at noon, then mid-afternoon, then at the very end of the day, and he says, "Come on and work." Then he pays the last ones first, and they get the daily wage that everyone agreed to. So the earlier people say, "Hey, well then he's going to give us more." And then he just gives them all the same. And then they complain: "Well, come on — I worked all day and this guy worked for one hour, and you're paying us the same?" And the answer comes back: "What? Are you jealous because I'm generous? You all agreed to the same thing."
I wonder how many of you — how many of us — find that satisfying. Or how many say, "I kind of sympathize with these people. This seems unfair." Now, dealing with God, we often think things are unfair, don't we? Why does God do what he does? Why are goods distributed the way they are? Is it the case that good people get rewarded and bad people get punished? It seems, on the contrary, things don't work out very fairly with God. So what gives? I thought you were all good and all just and all fair. We're meant to identify — to hear our own voices in these voices of complaint.
Loving God, Not His Benefits
So what do we say about this? Let me offer first this clarification, and it comes right out of the heart of the spiritual tradition. Read the great spiritual masters — like John of the Cross, for example. He'll say: you don't fall in love with the benefits of God. You fall in love with God. Let me say it again. We're not meant to fall in love with the benefits of God. We're meant to fall in love with God. Not the rewards God might give us, but rather with his will.
Can I suggest that a lot of the spiritual life hinges on this great distinction? Here's what most of us want from God: we want benefits. "Lord, give me what I want. I'll follow your commandments as long as you give me what I want. Make me feel good about this. Give me the things I've always asked for." Seeing God as a kind of great provider — hit the right buttons and then get what you want. Well, that's a very immature approach to God.
Maybe in the beginning of the relationship — and John of the Cross says this — maybe in the beginning of our relationship, God will give us a lot of benefits. What Ignatius calls consolations. We might get those. People who are very new to the faith might say, "I'm delighted to pray. I love going to Mass. I find the stories of the saints so beautiful. I find great emotional reward in living the spiritual life." John of the Cross says God might use that to draw us close to himself. But then inevitably, God will take away those benefits — not because he's cruel, but because he wants us to fall in love with him, not with the benefits.
The World Series Ring
You say, "Okay, I kind of get that, but I'm still struggling." Let me give you a concrete example. Imagine you're on a pro baseball team that's in a pennant run, and you've played every day. You're the shortstop — you're like Lou Gehrig, you're like Cal Ripken Jr. You play every game: in the hot sun, late at night, home games, away games. You are the guy. You're playing shortstop every day.
At the end of the season, just before the trade deadline, the team picks up a relief pitcher which they really need. And for the last month of the season, he saves three or four really key games that enable you to win the pennant. Then in the World Series, he performs beautifully, saves a couple of key games, and you win the World Series. Now there's the parade, and everybody gets the World Series ring.
Can you imagine that shortstop — the one who wanted above all else to win the World Series — saying, "Hey, wait a minute. That guy only played one month. He only pitched a handful of games. He's getting the same ring I'm getting?" Who'd be that petty? No. He'd say, "We won the World Series. He helped. God bless him. Give him a ring." When you care about winning the World Series, you don't care that much about the honors associated with it. You don't care that much about the rewards associated with it. You are carried away in the beauty of this great accomplishment.
The Highland Queen
Let me give you a second example — going from high-level baseball to very low-level baseball. When I played Little League, when I was like seven, eight, nine years old, we had this coach who we thought was an old man. He was probably like twenty years old at the time — a young guy. And he used to say to us, "All right, listen guys, if you win this game, we're all going to the Highland Queen." The Highland Queen was like Dairy Queen — it was our local ice cream place with the soft serve.
So we'd play the game, we'd win, and then we'd all go to the Highland Queen and have our ice cream. And I must say honestly, those are some of the sweetest memories I have of being a little kid. Sitting in the Highland Queen, my feet up on the table, my socks and pants all dirty from sliding around, talking with my buddies, my baseball hat askew — we'd had a great game and we won.
At that moment, if one of my buddies on the team had a thirty-cent ice cream cone while I had a fifteen-cent one, would I have said, "Hey, wait a minute — this is unfair. He's getting more reward than me, and I played a better game than he did"? No. You're so caught up in the fun and the beauty of that moment — having played a great game with your friends — that the reward is not that important. The reward was something our coach used when we were little tiny kids to give us a little motivation, but it wasn't about the reward. It was about the accomplishment.
Working in the Vineyard
We see the point here. What's the vineyard? "Hey, come on, work in my vineyard." Some were called early. Some were called mid-day. Some were called at the end of the day. "Come work in the vineyard." Everyone's paid the same — so what? Because the point was working in the vineyard. It wasn't what you were paid.
The vineyard here — the kingdom of God — is the great work that God has given us to do, the mission. And that work is so beautiful and so involving and so satisfying that the last thing we should do is complain about who's getting paid for it. What matters? How about those who were hired early saying: "Thank you, Lord, for the privilege of letting me work all day in your vineyard."
Don't fall in love with the benefits of God. Fall in love with the will of God. The will of God is that you work in the vineyard under his direction — that you belong to him, as we heard last week. It's not my life. I belong to the Lord, and I'm given the privilege of doing what he wants me to do. That's what matters, not the petty rewards.
Look Up, Not Around
Here's the last observation. In life, everyone — don't look around, look up. Think of the World Series players again for a second. What were they looking toward? They were looking toward the great goal of winning the World Series. Together, they were looking up at the one great goal. If you forget that, what do you start doing? Looking around. "Hey, he's getting more than I got. Hey, it's not fair. What's going on over there? How come he's getting more? How come he got the trouble?" Forget that. Stop looking around. Together, look up.
God Sees Everything
Now here's another perspective on this — from God's side. We look at the scene in front of us and we say, "This is unfair." Take this scenario in the parable. It seems unfair. He should have paid those other people more. But what do we actually know of the situation? Next to nothing. Think of these workers hired by the landowner. What do they know about him, about his work, about what his ultimate purpose is? Not much. They were just hired. And those hired at the end of the day — what's the one thing we know about them? That they worked for an hour while the others worked for eight hours. On the basis of that information alone, you're going to make this sweeping judgment that the whole thing is unfair?
How do you know? What's God up to? What if those people hired at the end of the day had been going through such a terrible time that they hadn't been able to work for weeks? What if they had a special need in their family? What if they had gone through an especially difficult time and the Lord wanted to reward them — wanted to give them something special? Maybe you didn't need it as much as they did.
You know what comes to mind here? If you ask parents of many children, "Which of your children do you love the most?" most will say, "Oh, no — I love all my children equally." But I remember hearing this answer from a mother that I thought was really good. "Which kid do you love the most?" She said, "I love the most the one who at any given time needed my love the most." That's a good answer. Say she's a mother of five kids — of course she loves them all, but at different times those kids needed her love with different degrees of intensity, and the one who needed her love the most was the one she loved the most at that moment.
So how does God pay us? "Well, I've got my standards. You should pay according to this standard. I worked eight hours, he worked one hour, I should get eight times what he got." All right — that's your little mathematics based on the little bit of the situation you could see. But what can God see? Everything — outside and inside, every motivation, everything.
So how does God dole out his benefits? Why don't we leave that up to him? Why don't we stop organizing things the way we think God should do it? What are we falling in love with? Not the benefits of God — not what's in it for us, not what we think we have coming. No. We fall in love with God. Our lives are not about us. We belong to Christ. We belong to a higher power.
At the end of the day, that's what this parable is meant to do — it's meant to shake us out of this petty self-regard and to teach us to love God and God's will for its own sake. And God bless you.