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In 1976 a movie was released in this country, and towards the end of this movie, the key character in this movie keeps asking, "Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?" And he's usually alone when he asks the question. And because of the actor's subtle inflection, sometimes it's bafflement, sometimes it's defiance, sometimes it's complete rage. "Are you talking to me?" This Gospel, for many of us, is a "Are you talking to me?" Gospel. My father, who was a convert, hated this Gospel. Every Sunday when it rolled around, he would grumble the whole way home, "Terribly unfair! Unjust!" Which I think is a perfectly human, resentful, reaction.

Now be brave, there's another acronym coming up, but this one is mercifully short. It's PAY. P-A-Y. 'Cause the Gospel is about pay - "you're paying them the same thing!"

The "P" is "pause," as we have to with some of these humdinger homilies and Gospels, "pause." And then the "A" is "argue," it's perfectly OK to argue with the Lord - great saints argued with Christ; at least we're talking to Him. And the "Y" is "yield," yield, accept, give in. That's not cowardly when you're yielding to our Lord.

OK, so as usual, first of all when I looked at my schedule and saw that the Sunday that we'd be together, I would have this Gospel, I said out loud, "Ugh! Ugh!" 'Cause it's difficult! But luckily, I have my (when I have to pause and do some homework), I have these three books of contemporary, solid Catholic Bible experts, and each of them examines the Gospels. I went to each of the three books for this Gospel. That's my first pause - "let me see what the experts say - what's our Lord talking about?" And evidently these scripture scholars say our Lord is talking about two things. Number 1 - you remember, because most of you have been listening to this material since you were kids, you remember how the constant carping criticism of Christ for that entire three years of his life was that he hangs out with sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers (physical and moral); he was always getting ferocious flak about hanging out with the outcasts. Always! And what the Lord was trying to say to His disciples - good women and men who had been loyal and had been with Him for three years and listening - He's saying, "You know I'm getting a lot of criticism about these latecomers being made welcome. What I'm trying to do, I'm trying to give these prostitutes and tax collectors and lowlifes who messed up their moral lives and trying to give them the same amount of Good News (that's what "Gospel" means) that I'm giving to you good people. I want them to get the same Good News - there is a God who hears you, prayer is not wasted, you're going to live forever, if you repent you're forgiven - I want them to hear it!" These latecomers who are coming in at 5:00, so to speak.

And the second subtext that our Lord is preparing his apostles for is, once the Jews have been preached to (once our Lord has spent three years instructing the Jews), they're going to go out to the Goys- us! The Goyim, the Gentiles. And a Jewish person would be understandably outraged by that! In the way, "Wait a minute! Are you talking to me? We Jews have carried the 10 Commandments for 2,000 years - tough, tough moral laws that none of these other desert Semitic tribes are paying attention to! We Jews have gone on believing in one God, and they have 26 and a half Gods - and you're going to (after 2,000 years we have been in the vineyard and borne the heat) you're going to give it to these Goys? Gentiles?" Our Lord is going to - you and me. First to the Jews, and then to the rest of the world. And He's saying, "Don't get mad at me, because I have a generous heart."

OK, well when I used to teach religion to seniors at a Catholic High School, and we did the Gospels, when I got to this Gospel (and I didn't have my three expert books!) I thought how could I make it connect without this outrageous, irritating talk that Jesus gives? How can I make it connect? And I brought in a painting by Picasso. Now, this painting has recognizable human beings in it. It doesn't have a floating mackerel in the sky and a little eye oscillating in the ooze - "How dare you criticize Picasso?" I'm not! (Laughter!). I'm simply saying that it has three recognizable human beings. And it's in his blue period (literally), and they're on a beach (these three people in the painting). Two adults (one male, one female), and they've got their arms locked under them like this - two adults (gestures), and they're gazing almost with ferocity at the ground. Not looking at each other, not looking at anything, just the ground - the sand. And behind them, this deep, translucent blue ocean. Everything blue. Standing near them is a younger person, and his right foot looks like he's about to move (the other is rooted in the sand), and his hand is stretched out to them. That's it. And when I would teach this Gospel, I'd ask the seniors, "Give the painting a title." And my last year of teaching, a senior guy gave me the title that I personally liked the best out of all of them. He said, "I think the painting is saying, 'Will you guys look up and listen? Will you look at me and listen?'" That's what that younger person thought - I like that. That's the best. That's what our Lord does when He sometimes says outrageous things. And we mustn't pat Him on the head, "Nice Jesus, you really don't know about real life." No, He does. He does. And He's outrageously irritating today because He wants them to look up and listen. Outcasts aren't going to be outcasts to Jesus, and Gentiles are going to be welcome, even if they come in awful late.

