The Eleventh Hour, the Mystery of Readiness, and the Theology of Synergy in Matthew 20:1–16

Jean Khoury

Summary: This article offers a sustained reading of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16), taking as its point of departure a question that the text itself seems to provoke: why does the landowner appear only to discover the eleventh-hour workers at the end of the day, as though he had overlooked them earlier? Working outward from this question, the article argues that the parable’s dramatic structure — the landowner’s repeated goings-out — discloses a theology of vocation in which the decisive movement is always the Master’s initiative. It then draws the parable into conversation with the Abrahamic narrative, in which the interval between promise and fulfilment is shown to belong to the promise rather than to interrupt it; with the patristic theology of synergy, according to which one may be occupied without yet being spiritually “hired”; with the Johannine theology of the Father’s continuous work, in which the Son does only what he sees the Father doing; with Saint Luke’s account of the boy Jesus in the Temple, read through Saint John of the Cross’s judgement that the Father’s work is redemption; and finally with Ezekiel’s oracle against the false shepherds, in which God’s promise to shepherd his own sheep is fulfilled not by the abolition of human shepherds but by their transformation into transparent instruments of his care. The whole is drawn together into a single governing distinction: the difference between working for God and working with God, and the practical consequences this distinction carries for discernment, spiritual direction, and priestly and lay formation.

Introduction

The parable of the labourers in the vineyard is deceptively simple. A landowner goes out at dawn to hire workers, returns to the marketplace at the third, sixth and ninth hours to hire more, and finally, at the eleventh hour — with only one hour of the working day remaining — finds still others standing idle. “And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing; and he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’” (Matthew 20:6). Read quickly, the landowner’s question can sound almost like an admission of oversight, as though he had simply failed to notice these men during the earlier hours of the day. But this reading does not survive contact with the text. The parable does not mean that the landowner literally overlooked them. The repeated goings-out belong to the deliberate dramatic architecture of the parable: dawn, the third hour, the sixth, the ninth, and finally the eleventh (Matthew 20:1–6). The men found at the eleventh hour are presented, quite simply, as those who have remained outside the vineyard almost until the day’s end.

What is genuinely interesting is not the landowner’s question but the workers’ answer. Asked why they have stood idle all day, they reply: “Because no one has hired us” (Matthew 20:7). This single sentence reorients the whole scene. The men are not saying, “We refused to work.” They are saying, in effect, “We have been available, but nobody has called us.” The parable leaves deliberately open the question of why they were still standing there — whether they had been passed over by other employers, had arrived later than the rest, or were simply among those whom nobody had chosen. What matters is that they remain available to be called, and that it is the landowner, not they, who determines when that call comes.

This opening observation is the seed of everything that follows. Read carefully, Matthew 20:1–16 is not primarily a parable about lateness, nor a simple moral encouragement not to delay. It is a parable about the structure of vocation itself: about the relationship between human readiness and divine initiative, about the difference between mere activity and the will’s true correspondence with the Holy Spirit, and about the nature of the work into which the labourer is called — which is, at bottom, nothing less than participation in the Father’s own work of redemption. This article traces that argument through six further movements: the mystery of readiness as it appears in the Abrahamic narrative; the patristic theology of synergy and the distinction between working for God and working with God; the Johannine theology of the Father’s continuous work; the hidden life of Jesus as formation in the Father’s redemptive work; the art of listening by which the disciple passes from servant to friend; and Ezekiel’s oracle on the shepherds, which shows what it means for God himself to “take care” of his sheep through those he has properly hired.

I. The Landowner’s Repeated Goings-Out: The Priority of the Call

There is something notable in the Greek of the landowner’s question that a translation can easily flatten: τί ὧδε ἑστήκατε ὅλην τὴν ἡμέραν ἀργοί; — literally, “Why have you stood here idle the whole day?” The emphasis does not fall on the landowner’s failure to see them; it falls on the astonishing fact that they have spent the whole day outside the vineyard. Nor does he ask the question we might expect: “Why did you not come and ask me for work?” He asks only, “Why do you stand here idle?” — and when they answer, “Because no one has hired us,” he responds at once: “You go into the vineyard too” (Matthew 20:7).

