The Unfair Businessowner

 Is God a communist?

That's how the priest opened his homily this Sunday, and a ripple of uncomfortable laughter went through the congregation — the kind where you're not sure if you're allowed to laugh, but you can't quite help it. He'd just read the parable of the workers in the vineyard — a landowner hires at dawn, then again at nine, noon, three, even five o'clock with an hour of daylight left, and pays every one of them the same denarius. Full day. One hour. Same pay.

The dawn workers grumble, and honestly, I get it. If I worked twelve hours in the sun and watched someone stroll in for the last sixty minutes and walk away with the same envelope, something in me would flare up too.

But look closer at what actually happened. The twelve-hour man got exactly what he agreed to at dawn. Nobody shortchanged him. Nothing was taken from him and handed to someone else. The only thing that happened is that somebody who had no claim on anything got a gift standing right next to him.

That's the whole problem, and it's not really about fairness. It's about comparison.

The landowner says it straight out: "Am I not free to do as I wish with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous?" Envious. Not cheated. He paid the dawn workers in full — they lost nothing at all. What they lost was the feeling of being special for having lost nothing. The moment someone else got the same reward for less effort, the dawn workers stopped looking at their own wage and started looking sideways at everyone else's.

That's man, every time. We rarely suffer from not having enough. We suffer from noticing what somebody else has. Give a kid the exact toy he asked for and he's thrilled — until he sees his brother's toy and decides his is now the worse one. Nothing changed about what he has. Only what he's looking at changed.

God isn't running a payroll system where your reward depends on beating out the guy next to you. Each worker's wage was agreed one-on-one, at the moment he was hired. That's the part I think we skip past: the deal was personal, between him and the landowner, before anyone else was even in the field. Your relationship with God isn't a group project with a leaderboard. He isn't rationing out a fixed pile of grace where more for someone else means less for you. He meets you where you are, gives you what you need, and that transaction was never in competition with anyone else's.

Which is what "the last will be first, and the first will be last" is actually doing in the text. It's not God flipping a scoreboard to punish the dawn workers. There is no scoreboard. It's God saying: stop counting other people's hours. Yours were already enough.

And I don't think this world, even two thousand years later, is ready for this. We're still built to compare, still keeping score at the edge of our eye even when our own hands are full. But we, as Catholics, are called to something harder than fairness — to be glad for a gift we didn't earn, and just as glad when the person beside us gets one too.