Dear parishioners & visitors,

Life can be unfair. With all the joys and celebrations of life, we also encounter sorrows, disappointments, and challenges. This is our human condition. Our Scripture readings this Sunday teach us how to accept and navigate through this life. Teach us how to seek to embrace God’s plan and break through challenges that might hold us back.

We see in today’s Gospel how Jesus describes a real condition of what people faced at the time Jesus walked this earth. It portrays the reality that there were two classes of people. There were the rich, which were few. And there were the poor, which made up the majority of people. The poor struggled every day to have enough food to eat. And it was common for landowners to hire help on a daily basis when the fields needed to be harvested. 

The “usual daily wage” mentioned in the Gospel plays an important part in Jesus’ message. We heard the landowner hired workers five times during the day. The “usual daily wage” equated to enough money for a worker to feed their family for one day. Let us imagine if we were the worker that was hired at dawn. How would you react when you see the worker get the same pay as you started later in the day? It is not that the worker that started at dawn was initially upset with the wage he received. He only got upset when he saw the other workers that started later in the day got the same wage.

Life can be unfair, but God is just. God is here for us. Trust Him. Pray to Him. Get to know Him in your life. If you do, then whether you are celebrating life’s triumphs, or fighting through life’s challenges, God will help you, God will lead you, and God will see you through.

Yours in Christ,

Father Dan