Just reward. What is it?

Years ago, a foreign company started building a hotel in our country. It promised high earnings. Many people changed jobs and came to work on the construction site to earn a lot of money. At the first paycheck, there was disillusionment. True, many made their disapproval known, and not just in words. They went to complain. They gathered all the dissatisfied people in one room. The name-calling and discontent ceased when they were shown a film the company’s agents had shot as they worked. Getting to work, brunch, lunch, standing around… In the end, it ended up like today’s Gospel.

The farmer tells the grumblers: “Friend, I don’t blame you. Didn’t you make a deal with me for a penny? Take what is yours and go” (Mt 20:13-14). The fourth truth of our six cardinal facts states: “God is a righteous Judge who rewards the good and punishes the wicked.” The attributes of God include not only justice but also love and mercy. At times God breaks the plane of purely arithmetical justice and admonishes. The Lord Jesus says: “Except your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). It is not against the righteousness of God when we hear in the parable the command of the householder to his steward: “Pay them their wages, beginning from the last to the first” (v.8). The parable shows how God’s goodness turns against the claim of rewarding those who were first. Jesus rejects reward in the sense of legal entitlement. He wants to emphasize that the “first” have no priority over the “last.” Jesus emphasizes the goodness of God. All earthly thinking is unable to comprehend the words of the Lord Jesus. And yet Jesus wants to help us, to get out of righteousness as the world and God understand it. In doing so, the principle that God will not leave any man’s service unrewarded is an unshakably firm principle for Him.

Perhaps you, too, have heard it, uttered it, or at least thought it: “Happily there is one righteousness – a God who knows no connections, no favoritism, who will one day give everyone what he has earned.” Therefore, we can more easily understand the words about the householder and the hired laborers. Only God will give a just reward. The reward that God gives is grace. When something is required of him, a person may ask, “What will I get out of it.” And God’s typical answer is, “All is grace.” We know that God alone gives life; man alone cooperates with God. When God invites, God gives life to man, and man can say “no” to God!

The steward in the parable is God. The workers He invites to work in the vineyard are the people. God allows man to dialogue with his God. God respects man’s reason and the freedom he has endowed them with. And we shouldn’t forget that he died for all of us. Those speculators on the construction site, thinking they could make money without honest work, went silent after a film was shown of their activity. Indeed they learned from the movie if they wanted to make money. And sure enough, when they changed their attitude and worked, they earned as promised.