Sunday the 20th of September 2026 - The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 55:6-9/ Ps 145(144)/ Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a/ Matthew 20:1-16
Remember one of the criminals crucified with Jesus. He was at the end of his life, crucified for the crimes he had committed, when he said to Jesus those wonderful words, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Jesus responded to him saying, 'today you will be with me in paradise.' On the face of it this crucified criminal had done nothing to earn a place in heaven, no lifetime of good works, no years of faithful service. He came to Jesus at the eleventh hour, in the very last minutes of his life, and he is welcomed home. That criminal is the labourer hired at the end of the day, receiving the full wage. There is a wonderful message about the nature of God in this parable. It is never too late to turn to Him. Isaiah, in the first reading, tells us to seek the Lord while he may be found. Whoever we are, wherever we have been, whatever we have done, that door is still open. But be cautious, seek the Lord while he may be found, do not leave it too late. This life we have been given is the precious opportunity to discover God and to draw ever closer to him.
Isaiah reminds us that the thoughts of God are not our thoughts, nor are our ways His ways. God sees the whole of everything, things within his creation, but importantly things beyond it, things we cannot imagine. We are creatures living inside the world He made, bound by time and by our limited human minds. We cannot fathom the thoughts and plans of God while we live within this life. God is entirely ‘other,’ and will remain beyond our full understanding until we are one with him in heaven. This infinite God is not remote and distant. The psalm tells us that He is near to all who call on Him. Gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in mercy. This is the wonder of our faith, the God whose thoughts tower above ours became one of us in Jesus Christ. He entered his own creation and became subject to all that is human, life, suffering, and death. We have a God who is close, who knows what it is to be one of his creatures, who can identify with us in everything.
That closeness reshapes how we understand the second reading. Saint Paul comments that he is torn between a desire to die and be with Jesus or to remain and continue his work. At first this may sound like a longing for death. But Paul is not being morbid, he is giving us a more realistic view of death than the world offers. It would be wrong to have a morbid fascination with death or a wish to die. Our life here is a gift from God, and we are called to remain in it, moving ever closer to Jesus and helping others do the same, but it is the pathway to our eternal life and there is a doorway we must all go through in the end. We were baptised into the death of Christ so that we might follow him through our own death into the glory of his resurrection. Our faith gives us a longing, not for death itself, but to be with Jesus for eternity. Death is not something to look forward to, nor something to dread, it is simply the way we transit from this life into the next. It is the life to come that we live for, not the means by which we reach it. If we spend this life drawing near to Jesus, then when the moment comes, we can easily slip from one life into the other.
The Gospel for today challenges our human sense of fairness. The landlord in the parable pays those hired at the eleventh hour exactly the same as those who bore the burden of the whole day in the scorching heat. To our ears, that is not fair. What are we to make of this image of God and his kingdom? The truth is that we cannot measure God by our standards or fit Him into our categories. In the parable each worker received what was agreed, no one was cheated. The landlord was not unjust to the first, he was astonishingly generous to the last. This is God's way. None of us are worthy, none of us can earn or work our way into heaven. The inheritance won for us on the cross is the same for each of us, regardless of our efforts. What we receive from God is grace, not wages.
We do well to contemplate this on the day set aside by the Church as Home Mission Sunday. God reaches out to those who come late, those who are distant from Him, those on the margins. Whoever we are, we can avail ourselves of his boundless generosity. This is our challenge today, to stop measuring what we give against what we receive, to stop forgiving only as much as others forgive us, and to become more like the generous God who welcomes the eleventh-hour worker with open arms.
We come into our church buildings as equals in the sight of God. This is where Jesus, who gave himself once on the cross gives himself equally to each of us in the Eucharist. The saint and the struggling sinner receive the same Lord. Let us receive Him with gratitude, and then go out and bring others to that same generosity. Let us seek the Lord while he may be found, not leaving it too late.
God Bless Brendan