Wednesday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time

The Invitation of Our Lives

There is one little line in today’s Gospel that can easily get overlooked.

The landowner goes out late in the day and finds people still standing there. He asks them, “Why do you stand here idle all day?” And they answer, “Because no one has hired us.”

Notice what they don’t say. They don’t say, “We didn’t want to work.” They don’t say, “We weren’t interested.” They simply say, “No one has hired us.”

And when someone finally invited them into the vineyard, they went.

I wonder if there aren’t people in our own lives who could say something similar about faith.

We sometimes wonder why people don’t go to church anymore. We wonder why someone has never become Catholic, or why a family member or friend seems to have no interest in faith.

Maybe we should ask ourselves: Have we ever invited them?

And that invitation doesn’t always have to be verbal.

Certainly, sometimes we should say, “Why don’t you come to Mass with me?” Or, “Have you ever thought about becoming Catholic?” We might be surprised at the answer.

But there is another kind of invitation—the invitation of the way we live.

If people know that we are followers of Christ, what do they see in us? Do they see joy? Do they see hope? Do they see kindness and generosity? Do they see something in our lives that makes them wonder, “What does this person have that I would like to have?”

Because if we talk about how much our faith means to us, but we are constantly angry, complaining, judging others, or miserable, that can become exactly the opposite of an invitation.

What is striking in today’s Gospel is that the landowner keeps going out. Nine o’clock. Noon. Three o’clock. Five o’clock. He never stops looking for people to bring into his vineyard.

And perhaps Christ is still doing that today—through us.

Sometimes through the words we speak.

And sometimes simply through the kind of people we have become because we belong to him.

There may be someone in our life who is waiting for an invitation into the vineyard.

The question is: When they look at us, do they see a vineyard they would want to enter?