Love God—Not His Benefits – Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

0:00 Peace be with you, friends. For this 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time, we have this parable from Jesus that kind of bothers everybody. It's sort of the way the parables tend to work. Parables aren't just nice little moral tales. Parables tend to upset the world that we're used to. They throw us off balance. That's what they're meant to do. And this is a really good example. You know the story well about the guy that goes out at the beginning of the day and hires some workers, and I'm going to pay you this wage, and they work all day. And he goes out mid-morning, then at noon, then mid-afternoon, then the very end of the day, and he says, come on, work. And so then he pays the last ones first, and they get the daily wage, right, that everyone agreed to. So the earlier people say, hey, well, then he's going to give us more, and then he just gives them all the same. And then they complain, well, come on, I worked all day, and this guy worked for one hour, and you're paying us the same?

0:57 And the answer comes back, you know, what, are you jealous because I'm generous? You all agree to the same thing. Well, I wonder how many of you, how many of us find that satisfying, or how many say, well, I kind of sympathize with these people. This seems unfair. Now, may I say, dealing with God, we often think things are unfair, don't we? Why does God do what he does? Why are our goods distributed the way they are? Is it the case that good people get rewarded, bad people get punished? It seems, on the contrary, things don't work out very fairly with God. And so what gives? I thought you're all good and all just and all fair. So, you know, we're meant to identify, to hear our own voices in these voices of complaint. So what do we say about this?

1:52 Let me offer first this clarification, and it comes to everybody right out of the heart of the spiritual tradition. Read the great spiritual masters like John of the Cross, for example. He'll say, you don't fall in love with the benefits of God. You fall in love with God. Let me say it again. We're not meant to fall in love with the benefits of God. We're meant to fall in love with God. Not the rewards God might give us, but rather with his will. Now, can I suggest a lot of the spiritual life hinges on this great distinction. Here's what most of us want from God. We want benefits. Lord, give me what I want. I'll follow your commandments as long as you give me what I want. Make me feel good about this.

2:47 Give me the things I've always asked for. Seeing God as kind of this great provider, you know, he'll provide for my needs. I'll hit the right buttons and then get what I want. Well, that's a very immature approach to God. Maybe in the beginning of the relationship, and John of the Cross says this, maybe in the beginning of our relationship, God will give us a lot of benefits. What Ignatius of Loyola calls consolations. We might get those. People who are very, you know, I'm delighted to pray. I love going to Mass, and I find the stories of the saints so beautiful, and I find great emotional reward in living the spiritual life. Yeah, John of the Cross says God might use that to draw us close to himself, but then, inevitably, God will take away those benefits because he's cruel? Uh-uh. because he wants us to fall in love with him, not with the benefits.

3:51 You say, okay, okay, I kind of get that, but I'm still struggling. Let me give you a concrete example now. Imagine you're on a pro baseball team that's in a pennant run, and you played every day. You're the shortstop, let's say, and you were like Lou Gehrig. You're like Cal Ripken Jr. Bring it up to date. Who would be, I don't know, the one today who's like the Iron Man, you know, who plays every game? But you're like that. You play every game in the hot sun, late at night, home games, away games. You are the guy. You're playing shortstop every day. At the end of the season, just before the trade, you know, deadline, the team picks up a relief pitcher, which they really need. And for the last month of the season, he saves like three or four really key games that enable you to win the pennant. And then in the World Series, he performs beautifully, saves a couple key games, and you win the World Series.

4:54 Now, there's the parade, right? And everybody gets the World Series ring. Can you imagine that shortstop? What he wanted above all, above all, was to win the World Series. Can you imagine that shortstop saying, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. That guy only played, you know, one month. He only pitched a handful of games. He's getting the same ring I'm getting?

5:21 Who'd be that petty? No, no, he'd say, we won the World Series. He helped. God bless him. Give him a ring. See, when you care about winning the World Series, you don't care that much about the honors associated with it. You don't care that much about the rewards associated with it. You are carried away in this, the beauty of this great accomplishment, right? Let me give you a second example. I'm going to go from high-level baseball to very low-level baseball. When I played Little League, when I was like seven, eight years old, nine years old, we had this coach who was, we thought he was an old man. He probably was like 20 years old at the time, he was a young guy. And he used to say to us, all right, listen, guys, if you win this game, we're all going to the Highland Queen. The Highland Queen was like Dairy Queen.

