Living out our Catholic faith as a community has never been easy. In recent weeks we have read on Sundays about dispute resolution and the individual exercise of mercy in the Matthean community. We know from elsewhere in the New Testament that the followers of "The Way" faced challenges in their nascent Church of: fraud (Acts 5: 1-11), ethnic prejudice (Acts 6: 1) and racial intolerance/doctrinal disagreement (Acts 11: 3). In addition, the Early Church was mindful of those who had: been with the community: "... beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us." (Acts 1: 22) Jesus, himself, had given priority in his earthly ministry to the Jewish people (Mtt 15: 24) which is also reflected in the fact that St Paul would, when he arrived in a city to spread the Good News, would go first to the local synagogue. (eg. Acts 17: 2) It is understandable, therefore, that individually and collectively Jewish believers would look at later Greek speaking Jewish or Gentile believers with the same attitude as we hear from the early workers in the parable today: "These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat." (Mtt 20:12) There is a challenge, in all this, to the contemporary Church to focus not on human ideas of precedence rather to express the mercy and generosity of God to all those who are drawn to experience him through the Church and the sacraments. Just as God's mercy is our mercy, so too his generosity is our generosity. There is no room for jealousy in the Church: " 'For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?' But we have the mind of Christ." (1 Cor 2: 16)
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