This exchange is characteristic of the theology of the whole parable. The decisive movement is not primarily from the worker towards the vineyard but from the landowner towards the worker. The vineyard is entered because the master calls, not because the labourer petitions or earns his way in. Understood in this light, the eleventh-hour workers can represent all those who seem, from a human point of view, to have arrived extraordinarily late in the spiritual life. The parable refuses to treat their late arrival as evidence that their vocation is insignificant. On the contrary: the master continues to go out searching for workers until the very end of the day.

The phrase “all day” sharpens the poignancy of the scene, because it exposes two entirely different perspectives held together in a single moment. From the workers’ side, the whole day appears to have been wasted in waiting. From the master’s side, there is still time for them to enter the vineyard. Their day appears finished; the master does not consider their story finished. This is precisely the theological point the parable reaches at its conclusion: “So the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). The kingdom does not operate according to a calculation of how long someone has laboured. It operates according to the generosity of the One who calls. God’s calling, in other words, is not exhausted by the opportunities we imagine ourselves to have missed. He can come to us at the eleventh hour and still say, “You go into the vineyard too.”

II. Readiness and Promise: The Abrahamic Paradigm

The parable’s refusal to equate lateness with wasted time opens onto a further and equally important consideration: the mystery of readiness. Standing near the vineyard for years is not the same thing as being ready to enter it. A person may remain for a long time in a certain place, hear a great deal, even desire God in some real sense, and yet not possess the interior readiness that a particular call requires. The delay, in that case, is not necessarily wasted time; it can be a period of preparation whose meaning becomes intelligible only when the call finally arrives.

Abraham furnishes the great biblical paradigm of this principle. The promise is given to him long before its fulfilment. He is shown the land but does not immediately possess it; the divine promise instead opens a long history of preparation that will span not his own lifetime but the lifetime of generations. Genesis 15 already situates Abraham’s descendants within a history that will pass through prolonged subjection before the return to the land: “your descendants shall be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and shall be servants there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13). Only afterwards will they return. And even the Exodus itself is not the arrival at the goal: the crossing of the Red Sea is a passage out of slavery, not yet entry into the fullness of the inheritance. Then comes the wilderness, Sinai and the giving of the Law, the formation of the people, the conquest and settlement of Canaan, the period of the judges, and only then the monarchy.

It is worth pausing on a still sharper point: Abraham himself never sees the Temple. The promise given to him is larger than his own life. It is Solomon, not Abraham, who builds the Temple, centuries later. If the Temple is understood as the climactic sign of God’s dwelling in the midst of his people, then the fulfilment of what begins with Abraham unfolds across a span of time far greater than the individual who first received the promise. There is, then, a real distinction between being shown a destination and being prepared to possess it. God can reveal something long before he gives it; the interval is not an interruption of the promise but belongs to the promise itself.

This gives a controlling principle for reading the eleventh-hour workers: the length of time spent standing should not automatically be read as evidence of wasted time. God may be preparing a person precisely during what looks, from the outside, like inactivity. The decisive question is not, “How long have I been standing here?” but, “Am I now ready to hear the word by which God calls me into the vineyard?” Yet this principle must immediately be held together with a second and equally essential one, or readiness risks being turned into a human achievement. The workers do not determine the hour of their own calling. The landowner goes out; the landowner sees; the landowner calls. The eleventh-hour worker cannot say, “I have finally made myself ready, and therefore I have earned the call.” He remains dependent on the master’s initiative, which could have come earlier and comes now instead.