Now Thomas Aquinas, who can't be accused of being a hip liberal, way back in the thirteenth century, says, "When you hear a Gospel," he doesn't say, "Go to scholarly books!" He says, "Try to relate it to something in your own life, your own heart." So when I realized I had this humdinger of a Gospel, I went to my landlord and his wife. I live on the property of a married couple, and they are building a vineyard. Big one, right next to this little apartment that I have (and I live there, rent-free)! And they've been building this vineyard for months, and those workers! Gosh - I mean, the heat of the day; but I thought, "Well, Thomas Aquinas says, 'make it relevant!'" So I went to the landlord, David, and I said, "David, I want you to help me with an experiment. Now, I've been watching these guys work in your vineyard in the heat for weeks. And you pay them every Friday with a white envelope - you give each of the workers a white envelope on Friday around 5:00. What I'm going to do, is around 4:00, since I live right on the property, I'm going to come out in a loud voice, and I'm going to say 'David, give me something to do!' And you'll say all right, and you'll hand me some kind of a can and I'll water some plants. And at 5:00, when they're all gathered for their white envelopes, I will join them - and I will open my envelope as they do theirs, and I'll hold up the same amount of cash! To make it relevant!" And he said, "I don't think so!" (Laughter!) Talk about the old and the handicapped! (Laughter!)

The second thing of PAY is "A" - "argue." God became man so we could dialogue and even argue. When you're arguing with Christ, at least you're talking to Him. And the argument my father used to have, grumbling and grouching all the way home, every Sunday this Gospel came up was, "It's so unfair!" Trying to turn it into a tract on labor relations - "It's so unfair!" Now, I bring up my father with some diffidence, because when I used to sit out there in high school and college and grammar school, and some priest would get up and talk about his parents - his dad and his mom - I used to sit in my seat and swivel down and snarl and snort, because his parents (all these priests parents!) seemed to have stepped out of the Waltons! Mama Walton, Daddy Walton, the little Waltons - the ideal WASP couple! Loving, understanding, sagacious and kind. And I thought, "Nothing like my family!" And I bring it up because my father, who so virulently objected to this Gospel, was the kindest, funniest man - he really was. He was a widower, my brother and I were little kids when my mother died, and this widower brought us two guys up together by himself. But he was also a hopeless alcoholic - he was not Daddy Walton. And when he died (and the reason I'm dragging my poor father into this talk is that he died this week in September in 1961) we had just had this Gospel! In that little Church way upstate New York. And I got the phone call from my brother, and I went to the Pastor, I want to say his name out loud, (you don't know him, but I want to honor him), his name was John Caldwell. He was a great priest for a scared, young, green priest to have as a Pastor - kind and just great. And he said, "I'll drive you to New York," (and it was 100 miles down the parkway) "so you can handle the death duties, and stuff." And I was completely distracted and disassociated, and he asked, "What's the matter?" "My Dad died drunk," I said. He said, "Well, what was the point of the Gospel about Jesus and the latecomers and the vineyard?" I said, "I don't know! I don't want to talk about a Gospel - how can you bring Jesus into this!" (Laughter!) I realize now, in a way, that's what I was muttering! And then I remember Fr. Caldwell banged the steering wheel a couple of times on the highway, and he said, "The point of the vineyard Gospel is that Jesus was generous with mercy! And I want you to keep saying it, 'Jesus is generous with mercy,' and say it for the next three days!" And I think that's the point, so in a year from now if you're sitting hearing this Gospel - Jesus is generous with mercy.