6:14 It was our local ice cream place with the soft serve ice cream. And so, you know, we'd play the game and we'd win. And then we'd all go to the Highland Queen and we'd have our ice cream. And I must say, honestly, those are some of the sweetest memories I have of being a little kid. Sitting in the Highland Queen, my feet up on the table, my socks and pants are all dirty from sliding around. And I'm talking with my buddies and my baseball hat's askew. And we had a great game and we won. at that moment, let's say one of the players, I remember this years ago, that these guys weren't super rich, and they paid for a 15 cent ice cream cone. It was like this little ice cream cone. If one of my buddies on the team had like a 30 cent ice cream cone, would I have said at that moment, hey, hey, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is unfair. He's getting more reward and I played a better game than he did.

7:15 No, no, no. You're so caught up in the fun and the beauty of that moment of having played a great game with your friends. The reward is not that important. The reward our coaches were using when we were little tiny kids to give us a little motivation, but it wasn't about the darn reward. It was about the accomplishment. right? We see the point here. What's the vineyard? Hey, come on, work in my vineyard. And some were called early. Some were called middle day. Some called the end of the day. Come work in the vineyard. Everyone's paid the same. So what? Because the point was working in the vineyard. It wasn't what you were paid. The vineyard here, the kingdom of God is like, right? The vineyard is the great work that God has given us to do, the mission. And everybody, that is so beautiful and so involving and so soul-satisfying that the last thing we should do is complain about who's getting paid for it.

8:33 What matters, how about those who were hired early? Thank you, Lord, for the privilege of letting me work all day in your vineyard. see here's the point don't fall in love with the benefits of god fall in love with the will of god the will of god is that you work in the vineyard under his direction that you belong to him as we heard last week it's not my life it's the it's the lord i belong to the lord and i'm given the privilege now of doing what he wants me to do that's what matters not the petty rewards here's the last observation. In life, everyone, don't look around. Look up. Think of the World Series players again for a second. What were they looking toward? They were looking toward the great goal of winning the World Series. Together, they were looking up at the one great goal.

9:34 if you forget that what do you start doing looking around looking around hey hey he's he's getting more than i got hey hey it's not fair what's going on over there how come he's getting more how come he got the trophy forget that stop looking around together look up now here's the next perspective on us that's kind of like from our side but look at it now from god's side if you want so we look at the scene in front of us and we say okay this is unfair this situation so take this scenario in the parable it's unfair he should have paid those other people more what do we know of the situation next to nothing think of these guys you know they're hired by the landowner.

10:30 What do they know about him, about his work, about what his ultimate purpose is? Not much, they just, they were hired. And then those hired the end of the day, what's the one thing they know about them? That they were hired the end of the day, that they worked for an hour and they themselves worked for eight hours. Okay, you know that. On the basis of that information, you're gonna make this sweeping judgment that this whole thing is unfair. How do you know? What's God up to? What if those people hired the end of the day had been going through such a terrible time, they hadn't been able to work for weeks? What if they had a special need in their family? What if they had gone through an especially difficult time?

11:24 And the Lord wanted to reward them. He wanted to give them something special. Maybe you didn't need it as much as they did. You know, it comes to mind here, I've always loved this. You know, if you ask parents of many children, you know, which of your children do you love the most? Oh, oh, I love all my children equally. Or some of them might be honest, say, no, I love this kid the most, you know. But I remember hearing this answer from a mother that I thought was really good. Which kid do you love the most? She said, I love the most the one who at any given time needed my love the most. That's a good answer, I think. She's a mother of five kids. Of course, she loves them all. But at different times, those kids needed her love with different degrees of intensity. And the one who needed her love the most, that's the one that at that moment she loved the most.

12:20 So how does God pay us? Well, I got my standards. You should pay according to this standard. I worked eight hours. He worked one hour. I should get eight times what he got. All right, that's your little mathematics based on the little bit of the situation you can see. But what can God see? Well, everything, outside and inside, everything, every motivation, everything, everything. So how does God dole out his benefits? Why don't we leave that up to him? why don't we stop organizing things the way we think god should do it again mind you what are we falling in love with not the benefits of god not what's in it for us what we think we have coming no we fall in love with god our lives are not about us we belong to Christ. We belong to a higher power. I think everybody, at the end of the day, that's what this parable is meant to shake us out of this petty self-regard and to learn to love God and God's will for its own sake. And God bless you.