Abraham’s own story guards against reducing this to a programme of human self-preparation, since Abraham does not manufacture the promise: God comes to him first. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). His entire journey begins because God speaks; the preparation that follows is itself contained within a prior act of grace. There is, then, a profound complementarity here rather than a competition between two explanations: God’s sovereignty determines the hour, while human readiness determines whether the call, once given, can be received and obeyed — and even that readiness is itself part of the preparation God has been accomplishing all along. Scripture consistently presents spiritual maturation this way, as a process rather than an instantaneous arrival: Israel must become a people before it can receive the fullness of its vocation, and the wilderness is therefore not merely a delay between Egypt and Canaan but part of the very formation of Israel. A person may spend years “outside the vineyard” and then receive a call that appears, from the outside, to come very late — while God has in fact been preparing that person throughout those years. Conversely, someone may stand near the vineyard for a long time without being inwardly ready to respond. What looks like delay may conceal an invisible work of preparation, because God knows when the person is ready, precisely because God knows what he intends to accomplish through that person. The eleventh hour is not God’s second-best moment; it may be exactly the hour he has chosen — and the worker at that hour may be entering a vineyard whose harvest extends far beyond his own portion of the day, since the divine sovereignty governs not only when God calls a person but what historical and spiritual work he intends to accomplish through the call.

III. Working Without Working: The Theology of Synergy

A further and quite distinct consideration now enters. The men in the parable are, after all, ordinary labourers — people whose trade is work. This allows the text to be read through the lens of what the Greek Fathers called synergy: our cooperation with the Holy Spirit, our hand placed in the hand of the Spirit, working with God. On this reading, “working” in the parable is not simply labour in the generic sense; it is correspondence with the Holy Spirit, with the grace of God. One can, in this sense, be genuinely working — in the ordinary meaning of the word — without yet working in the spiritual sense, because to work in the vine means to work in the kingdom, answering the Spirit’s promptings, guidance and movements. To be “idle,” then, does not necessarily mean that the eleventh-hour workers were doing nothing at all. It means that they had not yet been hired into the vineyard.

This distinction is confirmed by Christ’s own words to the apostles: “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). The priority belongs entirely to him. It is this same recognition — that it is Jesus who initiates, and not we who engineer our own vocation — that Saint Ignatius of Loyola describes as a kind of awakening: the sudden realisation that it is Jesus who is calling, which in turn requires that I become detached from the project of my own vocation. I do not own my vocation. I am not engineering it. I am not the one who guides; I am the one who replies, who answers God’s initiative and follows what he says.

A close parallel appears in Jesus’ teaching on worship. The true worship he announces to the Samaritan woman is worship neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23) — that is, in the Son and with the Holy Spirit. If we are not in the Son and in the Spirit, we may be physically worshipping while nothing is truly happening within us. This is precisely why the Church’s liturgical tradition, in every rite, repeatedly issues the invitation to lift up our hearts: unless the heart is lifted, we are not truly present to what is taking place. Saint Teresa of Ávila makes exactly this point about vocal prayer. She does not reject vocal prayer — quite the contrary; she insists on it and teaches it explicitly through her exposition of the Our Father. But she is equally clear that for the prayer to be wholesome, to be truly at work, it must be prayed in spirit and in truth: the soul must be immersed in God, and in God, for the vocal prayer to be complete.

On this reading, then, “Why have you been standing here idle the whole day?” can be heard as: not yet converted, not yet corresponding to the Holy Spirit. Saint Teresa’s own life illustrates the point with particular clarity: for some nineteen or twenty years before what she herself describes as her deeper conversion, she was not yet, so to speak, hired in the vineyard, because she had not yet placed herself totally in the hands of Jesus. This suggests that the parable’s “hiring” can be understood, spiritually, as an image of what may be called the second conversion.

This spiritual reading calls for one careful clarification. ἀργοί (‘idle’, ‘unemployed’, ‘without work’) does not lexically mean ‘unconverted’; the spiritual sense arises only from understanding what ‘working in the vineyard’ signifies within the wider biblical theology of vocation, grace and the kingdom. Yet the parable itself invites the move: the men are precisely workers, standing in the marketplace because they are available for work, yet not yet brought into the vineyard. There is, in other words, a real distinction between being a worker in the ordinary sense and being a worker in the vineyard — and this is exactly the distinction that opens onto the theology of synergy proper. In the Eastern Fathers, συνεργία describes the cooperation of human freedom with divine grace: not two independent contributions to salvation, but grace with priority — God initiates, enables and sustains; human freedom truly responds. Saint Paul gives this its classical formula: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13). ‘Work out’ and ‘God is at work’ belong together.

To work in the vineyard, on this account, is not to perform religious activities; it is to participate in the work God himself is already accomplishing — to correspond to the Holy Spirit, to receive his promptings, to allow oneself to be guided by him. This gives rise to one of the great paradoxes of the spiritual life: a person can be extremely active, and yet, spiritually speaking, be idle. He can preach, organise, teach, evangelise, pray, build institutions and undertake apostolic projects, and sincerely believe that he is working for God, while the initiative remains, in fact, his own. He may be working for God without working with God — active in the vineyard in an external sense while remaining, in the deeper sense, outside the movement taking place within it. This is why the discovery that “you did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16) is so decisive: the disciple does not begin by designing his vocation and asking God to bless it; he receives a call. In the parable, likewise, the workers do not hire themselves. They are hired. The spiritual life begins not with the construction of a project but with the reception of an initiative.

This is the true meaning of the second conversion. A first conversion may bring a person into the Christian life, into faith, sacramental practice and the ordinary observance of religion; but a profound difference can remain between practising Christianity and truly surrendering to the initiative of Christ. One can be a Christian, pray, work, and engage apostolically, while remaining, in substance, the organiser of one’s own spiritual life. The second conversion occurs when a person discovers that the Christian life is not principally a project he constructs for God but a life he receives from God — when he no longer says, “This is my project for God,” but begins instead to ask, “What is God doing, and how am I being invited to correspond to it?” This is exactly the movement Ignatian discernment names as its starting point: the awakening to God’s initiative, by which a person becomes gradually detached from the idea that his vocation is his own possession. I do not own my vocation; I receive it. I do not engineer it; I discern it. I do not direct it; I follow the One who calls.

Read this way, the eleventh-hour workers should not be understood simply as people who have done nothing with their lives — the text says only that they have not been hired (Matthew 20:7). The decisive issue is not activity versus inactivity but whose initiative governs the activity. A person can spend twenty years doing things for God and then discover he has never truly surrendered the direction of his life to God; another may appear to have done very little outwardly while undergoing, in fact, a profound interior preparation for a genuine vocation. This is precisely the trajectory of Teresa of Ávila’s own account of her early religious life: years of sincere religious practice held in tension with an incomplete surrender, until a decisive interior change made everything that had preceded it into preparation for a deeper response. The image of the vine in John 15 gives this its fullest expression: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The ultimate distinction, then, is not between activity and inactivity but between abiding and not abiding. One can perform many actions, even religious actions, without abiding; the fruit of the vine comes only from participation in the life of the vine.

IV. “My Father Is Working Still”: The Johannine Theology of the Father’s Work

This same distinction receives its deepest grounding in Saint John’s Gospel, where Jesus himself defines the nature of his own action. After healing on the Sabbath, he says: “My Father is working still, and I am working” (John 5:17). Jesus does not defend his action merely by exempting himself from the Sabbath law; he reveals the very nature of his action. The Father’s work is continuous — God’s rest is not inactivity, but the Father is perpetually accomplishing his work, and the Son participates perfectly in it. He goes on to explain his own mode of acting in terms that could hardly be more direct: “The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). The Son’s work is not self-generated activity; it is perfect correspondence. This is exactly what makes Christian ‘work’, rightly understood, radically different from ordinary human productivity: the first question is not “What can I accomplish?” but “What is the Father doing?” The Son sees the Father’s action and enters into it, so that his activity becomes the earthly manifestation of the Father’s action. This is why he can say, further, “I can do nothing on my own authority” (John 5:30), and again, “I do nothing on my own authority, but speak thus as the Father taught me” (John 8:28). The Son’s human activity is entirely transparent to the divine initiative; his humanity becomes the instrument and manifestation of what the Father is doing.

