The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme is the official name for ‘furlough’. This word used to be of marginal use, but now it’s very familiar to everyone who has not lived under a rock for the last half-year or so. All political and partisan aspects aside, the scheme proved to be a godsend to millions of people across the country, who otherwise would have faced uncertainty and mass unemployment. The scheme is the latest incarnation of the so-called welfare state – a safety net provided by the government for those in need. Nowadays we take this for granted, but it’s a relatively modern concept. The humble beginnings of the welfare state are usually traced back to the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s. Then, in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, many governments introduced elements of the welfare state. In the UK the most prominent element of the welfare state was the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. The benefits system, combined with free health service, pensions and so on, provides us with a level of safety and security unknown to most generations over the millennia and still inaccessible to many of our fellow human beings across the world. In the most advanced and socially-oriented western societies, there’s an ongoing discussion about Universal Basic Income – essentially, it would be paid to everyone, whether they were in work or not. If introduced, it would be even more generous than the landowner in today’s gospel.
On the face of it, this parable is a story of equal pay; everyone who worked in the vineyard earned one denarius – a fair daily pay for a hired worker. Taken in separation, each worker would have been quite content with his pay. But because they had been paid in public, all the workers knew what the others had got and there was strong resentment among them, openly expressed by those who had worked for the whole day. There was a feeling of unfairness stemming from comparison with those who had worked for one hour and were awarded the same pay. Many of us might be quite familiar with such a sentiment; we either experience or hear about the disparity of income, based on gender and other factors that should not play any role in determining salary. We strongly believe that it should be based on merits, workload and other measurable determinants. Based on that, each one of us believes that obviously, we ought to earn more than our colleagues!
We reflect this kind of seemingly meritocratic thinking in our perception of eternal life. We’ve been trying hard to stay on the right track, to avoid falling into self-indulgence or guilty pleasures, so at the end of that struggle, we earn the ultimate prize, eternal life in heaven. Those who have been less perfect than us should land in less leafy quarters of heaven, while those eleventh-hour chancers certainly should get accommodation in the slums of the kingdom of heaven. It might sound like a joke, but it actually describes the way many Catholics perceive gradation of salvation! The problem is that salvation isn’t gradual; it’s a full-fat, no-strings-attached, complete and finished product of Jesus’ sacrifice: ‘I came to give life – life that is full and good.’ (John 10:10) If you get everything, you cannot get more on top of it, because there isn’t anything missing. One denarius in today’s parable symbolises this full and complete gift of salvation offered to each one of us. We have accepted such an agreement at our baptism. Our efforts to keep God’s commandments and live out our faith are our positive response to the free gift of salvation. Some people, for various reasons, might come late to such an agreement with God. Instead of begrudging such generosity of grace, we ought to be grateful that God gives everyone a chance – even at the eleventh hour.
Image by Jody Davis from Pixabay