Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time · Year A · Matthew 20:1-16a
The workers in the vineyard
For Sunday, September 20, 2026
This is the one that makes kids mad, which is why it is a good one to start on. A man hires workers at dawn and promises them a fair day's pay. He hires more at nine, at noon, at three, and then a last group at five in the afternoon with barely an hour of light left. At the end of the day he pays them all the same.
The ones who worked since dawn are not imagining the unfairness. They really did work twelve hours for what somebody else got for one. Jesus does not tell them they are wrong to notice. He tells them they are looking at the wrong thing. The owner did not take anything from them. He gave something extra to somebody else, and that felt like theft.
I think that is worth sitting with before you correct a child who says it is not fair, because it is not fair. That is the point. Grace is not payroll. The ones who worked all day got the denarius (the coin of the day) they earned. The ones who came at 5PM got the same pay, with less work. And that's the parable.
Five minutes at the table
- If you worked all day and somebody who came at five got paid the same, would you be angry? Be honest.
- Has anyone ever been generous to somebody else in a way that bothered you?
- Is there anything you think you have earned from God?
Class discussion topics
Sept 16 — Classes begin. Parents join the first fifteen minutes. Connect Chapter 1, Pentecost and the Apostles' Mission.
“What do you expect from yourself this year?”
That was the first question Wednesday night, and parents answered it too. Before you left, you wrote down what you expect of yourself this year in helping your child toward Confirmation, and handed it to me. I keep those. The kids answered the same question, then two more: what do we expect from each other, and what do they expect from me. That becomes the class covenant, on the wall all year.
The landowner in Sunday's Gospel asks the grumbling workers one question. “Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?” They had. They were angry anyway, because they were watching what somebody else got. A covenant is what you agree to expect of yourself. The parable is about people who kept their side of it and still could not stand the generosity going on next to them.
The lesson itself is the Acts of the Apostles, the Church spreading out from the Upper Room. Paul came last. He spent the early years hunting Christians, and he says it himself: the least of the apostles. The Landowner paid him the full day.
Some years the class picks up a new kid midway, or toward the end of the year. They aren't late either. And some years a kid stops coming altogether. That is all right too. Nobody should show up to get hired if they don't want to work. The landowner asks. He does not drag anyone in.
One more. The landowner does not wait for workers to come to him. He goes out to the marketplace, five times in one day. That is the Acts of the Apostles in a sentence. Nobody stayed in the Upper Room.
If your child comes home saying nothing else, this is the one to ask about: which one was Paul, the dawn worker or the five o'clock one?
We will see this landowner again. Matthew brings him back in the Gospel reading on October 4.