This gives a remarkable depth to the prayer Jesus himself teaches: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Heaven is not merely the place where God’s will is known; it is where it is perfectly accomplished. The petition therefore asks that what is perfectly realised in heaven become perfectly realised on earth — that earth become the reflection of heaven. This is exactly what Jesus does: he does on earth what he sees the Father doing, and his earthly existence becomes the visible expression of the Father’s invisible will. To be hired into the vineyard, understood in this light, is not simply to receive a task; it is to be brought into the work already being done by the Father and the Son. The vineyard is already active before the labourer arrives — the Father is working, the Son is working, the Holy Spirit is working — and the disciple is not asked to invent a second work alongside God’s; he is invited to enter into the work God is already accomplishing. Synergy, on this account, is not God waiting for us to devise a project and then helping us to carry it out; it is the reverse. God is already acting; grace precedes us; the Spirit is already moving; and the disciple’s vocation is to recognise, receive and cooperate with what God is already doing.

This also clarifies what “working with the Holy Spirit” actually means: not merely that the Spirit strengthens us to accomplish our own plans, but that the Spirit reveals and communicates God’s initiative, and we consent to become instruments of it. “Thy will be done” is therefore not a passive resignation — “whatever happens, I accept it” — but an active conformity of freedom to the divine initiative: let your will become the principle of my action, let what you are doing in heaven become the pattern of my action on earth. Jesus states the same reality still more directly: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). Will and work are inseparable here: the work is not Jesus’ private project but “his work”, the Father’s work, which Jesus receives, sees, does and brings to completion. The worker hired into the vineyard, then, is not simply given employment; he is given participation in the Master’s own work — and the second conversion can accordingly be described with still greater precision as the passage from doing good things for God to participating in what God himself is doing: from asking, “Lord, what can I do for you?” to asking, “Lord, what are you doing, and may I enter into it?” The measure of spiritual work is therefore not quantity of activity but degree of correspondence: someone can be extraordinarily active and yet, in the deepest sense, idle, if the activity does not proceed from God’s initiative; and the smallest action performed in profound correspondence with God’s will can be authentic participation in the divine work.

V. “About My Father’s Things”: The Hidden Life as Formation in Redemption

The Johannine theology of the Father’s continuous work finds a vivid narrative counterpart in the Lucan account of the finding in the Temple. When Mary and Joseph discover the twelve-year-old Jesus among the teachers and ask, “Why have you done this to us?”, he replies: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). The underlying Greek, ἐν τοῖς τοῦ πατρός μου — literally “in the things of my Father” — allows a more dynamic rendering than “my Father’s house” alone: to be occupied with, concerned with, engaged in the Father’s affairs. Reworded, then, Jesus’ reply can be heard as: I am at the Father’s work. Saint John of the Cross, commenting on this scene, identifies that work precisely: the Father’s work is redemption.

This yields a striking and consequential reading of the hidden years at Nazareth. It is not, at the deepest level, Joseph who teaches the Eternal Son how to become a carpenter; it is the Eternal Father, through the Eternal Son, who teaches the human nature of Jesus how to work in the Lord’s vineyard — which is to accomplish redemption. Joseph really does teach Jesus a human craft, and Luke records the genuine human development this involved: “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52). But this authentic human formation is taken up, at a deeper level, into the Eternal Son’s filial obedience to the Father. Joseph teaches Jesus to work with wood; the Father teaches the human nature of Jesus to accomplish redemption.

What, concretely, is this redemptive work? It is everything the vineyard and shepherd imagery together disclose: God coming to seek humanity, the Son crossing the immense distance between divine holiness and fallen humanity, entering our condition, going to the place where humanity is lost, seeking the sheep who have wandered, carrying each person on the shoulder of his love, bringing them back. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34): the Father’s work becomes Jesus’ food; his human existence draws its deepest nourishment from accomplishing the Father’s will.

