Dear friends,
The landowner in today’s Gospel ends with a question, and the Greek is blunter than our English translated Bibles let on: Is your eye evil because I am good?
Pope Leo XIV was explicit this morning that the owner wanted the men who came at dawn to stand there and watch him pay the men who showed up last.
Envy is the sin nobody confesses, and today we’ll explore why that is.
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“Are you envious because I am generous?” — Matthew 20:15
The landowner in today’s Gospel asks one question at the very end, and most of our Bibles soften it. The New American Bible has him say, “Are you envious because I am generous?”
What Matthew actually wrote is stranger and more physical. The Greek runs, more or less, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”
That was not a figure of speech in first-century Galilee.
The evil eye was something people believed in and guarded their children and their fields against: the look that fell on a neighbor’s good fortune and withered it. Jesus is not accusing the men who came at dawn of holding an opinion. He is describing what their faces are doing.
The story itself takes about a minute to tell.
A landowner hires men at dawn for the usual daily wage, goes back to the marketplace at nine, at noon, at three, and once more at five, an hour before the light goes, and sends every one of them into the vineyard.
At sundown he tells his steward to pay them all the same denarius and to pay the last ones first. So the men who have worked twelve hours in the heat stand in a line and watch a man who worked one hour walk off with the exact coin they were promised, and then they get the same coin, and then they complain.
In provocative remarks this morning, Pope Leo XIV said that these men watching this ritual of being paid last despite working the hardest and the longest was the point.
