Equal in Dignity and Value!

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Ez 34: 1-11; Mt 20: 1-16

Today’s Gospel challenges human ideas of fairness and justice.

The five questions that the landowner asks reveal his sense of justice and fairness. ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ ‘Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?’ ‘What if I wish to give this last one the same as you?’ ‘Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?’ ‘Are you envious because I am generous?’

While we have the temptation to conclude that injustice was meted out to those who were hired at dawn, we need to also consider what justice and fairness mean to God. Accordingly, we may decode several aspects of the landowner’s justice. 

1. The landowner breaks the rigid view of justice. Instead of rigidly applying the rule of ‘first come, first served,’ the generous landowner upholds an uneven measurement as a rule of justice and fairness. It is not that he wants to do injustice to those who ‘bore the day’s burden and the heat.’ But he wanted the needy others to partake of his just generosity. 

2. The landowner chooses natural justice over legality. The landowner was aware that if he wanted to satisfy those who came early, it could not happen without depriving those who were hired in the evening of their living wage to feed their families. Thus, the landowner’s sense of justice not only remembers the families of those who were hired in the evening but also extends his generosity towards them. 

3. The landowner could perceive the trap of envy in those who protested the distribution of equal wages to those who were hired late in the evening. He understood that what the first comers wanted was to see their peers receiving less because they bore the day’s toil. Thus, in their envy, they could not digest the fact that those who were hired in the evening were treated equal. Thus, while they refuse to count their blessings, they want their fellow workers to be deprived of the daily wage that they need to provide for the family. 

By thus allowing the scales of justice to look uneven in the landowner’s just generosity, Jesus teaches that God’s grace is greater than human merit.

Here, I recall Agatha Christie’s famous detective, Hercule Poirot, saying at the climax of Murder on the Orient Express, ‘The scales of justice cannot always be evenly weighed. And I must learn, for once, to live with the imbalance.’

Let us pray that we may imbibe God’s inclusive and generous vision of fairness and justice.

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar