Eventide & Altar

Paul writes tonight's second reading from a prison cell, genuinely unsure whether he is about to be executed, and he says something most people only manage to say honestly very late in life, if ever: to live is Christ, and to die is gain. He is not choosing between fear and courage. He is choosing between two things he actually wants - to depart and be with Christ, which he calls far better, or to remain and keep doing fruitful work for the people who still need him. He calls that second option, staying, "more necessary" rather than more desirable. He would rather go. He is willing to stay.

That is a strange kind of peace to arrive at, and it usually only comes after decades of learning that neither option is the enemy. If you have reached an age where death has stopped being an abstraction and started being a nearer neighbor, take Paul's sentence as your own rather than merely admiring it. To live is Christ. Not my career, not my health, not even my family, though all of those still matter enormously. And to die is gain - not a loss to be postponed as long as possible, but an actual increase.

The Gospel's laborers give you a second question for tonight, and it may be the one that stings more. Some workers were hired at five in the afternoon, with almost no daylight left to work in, and received a full day's wage anyway. If you came to real faith late - after decades of something else, after a conversion that happened well past midlife, or if you are simply looking back now at years you wish had been spent differently - this parable is aimed directly at you, and it is not scolding you. The five o'clock worker did not get less because he arrived late. Isaiah tells you why: my thoughts are not your thoughts. The math you have been doing on your own life, tallying up wasted years against faithful ones, is not the math God is doing.

The Glorious Mysteries tonight, since it is Sunday. Offer the fifth mystery, the Coronation, for anyone who came to faith late in life and has quietly wondered if it counted as much as a lifetime of it would have.

• For the grace to say honestly, with Paul, that to live is Christ and to die is gain, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who feel they arrived too late to matter as much as those who came first, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who have died, that the last wage paid to them would be the same abundant one paid to every laborer in the vineyard, we pray to the Lord.

Write down, honestly, which half of Paul's sentence is truer for you tonight - the desire to depart and be with Christ, or the sense that staying is still necessary for someone. There is no wrong answer. Just be honest about which one it is.