This reaches its summit at Gethsemane, where the Son’s human will does not disappear before the divine will but rather shows what authentic human freedom truly is: “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). There are genuinely two wills at work — the divine will and Christ’s own human will — and the human will, experiencing the full horror of what lies before it, freely and perfectly conforms itself to the Father’s will. This is not the destruction of human freedom but its perfection: Christ’s human will, in effect, chooses the Father’s will. This is the deepest meaning of the Son’s work: his humanity becomes the place where the Father’s saving will is freely accomplished in human freedom — and here synergy reaches its own summit, since in Christ, uniquely, the human nature is perfectly united to the divine Person of the Son, so that his human will stands in perfect conformity with the divine will. He does not act instead of us; he acts as the true human being, showing humanity what it means to receive God’s initiative and freely respond to it.

Everything in Christ’s life belongs, in consequence, to a single movement: his descent into our condition, his poverty and hiddenness, his compassion, his encounters with sinners, his healing and teaching, his crossing of social and religious boundaries, his journey to Jerusalem, his passion and death. He is constantly seeking the lost, crossing the abyss between light and darkness to reach those in darkness, coming precisely where the human being cannot return by his own strength — and he does not merely point the way back; he carries the person. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11): the shepherd does not stand at a safe distance giving instructions; he enters the sheep’s situation and gives himself for them. The vineyard, then, is the Father’s work of redemption, and to be called into it is to be drawn into the very work the Son himself came to accomplish; the Christian is not called merely to “do apostolate” but to participate in Christ’s own work, remaining in the vine so that the work becomes fruitful precisely because it participates in Christ’s work, which is itself participation in the Father’s work: the Father works; the Son sees the Father working and does what the Father does; the Holy Spirit communicates this divine action; the Christian is called into the vineyard and works by corresponding to the Holy Spirit. This is the deepest meaning of synergy, and it is also why the eleventh-hour worker, once called, is asked first for obedience rather than creativity: the Christian’s deepest prayer becomes the very prayer of Christ, “Not my will, but yours, be done,” so that “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” becomes not merely a petition but the very programme of the Christian life. And when, at the last, Jesus says, “It is finished” (John 19:30), the Father’s work has reached its appointed completion: the Cross is not an interruption of his work but its consummation.

VI. The Art of Listening: From Servant to Friend

If the mature Christian’s question is not “What good thing could I do?” — for there are innumerable good things one could do — but rather “What is the Lord asking of me now?”, then being hired presupposes, before anything else, the art of listening: the art of following, of obeying God’s word in and through the Holy Spirit. To be hired is to move from being deaf, incapable of hearing God’s word, to possessing new spiritual ears capable of listening to God. It is not enough to be his friend in a merely sentimental sense; friendship with him means listening to him, because it is precisely his word that forms the basis of the friendship — the very substance of the contract between him and us. What I want must become what he wants from me, here and now, for me and not for someone else, today and not yesterday or tomorrow: every moment is unique, and this presupposes a living, ongoing communication between God and the soul — the opening of a real channel of communication with him.

Scripture describes exactly this dynamic. The sheep of the Good Shepherd “hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out” (John 10:3): the relationship is not merely juridical but living and personal. And Jesus explicitly links obedience to friendship: “You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:14), immediately explaining why: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). Friendship with Christ, then, is not intimacy without obedience; it is precisely because the friend has been admitted into the Master’s own knowledge that obedience becomes possible. The movement from servant to friend is not a movement away from obedience but from obedience without interior knowledge to obedience born of intimacy — which is exactly the pattern already seen in John 5:19: the Son sees, hears, receives, and acts. Through the Holy Spirit, the Christian is introduced into this very same filial relationship: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love” (John 15:9); “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love” (John 15:10). The pattern runs Father to Son to disciple: the Son receives from the Father and abides in his love through obedience; the disciple receives from the Son and abides in his love in the same way, entering the very dynamic of filial life.

