The parable of the landowner rewarding the one-hour worker with the same wage as the all-day worker challenges us to look at our own tendency to be jealous of another’s good fortune. Sometimes life is unfair and we don’t get what we want or think we deserve.

TODAY WE'RE ADVISED to seek God where the Holy One may be found. That's fine as far as it goes—so long as God isn't someplace we're not inclined to look. That's the problem with God, isn't it?

Jesus told the disciples a parable: “God’s kingdom is like an estate manager who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. . . . When the day’s work was over, the owner of the vineyard instructed his foreman, ‘Call the workers in and pay them their wages. Start with the last hired and go on to the first.’

Everyone loves an underdog—in sports, politics, historical battles—but it’s usually when that person is involved in some kind of heated competition. What about the average guy who just beats back difficult life circumstances and comes out ahead?

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

The psalm offers a litany of praise for God’s sometimes surprising ways of mercy, compassion, and kindness—so different and above human standards of justice.

Farmhand work hasn’t changed much since the time when Jesus used the examples of workers in the vineyard to teach a lesson about God’s unrestrained generosity.

Indeed we also work, but we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us. —Saint Augustine of Hippo