Flannery O'Connor, that writer I keep talking about, she was a great, great short story writer. She was born a Catholic in the South - Georgia. And she had a friend who had became a Catholic, another Southerner. And this friend, who had just been baptized a Catholic, these two ladies (Flannery and her friend) were talking over iced tea, and the friend said, "I'm glad to be baptized a Roman," (Roman Catholic!) "But I must say that priest who instructed me in the Gospels, well I come from a very strict Southern, fundamentalist Protestant denomination, very strict! And all this priest in your Catholic Church talks about was Jesus' mercy! Jesus loves us! Jesus forgives us! I think he overdid that whole thing about Jesus' mercy." And Flannery O'Connor put her iced tea down with a "clink!" and said, "Don't knock it, honey, until you need it." And that said to me so much good theology.

Finally, we're up to "Y" - "yield." Give in. "OK, you're the Lord." In the Gospel today, at the very end, when our Lord is talking to the understandably angry worker, our Lord says the words (in the story), "My friend," he says to the grouch. Now, you and I use that term all the time, especially if you don't know somebody's name, "How are you doing, my friend!" But not in our Lord's language, and not in the Greek. It's very tender, very personal, very direct, and very intimate - my friend. So this landowner is very gentle with the understandably irritated worker, "My friend, don't get mad at me, I just want to be generous." Don't forget how much flak our Lord got for welcoming the sinners, the outcasts, the pariahs, and the moral and physical lepers. They used to snap at our Lord's disciples, "Your Master hangs out," (that's really what it means in Greek!) "with sinners, He even eats with them!" And finally, when our Lord is dying, He is hanging between two felons. These aren't two little pickpockets who steal stuff from Woolworth's, these are major-league felons, criminals, but one of them is touched by Jesus' courage and gentleness, and he says, "Lord, remember me when you come into Your Kingdom," this lug says to the Lord. You remember how our Lord turns immediately to him, both of them in awful pain, our Lord says, "This day you'll be with Me in paradise." Now if I were St. John, the one apostle who stayed with Jesus until the end, standing there and I overheard this bit of dialogue, I would have said, "What! I've been staying with You through three years in the heat and the criticism, and this lug gets to heaven in an hour!" And the Gospel ends with our Lord saying, "And the last will be first." He's the last guy you'd think would get right to heaven (this felon, this lug) and he's the first canonized Saint. "Yeah, are you talking to me?"

One of you lent me a video of my favorite novel, which I mention a lot, called Brideshead Revisited. It's a novel by a Catholic convert to the Church. And it's about a lot of Catholics who wander out of the vineyard. And at the end, one of them who have been bitterly against the Church and the sacraments and everything that we could call Catholic spirituality, he's dying. It looks like he's in a coma. His Catholic relatives are kneeling around the bed at the end of the book (and the video, which one of you lent me), and the old dying man who's been out of the vineyard for too long was played by Lawrence Olivier, who may have been the greatest actor of our time, but he was old, too. And he's lying in bed, seemingly in a coma and they're praying. There's an atheist kneeling around the bed, an atheist, and he says something like, "Oh God, if there is a God, give us some sign that something has reached this dying man." And as the scene closes, Olivier, seemingly in a coma, does this (gestures). And I thought - that's the guy coming in at 5:00 in the afternoon.

OK, so much for all this wonderful mystery of Jesus' mercy. On Tuesday, I was being given a ride in the car, and thinking about this Gospel (and this really is the end!). I was thinking, "OK all right, all right. The latecomers get in, OK." I remembered the other Gospel, where our Lord says, "In His father's mansion, there are many rooms." And I thought, this week - Tuesday! - "OK, many rooms and all these Johnny-come-latelies, these latecomers, these 5 o'clockers, they all get into the mansion. All right, OK, be generous. BUT! I have been a very good little boy all my life!" (Laughter!) "I joined the seminary at 15, I never missed a day of work, I've kept all my vows, and here I am - a bald, old geezer, practically broke. Now, if there are many rooms, I presume these latecomers, who wasted their lives in sin and wanton license, they get a basement! And I have a celestial condominium, with a great view. They get black and white TV, I get state-of-the-art DVD." And that's how I feel! Right now, even! (Laughter!)

Got to be a couple of people at our Mass, this Mass this afternoon, who have been called back into the vineyard at some point in your life - have to be a few.