It is the Holy Spirit who opens this channel of communication: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Word and Spirit belong together — the Spirit does not lead the disciple away from the Word but makes him capable of receiving it, for the Word gives revelation its objective form while the Spirit makes it living and operative in the concrete situation of the believer. This is why Lectio Divina, in its deepest sense, is not merely reading the Bible; it is learning to hear the Word addressed to me today. The Word is objectively the same, but the Spirit can disclose within it what the Father is asking of me now. The art of listening is not, therefore, a secondary technique appended to spiritual formation; it is foundational. Without it, one cannot truly follow; without following, one cannot truly correspond; and without correspondence, one cannot genuinely participate in the work of the vineyard.

VII. “I Myself Will Take Care of My Sheep”: Ezekiel and the Paradox of the Hired Shepherd

Working in the vineyard is, in the end, care for the redemption of each sheep of the flock: it is service to them. But if the worker is truly guided by God, then it is God himself, through the worker, who is serving them. This is precisely the logic behind God’s oracle against the failed shepherds of Israel in Ezekiel 34. The shepherds are condemned because they have not done their proper work; in that sense, they are not properly “hired.” God’s response is emphatic: “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out” (Ezekiel 34:11); “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep” (Ezekiel 34:15). Read on its own, this might seem to announce the abolition of human shepherding altogether. But the oracle immediately continues in a way that forecloses that reading: “And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them” (Ezekiel 34:23). God says, “I myself will shepherd my sheep,” and in the same breath promises to establish a shepherd over them. The two statements are not in tension. The human shepherd becomes the instrument of God’s own shepherding.

This finds its fulfilment in Christ, the Good Shepherd (John 10:11), who then sends others to shepherd in his name — not as his replacements but as those through whom he continues to shepherd. God’s taking care of his sheep, then, does not mean there are no shepherds; it means the shepherds themselves become so united to the divine initiative that God can take care of his sheep through them. This is a demanding understanding of ministry: the priest, or indeed anyone who serves the Lord, is not called merely to acquire a set of pastoral competencies. He is called to become an instrument of Christ’s own shepherding, which means his formation cannot stop at learning what a priest should do; he must learn to listen to the One who is acting through him. His heart must be, so to speak, in God’s hand; his mind attentive to the Word; his interior life sensitive to the movements of the Holy Spirit; his pastoral decisions must arise increasingly from discernment rather than from personal preference, institutional habit, efficiency, or his own idea of what would be useful. Then something extraordinary happens: the sheep encounter, not merely a human professional who happens to work for God, but a human shepherd through whom the Shepherd himself is acting.

If a priest is not, in this sense, inside the life of the Trinity — not moved by God’s own work, his heart not in God’s hand, his mind not attentive to the Spirit’s promptings and the Word’s guidance, which always go together — then God is not working directly through him. That is the paradox contained in Ezekiel’s “I myself will take care of my sheep”: it does not mean God will act without the shepherd; it means he will raise up a new kind of shepherd, one enabled to let God be his own guide, transformed to the point that God is taking care of the sheep directly through him and in him. It is not the elimination of the shepherd but, on the contrary, his transformation — to the point where the sheep can see Jesus in the shepherd. That is the goal of priesthood, and of any vocation given in service of the Lord: not that the shepherds should merely do God’s work, but that, through the shepherds, the sheep should encounter the Shepherd.

Practical Consequences

For discernment and spiritual direction

The governing distinction traced throughout this article — working for God against working with God — gives spiritual directors a concrete diagnostic question to place before any directee, whatever the stage of formation: not “What good could I do?” but “What is the Lord asking of me now?” Formation programmes and examens of conscience alike would do well to make this question, rather than a general audit of activity, the centre of ongoing discernment, since a full and even fruitful apostolic life can coexist with a heart that has not yet been “hired” in the parable’s sense.

