Today’s Gospel passage at Mass is such a mysterious parable. It really flips things around, humanly speaking. It turns the human sense of justice on its head.

A man goes out to hire day laborers. He agrees with them for the usual daily wage. As the day progresses, he hires more and more people.

He pays the last ones that he hired, the ones who worked the least amount of time, FIRST, and he gives everyone the same amount: the usual daily wage promised to the first workers hired.

And those first workers, well, they aren’t happy about that.

Of course, we are all supposed to see ourselves in those LAST workers. None of us, even were we saints from birth and lived our entire lives serving the Lord, could deserve or earn the “wage” of salvation, of entering eternally into the joy of the Lord. We couldn’t earn that any more than those last workers hired, who hardly worked an hour, deserved to be paid as if they had worked all day.

The point, I think, is that humble gratitude is the proper reaction, for each and every one of us, and that comparisons to the labors or ministry or faith lives of others aren’t healthy.

As for “the last will be first, and the first will be last…”

This has always haunted me, in a beautiful way. It’s impossible to fully understand or grasp what this means practically, and I’m sure Jesus meant to be. If He’d wanted to be clearer, He would have been.

The takeaway, for me at least, is this: however we think we can “rank” or judge others, whatever we expect eternal life to be, we need to let go of those expectations, because we are certainly wrong.