“Am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?”
The kingdom of God isn’t, in the end, about money, but the pecuniary metaphors in the gospel seem especially capable of showing us just how strange this kingdom is. Certainly it defies—to the consternation of talking heads everywhere—any typical human sense of economic justice. God is not a socialist, but this doesn’t mean that he’s a capitalist. In the end, he’s a transcendent king, whose ways are not like our ways, whose thoughts are not like our thoughts, as Isaiah reminds us.
Isaiah’s particular emphasis there, in today’s reading, comes just after a picture of God’s extravagant grace:
Ho, every one who thirsts,
come to the waters;and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy? (Isa. 55:1-2).
The insistence on God’s transcendence, then, isn’t some kind of anti-intellectual game by which we give up knowing anything about God because he’s just too great. No: we won’t understand him by ordinary means, but we can know him through his gifts.
Heaven is so often depicted as a wedding banquet because in the biblical imagination, eating and fellowship are a kind of knowledge—the knowledge of communion. Salvation is so much more interesting than a cash prize—which is I think part of the point of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. They’re working in this vineyard, but they don’t seem to understand the point of it. They can’t think beyond the basic categories of financial reward. What good is more coin in eternal life? Indeed, what good is coin when the wine and milk and bread are free?
Just before this parable, only a few verses back at the end of Matthew 19, the disciples are struggling with one of the Lord’s counsels of perfection: poverty for the sake of the kingdom. After the rich young ruler despairs of perfection because of his wealth, we hear a set of difficult admonitions for the wealthy, including the famous image of the camel and the eye of a needle. In response to this, the disciples declare their incredulity: “Who then can be saved?”
This is a fascinating question in itself. It doesn’t suggest that the disciples all think of themselves as rich (though we can be fairly certain they weren’t all poor). Rather, it reflects common human wisdom, which is that wealth and poverty are tied to merit. They—like, frankly, most people—see wealth as a sign of success, and poverty as a sign of failure. No one wants to be a failure, so what they hear basically is that you cannot be successful—you cannot live a good life—and be saved.
The Lord’s response, “With God all things are possible,” makes Peter press further: “We have left everything and followed you. What then shall we have?” Quite a lot, Jesus says: you will have thrones, and dominion, and, most importantly, eternal life. “For the kingdom of God is like a landowner . . .” Then follows today’s story.
It’s pretty clear, then, that Peter and the disciples are being compared to that first batch of laborers in the vineyard. They’ll get their reward. And it is great. But this doesn’t mean, on a basic level, that their eternal life is more worthy than those who will follow. After all, the last will be first, and the first will be last.
The fundamental teaching of the Church is that the Lord’s reward for his saints—for those who attain heaven—is the beatific vision: a direct, immediate participation in the divine nature. This is the true, final happiness to which all other temporal happinesses and joys tend, and it is in the infinite bliss that even the lesser aspects of our nature, our physical bodies, brought to new life in the resurrection, will be elevated and perfected. In other words, the supernatural happiness of the beatific vision enhances rather than destroys the various kinds of natural happiness proper to bodily life.
This beatific vision cannot be more or less, for it is God. So the penitent thief on the cross sees the same God that Our Lady sees; St. John sees the same God that the Holy Innocents see. All receive the same wage.
But this does not mean that the saints in heaven are all equally happy without distinction. St. Thomas clarifies: “But as to the attainment or enjoyment of this Good, one man can be happier than another; because the more a man enjoys this Good, the happier he is. Now, that one man enjoys God more than another, happens through his being better disposed or ordered to the enjoyment of him. And in this sense, one man can be happier than another” (ST I-II q. 5 a. 2).
So it’s not that everyone gets his own little private heaven. Heaven is God, and God’s transcendent reality is not merely a question of private experience. Yet it is at the same time true that the supreme good is experienced to different degrees. I think we should add that, given God’s infinitude, all these degrees are dynamically moving deeper and deeper into participation in God’s nature, so this distinction in beatific experience should not imply some kind of stasis in which we are locked into some meager portion of divine goodness, ever to remain. But we can never, for example, reach the exact same experience of divine goodness that Our Lady was privileged to receive. She was blessed in being the first to believe; her receptivity to the divine grace is absolutely unique.
The sad thing about the laborers in the vineyard is not that they don’t receive extra wages at the end of the day. The sad thing is that they’re unable to recognize the gift they have received, which is the privilege of working the whole day for something good. Doing more work means they have more capacity to enjoy the reward when it is given.
Again, in human economic terms, this might be unjust. But we’re not really talking about labor and pay; we’re not talking about labor for the bread that doesn’t satisfy; we’re talking about labor for the bread of immortality, the bread of life, the bread of heaven.
In the divine economy, there is no competition among the workers. Again, I think it’s easiest to think in the extremes. Our Lady is the queen of heaven, the highest human person in the celestial court. When she looks into history and sees someone making a deathbed confession, turning back to God after years of wandering, does she scoff and scold her son for generously offering such a one mercy? Certainly not. She rejoices. She is happy that this person can share in the infinite goodness that she already enjoys in the presence of God.
For the worker who waited until the last, the grace is sweet in its sudden splendid rush; he knows the great mercy of God. For the worker who started at dawn, the grace is sweet in its slow maturity; he knows the delight of savoring the divine life, letting its goodness seep into his bones as he works alongside it in love. The one is the honeymoon bliss of newlyweds. The other is the satisfied deep joy of love over time.
Those of us who have found the Catholic Church a little later in life have at times noted occasional resentment from those who became Catholic sooner, or who have been Catholic all their lives. We can then sometimes reflect that resentment in the other direction by hastily judging those who seem callous and uncaring toward the great gifts they have received. But I think the point of the parable is that the gift—the wages—is not only what was promised by the Lord, but it is in both cases far greater than what we actually deserve. Comparing our paltry temporal differences in light of an eternal, infinite gift quickly becomes ridiculous. But it also distracts us from the joy—a joy that is amplified by every sorrow and every happiness in this life simply because the Lord is with us. As we read from St. Paul today, “Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.”
We cannot control whether we live or die. We certainly cannot control whether or when other people decide to follow Jesus. What we can do is follow Isaiah’s advice to “seek the Lord while he wills to be found,” and delight in laboring for him now, whether it is the first hour, the sixth hour, or the last.