23 September 2023 – 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) (Sunset Mass) | 109th World Migrant Sunday

by Fr Fabian Dicom

The Parable of the Workers in the vineyard is rather startling. The parable is so much at odds with today’s way of proceeding that people often have a very negative reaction to it. At the end of the day, the landowner gave everyone a day’s wages, even though those who had worked only a few hours. Perhaps, perhaps he realised that anything less might not enable them to feed their family for the day.

The landlord was just to those who worked all day. He was simply extremely generous to those who had only worked a few hours and in some cases, just one hour. A normal landowner would have just given an hour’s wages for an hour’s work, three hours wages for three hours work and so on. However, this was a landowner who broke the mould.

In this parable, Jesus was trying to give us a little glimpse of the ways of God. Speaking through the Prophet Isaiah in the First Reading, God declares:-

My thoughts are not your thoughts, My ways are not your ways.

Jesus is suggesting that there is something to the ways of God that seems awfully strange when placed alongside our way of doing things. Always is.

God’s favour, my dear brothers and sisters, is not distributed out based on what we have earned. And this is very important, that we need to get into our system. God is constantly gracing, God is constantly dignifying us through His Son in ways that bear no relationship to what we have done or what we have failed to do.

How we hear this parable will, to some extent, depend on those we identify in the story. If we identify with the men who worked all day, we may be tempted to feel resentful at God’s generosity towards those we consider less deserving. However, if we identify with the undeserving ones, those who were called into the field at the end of the day, we can perhaps allow ourselves to experience the thrill of divine generosity.

We think of justice in terms of what is fair, what is right or what people deserve so we would say that the people who worked longer deserved more. But God doesn’t see it that way. He doesn’t. It is very clear in the Gospel today. God thinks of justice in terms of people’s dignity. He thinks of justice in their right to a decent life. That is the criteria of God’s justice. 

The people who came late had the same right to a decent life as those who had worked all day. So they were all treated equally. Nothing is taken from anyone, nothing. They were all treated in accord with their dignity, their right to a decent life. Such is God’s justice.

How about us, my dear brothers and sisters? How are we called to share that divine generosity, that dignity that has been accorded to us unconditionally, all of us?

Let us reflect very specifically today in the context of our celebration of the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. There are those who feel just like the early workers in the parable that they had worked in the heat of the day, that they have been in Malaysia for generations and have contributed to the progress and development of the land and for the good of society. But now the others come in the last hour. Now come the migrants and the refugees. How dare they reap the same? And this is what is being spinned by certain quarters in the Malaysian scene. Unfortunately, leaders as such.

At this point, I want to stop and invite Dr Ramona, a doctor who is from this parish, medical doctor who works for Doctors without Borders, whose main focus in Malaysia has been the plight of the refugees. And she has dedicated, she’s very passionate about this mission that she has taken on for the disenfranchised and very specifically the refugees. So I will invite here to share for a while before I continue my homily.

“Hi everyone. I am Dr Ramona. I work with Doctors without Borders and we are here in Malaysia in the area of access of healthcare services for refugees and asylum seekers.

So who are refugees? Refugees are people who have had to flee their country of origin because of persecution whereby there is a threat to their life or a threat to their freedom. An asylum seeker is someone, basically a refugee, before their claims are verified by UNHCR or authorities.

So in Penang, we have a clinic and we see a lot of refugees and asylum seekers, mainly from Myanmar. Majority of them are Rohingyas. I am sure many of you have seen Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers before. They are all over the place, correct?

And I think there are a lot of things that go through our head when we see them.
Why are they here?
What are they here for?
Are they coming to steal our jobs?
They are creating a lot of problems in our countries.
But do we know the real reason they are here?

So who are the Rohingyas? The Rohingyas are a Muslim majority, ethnic group from Myanmar who has had their citizenship stripped from them. They have undergone of cycles of violence and persecution and they have had to flee their country because of that. Many of whom has actually been beaten up, they have witnessed family members being killed, witnessed their villages being burnt down, witnessed or themselves being raped. And many, despite not wanting to, choose to take the arduous journey on a boat, 300 – 400 people at one go, travelling a month at end to reach a country, a host country, to seek some form of protection.

What happens on the boat? They are subjected to the traffickers, they are given rice with a bit of chilli, perhaps two cups of water a day. Sometimes having to drink their own urine. And they make that journey to come to a host country where they come to seek greener pastures or to escape persecution.

And what happens when they actually land up in the host country, when they come to our country for example? They undergo xenophobic sentiments and they undergo a lot of challenges. Challenged in terms of their documentation status. Their basic identification is basically a question. They don’t have any access to healthcare services. So what happens when they fall sick?

They don’t have any legal rights to education. They don’t have any legal rights to work and yet they are expected to live in the country. Where are they supposed to get food to eat?

And what basically has impacted me the most working with refugees and asylum seekers is basically this,  things that I have so often taken for granted. Basic necessities and even having an identity is something that they truly yearn for. And something that is so devoid of them. So I urge you to reflect on this the next time you come across an economic migrant, a refugee or asylum seeker. And when you have questions, think of what they have gone through. Thank you”

Thank you, Dr Ramona. And that sharing is the tip of the iceberg of all that is happening in our country. So my dear brothers and sisters, to just give you some of the things that are going on still and it looks like it will for a long, long time.

So let me continue. Like Saint Paul in the Second Reading who writes from prison. I am sure that life to you is Christ, just like Saint Paul. That whatever you experience, you want to spread the name and the Gospel of Christ. I believe that is our longing. Everyone here. If that is so, the Lord shows us once again how.

Going back to the Parable, the Parable of the Good Employer defense Jesus’s special concern for the marginalised in the Jewish Society. He is the friend of the tax collectors, a friend of the prostitutes, the friend of sinners. A recurring complaint against His ministry was His association with the outcasts, an association that He never denied.

I come not to call the righteous but sinners.

So this parable, like The Prodigal Son, defends this association by appealing to the generosity of God.Just as it is possible to entitle the one on The Prodigal Son be called The Prodigal Father, so one can call the text today The Prodigal Employer.

My dear brothers and sisters. Let us pray that we too are generous, that we too are as empowering to the least of our sisters and brothers as the Lord Himself is. That the way of the Lord becomes the way of our lives.

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