For the recognition of the second conversion

Formators, confessors and spiritual directors should be alert to the second conversion as a distinct and nameable moment in a person’s spiritual itinerary — not a mere intensification of existing fervour but a change in the principle of action, from self-direction to reception. Teresa of Ávila’s own extended period of incomplete surrender before her deeper conversion suggests that such delay, far from disqualifying a vocation, may belong to its very preparation, and should be read pastorally with patience rather than alarm.

For priestly and diaconal formation

Ezekiel’s oracle carries a direct consequence for seminary and ongoing formation: pastoral competence, however necessary, is not sufficient. Formation must cultivate the capacity to listen — through Lectio Divina, spiritual direction and habitual discernment — so that the priest’s decisions increasingly proceed from correspondence with the Holy Spirit rather than from institutional habit or personal preference alone. The formation question is not only “Can this man shepherd?” but “Can the sheep, through this man, encounter the Shepherd?”

For the practice of vocal and liturgical prayer

Following Teresa of Ávila’s teaching on the Our Father, communities should be formed to understand that fidelity to vocal and liturgical prayer — including the Sursum corda — is not in tension with interior prayer but requires it for completion. The words are not to be abandoned; they are to become, through the lifting up of the heart, an actual encounter with the One to whom they are addressed.

For those who feel they have arrived late

Pastorally, this reading of the parable offers real consolation to those who present themselves, or are presented by others, as having come to a vocation “too late”: the apparent lateness of the call says nothing about its dignity or fruitfulness, since the Master’s initiative, not the labourer’s timing, determines the worth of the work — and “the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16).

Conclusion

The question with which this article began — why the landowner seems only to find the eleventh-hour workers at the end of the day — turns out not to be a question about oversight at all. It is a question about the whole architecture of vocation. The landowner’s repeated goings-out establish, from the parable’s first verse, that the initiative belongs entirely to him; the workers’ answer, “because no one has hired us,” shows that mere presence and availability are not the same as being called. Abraham’s long history of promise held before fulfilment shows that the interval before a call is not wasted time but the very shape of preparation, sovereignly timed by the One who calls. The theology of synergy shows that one can be extraordinarily busy and still, in the deepest sense, be standing idle, because the vineyard is entered only by correspondence with the Holy Spirit, not by activity as such. The Johannine theology of the Father’s continuous work shows what that correspondence looks like in its perfect form: the Son does only what he sees the Father doing. The hidden life of Jesus, read through Saint John of the Cross’s judgement that the Father’s work is redemption, shows that this correspondence is itself formation for the Cross, in which the Son’s human will, at Gethsemane, freely chooses the Father’s will. The art of listening shows how the disciple, led by the Spirit, is drawn from servanthood into friendship with the One who calls. And Ezekiel’s oracle on the shepherds shows, finally, what it means for the labourer, once truly hired, to become the very instrument through which the Master continues his work: not that God dispenses with human shepherds, but that he transforms them until the sheep, looking at the shepherd, see the Shepherd himself.

“You go into the vineyard too” (Matthew 20:7) is therefore not merely an offer of employment extended, almost as an afterthought, to those left standing at the end of the day. It is the whole of the Gospel compressed into a single sentence: the disclosure that vocation is always received, never manufactured; that readiness is always God’s gift before it is our achievement; that the work into which we are called is not our own project but the Father’s work of redemption, already accomplished perfectly in the Son and already active in us through the Holy Spirit; and that the deepest fruit of being hired is not that we do more for God, but that God, through us, cares directly for the sheep he loves.

Select Scriptural References

Matthew 6:10; 11:15; 20:1–16. Luke 2:49, 52; 22:42. John 4:23–34; 5:17–30; 8:28; 10:3, 11; 15:5, 9–10, 14–16; 16:13; 19:30. Genesis 12:1; 15:13. Ezekiel 34:11, 15, 23. Philippians 2:12–13.

Together with the teaching of Saint Ignatius of Loyola on the discernment of vocation; Saint Teresa of Ávila on vocal and interior prayer (notably her exposition of the Our Father); and Saint John of the Cross on the finding in the Temple (Luke 2:49) and the Father’s work of redemption.