Eleventh hour

In Bukidnon a couple of decades ago, you were never sure if it was the last bus to take you to town. And so it was that to enter the bus, you would first have to hurl your bag into a window, go through the same window, and scramble for a seat. In many poor places of the world, you still see similar desperate dashes for the last trip or the last morsel or whatever it is that is precious and scarce.

In today’s Gospel, at the end of the day, the landowner grants the same compensation to those who worked at the eleventh hour and to those who had toiled the entire day. The unfairness is quite disconcerting if not for the truth that we are ourselves the people of the eleventh hour. We are the latecomers mismo, the ones referred to in the story, the recipients of “unfair” and generous grace. We got in through the window, and we made it to town.

I suspect people use this parable sometimes as an excuse or license to put things off till the last minute. Why be good now when you can repent later? Why be truthful now when you can confess later? Why be faithful now when you can make up later? Why work all day, when you can catch up later?

Of course, it is a misguided notion not only for the fact that we really don’t know what “later” means (especially when spread out before eternity). It is misguided also because it distorts the very meaning of grace, which is not a transactional commodity like compensation that can be traded for services rendered, but a mysterious gift bestowed undeservedly upon us by Someone whose ways are not our ways, whose time is not our time, whose heart is surely bigger than our hearts.

Perhaps the reason for the mess that now headlines all levels of government (from the judiciary to the legislature to the executive) is this misguided notion of the eleventh hour. Those who wield power think they can steal what rightfully belongs to the powerless because they assume, first, they are not seen; second, that they are entitled to goods that are not theirs; and third, that their actions now don’t matter at all. They bank their hopes of being redeemed on the delusion that they can wing it before the buzzer sounds the end of play. This form of gaming on grace is a gamble you can surely play in Macau. Try playing it on the tables of eternity.

The parable is not about our desperate Hail Mary three-point shots at the basket. It is not about us or what we can do or hope to get. It is about God and the utter gratuity of Paradise. It is about love and what love does or gives, about what love desires or hopes to redeem.

You don’t have to be a magnanimous landowner to understand all this. You only have to try to be human enough to love and be loved to know what a lover does or gives or suffers for a beloved who comes at the eleventh or whatever ungodly hour.

I believe it is this tunnel view of time and of who we are, among other things, this tragic myopia that multiplies the avarice and apathy of those we have trusted to lead our people. Their political lifetimes make them desperate and dangerous individuals, bent on recouping the huge investments they made to get to where they are now.

Alas, where they are now is the eleventh hour. The landowner has summoned them to work on the vineyard, but they have preferred the idleness of grafts and commissions and insertions they have never earned but feel entitled to. They are wrong to think corruption does not steal the lives and the future of our poor; they are wrong to think they are not seen, or that they are only at the noontime of their lives and that their grievous actions or inaction now against the “least of [Christ’s] brothers and sisters” can be nullified later.

The eleventh hour is not even about the last minute or the time we still have. It is not even about time. The eleventh hour covers this entire life we live now, and God’s offer of grace during these “end-times”. It is about God offering us the Way, the Truth, and the Life, right this very moment, and calling us to work on the vineyard by living a richly rewarding life dedicated to serving others.

The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ once wrote, “we are not human beings on a spiritual journey; we are spiritual beings on a human journey.” This human journey is now on its eleventh hour. There is no time to lose. Time now to take up God’s summons to the vineyard. If it means scrambling for the window of the bus that’s taking us home, just make sure the bag you’re carrying can fit through the window.

Fr. Jose Ramon T. Villarin SJ is President of Xavier University, Ateneo de Cagayan. For feedback on this column, e-mail [email protected]