October 4, 2026: Get to Work

Get to Work

Do you remember that book from a few years ago called The Five Love Languages? 

For a while, it seemed like that book was absolutely everywhere. You would meet someone and, before you knew it, the conversation would turn to “So, what's your love language?” 

If you’re not familiar with it, the book says that there are five basic ways that people tend to give and receive love: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. 

A couple of years ago, some friends and I were talking about love languages, and I realized that I had no idea what mine was. So, I took one of those online quizzes. And much to my surprise, it said that my love language was physical touch. And I thought, “Well, that can’t be right.” I don't particularly like people getting into my personal space and I'm not especially fond of being touched. So, I took the quiz again. And I got the same result. I took it again. Same result. Eventually, I had to accept that apparently physical touch is my love language. 

Now, it might sound a bit odd to talk about God’s love language, but it’s a helpful way to think about today’s reading. In a sense, this is what the reading is about. God’s love language is gift giving, and ours is acts of service (what we do with those gifts). 

In telling this story, Matthew draws on the imagery from our first reading in Isaiah. But there is an important difference between Isaiah's vineyard and Matthew's. In Isaiah, the problem is with the vineyard itself. God plants a vineyard, cares for it, does everything necessary to make it fruitful—and instead it produces wild grapes. 

But in Matthew, the vineyard is not the problem – it’s the tenants that were entrusted with the vineyard. When the owner sent his servants, and then his son, the tenants refused to give the owner his share of the produce and killed those he sent to collect it. 

We might initially think they did this because they’re greedy and want to keep everything for themselves. But I suspect that the problem lies elsewhere. Maybe they refused to hand over the produce because there was none. God made them stewards of the land and they did absolutely nothing with it. They refused to do the work of tending the vineyard, and so it produced only wild and inedible grapes. Like the first son in last week’s reading, the tenants initially said “yes” but then they refused to do the work. The problem isn’t simply that they were lazy; it’s that they didn’t love the owner of the vineyard. 

Notice how much the owner has done for the tenants: he plants the vineyard, puts a fence around it, digs a winepress, and he builds a tower. He prepares everything they could possibly need, and then he entrusts the vineyard to them as a lavish gift. But instead of being faithful stewards of that gift, they take it for granted and refuse to do the work necessary to produce fruit. 

This is where I think the image of a love language becomes helpful. In Jesus’ Jewish tradition, obedience to God's commandments wasn't simply about following a list of rules. The commandments were a way of loving God. In this tradition, all of life is understood to be an act of worship. Ordinary things—how you treat your neighbor, how you conduct your business, how you care for the vulnerable, how you lived your daily life—are all ways of loving God. One of my favorite scripture scholars, Jon Levenson, puts it this way. the commandments are “the words of the language of love.” It isn't a choice between law and love, but rather living in accord with God’s law is how we express our love of God. In other words, love becomes something you do. And I think that is exactly what Jesus is getting at in the parable.   

It is a remarkable image of God's generosity toward us. God gives us a world filled with gifts. Our lives are gifts. Our abilities are gifts. Our relationships, possessions, opportunities, and even creation itself, are all gifts. The vineyard represents everything God has placed into our hands. And then God says: “Here. Take care of this. Make something beautiful with it. Let it bear fruit.” 

But, too easily, we become like the tenants in our story. We take God’s gifts for granted and we refuse to do the work. We refuse to be stewards of the vineyard God has given us. At its very heart, stewardship means recognizing that everything we have ultimately belongs to God and it has only been entrusted to us to for kingdom work. Our time. Our talents. Our possessions, relationships, families, and our parish. These are all parts of the vineyard that God has placed in our care.  You see, Jesus is making the radical claim that, ultimately, none of these things are ours to do with as we please. They are gifts entrusted to us, and the big question is what we do with them.   

Using our gifts – working in the vineyard – is our gratitude in action. It’s how we live our thankfulness for God’s graciousness. In other words, stewardship is our love language. Love isn't simply a feeling in our hearts. It isn't simply something we say with our mouths. Love becomes real in the work we do. It becomes real in the way we care for one another, in how we use our time and our abilities, and how we serve our families, our neighbors, our parish, and the people who need us. 

Our work is our love. It is our worship. Working in the Vineyard is what we’re made for and our very best life or, as Fr Kevin might put it, our joyous life is when we’re at work in the vineyards, caring for the vines God has entrusted to us. 

But there is a warning here. Parables aren’t simply nice stories with a moral at the end, like Aesop’s fables. Jesus tells parables to wake us up. To cut through all the excuses and self-deceptions we use to avoid challenges that would make us uncomfortable and require us to change. And this parable does exactly that. 

The tenants were given the vineyard. They were entrusted with something that ultimately belongs to someone else, and they forget that. Whatever the reason, they stopped being stewards. 

This should give us pause, because at the end of our reading, Jesus says: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” Those are hard words. Because it is tempting for us to hear this parable and immediately think about someone else. We think about the people who rejected Jesus. The people who didn't understand him. The people who weren't faithful. But if we do that, we will miss the point. The parable isn't primarily about judging “those people.” It is a mirror. And when we look into that mirror, the question becomes much more personal. 

We are the Church and we have been entrusted with the vineyard. In addition to our time, talents, and treasures, we have received the Gospel, the sacraments, and the Scriptures. We have received an extraordinary abundance of gifts, but we must do the work. 

Being a Christian and going to mass, don’t automatically mean that we are producing the fruit God desires. We need to ask ourselves, “What kind of fruit is my life producing?” And that’s a much harder question. It requires us to examine our actual lives. Not our intentions, not the people we imagine ourselves to be, and not the people we hope to be one day. But the people we actually are and the lives we’re actually living, right now. What fruit is growing there? Are the people around me experiencing my patience, my kindness, my generosity, forgiveness, and compassion? Are my time, talents, and treasure – in short, everything God has given me – being used as gifts for other people? Or have I quietly started to believe that the vineyard belongs to me and me alone? 

This is our challenge: God has given us a vineyard. It’s our families, our workplaces, our friends, the neighborhoods where we live, the people we'll encounter at the grocery store this week, and this parish. These are the vineyards that God has placed are your care. All of them were given so that they could bear fruit—for God and for one another. 

So, this week: find your place in the vineyard; get to work; and tell God you love him through your acts of service.